A research team from Northwestern University used physics and statistical theory to confirm Fritz Heider’s social balance theory.
The oft-used proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not just limited to middle-school English classes and middlingly written revenge dramas. Not only does it spring from a socio-psychological theory proposed by psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1940s, it appears that it has finally been scientifically proven.
“Balance appears if all relationships are positive or when two negative relationships are balanced by one positive relationship. Other situations lead to unbalanced triangles, causing tension or frustration,” he explained further.
Kovács’s says, “As physicists, our initial interest was sparked by the 2021 Nobel Prize awarded to Giorgio Parisi who studies complex physical systems, shared with Syukuro Manabe, and Klaus Hasselmann working on climate modeling.” In their network model, the researchers departed from assigning purely random negative or positive values to the edges. In a truly random scenario, every node would have an equal likelihood of encountering one another. However, real-life social networks do not adhere to such uniformity, as not every individual is acquainted with everyone else in their network.
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