CSH scientist Tuan Minh Pham just got his PhD with this presentation! Congratulations, Tuan!
Follow his talk live or online—its a hybrid event.
If you would like to attend the talk, please send an email to office@csh.ac.at.
Title: “Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions”
Abstract:
The remarkable robustness of many human social systems has been associated with their peculiar triangular structure. Empirically, the so-called balanced state with either three or one positive link are strongly overrepresented with respect to pure chance. In the literature mechanisms that lead to this very specific (“balanced”) statistics of triads, are often based on Heider’s social balance theory.
Here we attempt to explain this phenomenon by a different approach where agents do not need information about triangles for the update of their relations and opinions. As agent tends to minimize her individual social tension associated to dyadic homophily-based interactions, a transition from unbalanced- to balanced society occurs at a critical level of tolerance. When the relative strength of positive interactions to that of negative ones exceeds 1/2, we observe another transition between the steady states with different fractions of balanced triads. We demonstrate the quality of the model on a real network of online game players, where the model not only predicts the distribution of triangle types but also explains empirical group-size distributions.