Structural groups in social networks are often characterized by a high proportion of negative ties between them. Could negative ties help explaining the emergence and stability of groups? Our new paper in #SocialNetworks (with @aaavoros and Károly Takács)
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
We argue that a number of positive social network mechanisms relate to group cohesion, most importantly the “big four”: reciprocity, homophily, transitivity, and popularity. But these forces of attraction may not be sufficient to explain group boundaries.
Between groups it is more likely that weak, neutral, or negative ties exist. A model that considers the co-evolution of positive and negative ties (forces of attraction and repulsion) could be better suited to explain the formation of groups.
We apply a combination of #SAOMs and #ABMs to test the #micromacro link of group emergence. We show that models concerned with forces of attraction cannot recover empirically observed group structure, but models including additional forces of repulsion can (to a certain degree).
