Local Balancing Influences Global Structure in Social Networks

Although social networks can often be viewed as graphs in their most basic form, many networks of interest include explicit sentiments (positive or negative views) of the nodes (constituent entities, also known as vertices) toward each other. This is particularly the case in geopolitics, settings where networks of firms compete in the creation of standards, and situations where polarization is frequent, such as in national elections, etc. The classical theory of structural balance developed by Heider (1) suggests how nodes may modify their relationships locally to maintain a type of balance within triads of nodes; this theory has been enriched in terms of explicit temporal dynamics by Kulakowski et al. (2). The work of Marvel et al. (3) in PNAS shows a rigorous analysis of these dynamics and brings out interesting properties and applications thereof.