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… 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.