• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Your Enemy’s Enemy Really Is Your Friend – According To Physics!

May 6, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Humans are social animals whose web of relationships is convoluted and often changing. Understanding these social networks and their changes has been the remit of different sciences and various theories. One of them was proposed in the 1940s, called social balance theory. Now, researchers have been able to corroborate it using statistical physics.

Advertisement

The idea at the center of social balance theory is, as the name suggests, balance. Individuals want and try to keep balanced relationships within their networks. Positive relationships are balanced, while negative or mixed relationships are not, and you need rules to keep the system balanced. The classical model has four simple rules, based on the simplistic idea that positive relationships are “friends” and negative relationships are “enemies”.

Advertisement

The first rule is that a friend of a friend is a friend. Now, this is an idealized case – do not immediately jump to thinking about that friend of your friend whom you hate. Another rule is a friend of an enemy is an enemy, and obviously the enemy of a friend is an enemy – we’ve got to defend our pals. The final rule is more subtle: an enemy of an enemy is a friend. The new analysis tends to agree with this requirement, but the scientists had to bring in significant complexity before they were able to model it.

“We can finally conclude that social networks align with expectations that were formed 80 years ago,” first author Bingjie Hao, from Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Our findings also have broad applications for future use. Our mathematics allows us to incorporate constraints on the connections and the preference of different entities in the system. That will be useful for modeling other systems beyond social networks.”

Crucial to the new model were two factors: not everyone knows everyone else in real life, and some people are more positive than others. Using both constraints actually reproduces a social network just like the one predicted by Fritz Heider 80 years ago.

“We have always thought this social intuition works, but we didn’t know why it worked,” added István Kovács, the study’s senior author. “All we needed was to figure out the math. If you look through the literature, there are many studies on the theory, but there’s no agreement among them. For decades, we kept getting it wrong. The reason is because real life is complicated. We realized that we needed to take into account both constraints simultaneously: who knows whom and that some people are just friendlier than others.”

Advertisement

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-NZ players reach Dubai after ‘specific, credible threat’ derailed Pakistan tour
  2. Soccer-Liverpool’s Alexander-Arnold ruled out of Man City game
  3. What Are Baby Platypuses Called?
  4. Should You Wash Chicken Before Cooking It?

Source Link: Your Enemy’s Enemy Really Is Your Friend – According To Physics!

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Have You Heard About America’s Government Cheese Caves? They’ve Got Over 600 Million Kilograms Of The Stuff Stashed Away
  • There Could Be A Surprising Health Benefit To Having Gray Hair
  • New Answer To The Fermi Paradox? Cognitive Horizon Hypothesis May Explain Why Aliens Haven’t Contacted Us
  • What Happened When Patient B-19 Was Given A Brain Stimulation Device And A Button?
  • The Ice Age Squirrel That Enabled A Plant’s Resurrection 31,800 Years Later
  • The First Video Game Came Long Before Pong And Was Invented By A Manhattan Project Physicist
  • Monster Hoaxes In The Age Of AI: Seeing Isn’t Believing Anymore
  • Everyone Thought This Ancient City Was Destroyed By Plague. A New Analysis Says It Never Happened
  • The “Mind’s Eye” Doesn’t Focus Like Our Vision, Even For People Who Have One
  • Strep Throat Or Sore Throat: What’s The Difference?
  • Reptiles “Pee” Crystals, But What Are They Made Of? Scientists Wanted To Find Out
  • A Vaccine For Stomach Ulcers Might Be On The Cards, And It Could Fight Off Cancer Too
  • Only One Place On Earth Now Remains Mosquito-Free As Iceland Records First-Ever Sighting
  • This Is One Of The Only Groups Of People Outside Africa Who Had Virtually No Denisovan DNA
  • Puzzling “Transient” Lights In The 1950s Skies Focused Around Nuclear Testing Facilities, Intriguing Study Finds
  • The Maya Calendar Had A Way To Predict Eclipses That Was Accurate For Centuries
  • “Elon Owes You $100”: Musk’s SpaceX Settles Lawsuit With Cards Against Humanity
  • Eyes To The Skies! The Special Orionids Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight
  • Flying Spiders Are Real, But It’s Not As Frightening As It Sounds
  • It Can Rain Monkeys In Florida, And The Reason Why Dates Back To The 1930s
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version