“Friends of my friends are my friends.” It is often said that this is how we greet people who come into our lives in one way or another on the recommendation of someone we value. This, apart from being a cliché, is part of a theory formulated in the 1940s by an Austrian psychologist. Fritz Haider: theory of social equilibrium. It also ensures that the friends of our enemies are our enemies, that the enemies of our enemies will be friends, and that, finally, the enemies of our friends will become our enemies.
This may seem cumbersome, but if you think about it, it makes sense. How are we going to get along with a person who makes our best friend’s life miserable? Or how can we avoid being friends with a person who can’t stand the person we so dislike? This seems logical, but science has still not been able to prove it.
However, a group of scientists from Northwestern University finally managed to give it consistency through mathematics, physics and computer science. Their results are interesting because they finally confirm a theory that is more than 80 years old. However, it is also useful for many modern applications.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
For decades, attempts have been made to explain Heider’s theory from a scientific point of view. However, this could not be achieved for some paradoxical reason: It was too simplistic.
As the authors of the just-published study explain in a statement, there are two obstacles that make it difficult to create this type of social model. On the one hand, this not all people know each other. If the enemy of your enemy lives thousands of miles from your home, chances are you will never meet him.
On the other hand, there are more friendly people than others, so it is easier for them to establish positive relationships with other people. So far, the models developed have taken into account one of these two factors, but not both at the same time.
Now a team of physicists at Northwestern University has created a model that combines both factors using data from four different sources. On the one hand, comments from users of the Slahsdot website, on the other, conversations of members of the US Congress. Also interaction with Bitcoin buyers and finally online product reviews.
The model contained a number nodes that they treated each other negatively, creating enemies, or positively, creating bonds of friendship. In the traditional model, all nodes would have the same chance of finding each other, but in real life this does not happen. Not everyone knows each other. Thus, positive and negative values were randomly distributed according to the statistics of positive or negative values established in the available data.
Moreover, even based on these data, it was taken into account that not all people have the same likelihood of developing positive or negative relationships. The friendliest choose the positive ones, and this must also be taken into account when analyzing relations between enemies and friends.
What is all this for?
Thanks to a federated node model based on Internet data, it has been shown that indeed, enemies of friends are enemies, enemies of enemies are friends, and everything in between.
This, according to the authors of the study, can have direct application, for example, in the study of international relations or political polarization. But it can also be used to study factors that have positive or negative associations but have nothing to do with human relationships. For example, combination of drugs with different effects.
Of course, Heider did not think about this when he presented his theory of human relations, but it is still relevant and has a lot to teach us.
Source: Hiper Textual
