A team of astrophysicists has discovered the mechanisms behind how we form relationships
The proverb «the enemy of your enemy is your friend» can be a great starting point for friendship. At least, that's been the case since the 1940s, when Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider put forward his theory of «social equilibrium.» He believed there was a structure to how we form relationships. Now, Norwegian mathematicians have come to the same conclusion.
Fritz Haider's theory was that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Henrik Vig, an anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, explains it this way: “We can feel like we are part of a community if we agree that we don’t like the same things, even if we don’t actually have anything in common.”
An example of this would be football fans who are part of a community because they agree on which club they don't like.
Using statistical physics, a team of astrophysicists has developed a network model that can test the «enemy of your enemy is your friend» theory with specific examples, such as user connections on social networks.
“We can use comparative models like this to check whether what we tell ourselves is actually true,” explains researcher Jonas Liebker Juul. “Sometimes a network is interesting in itself, but more often than not we are interested in something deeper that lies at the heart of the study of networks.”
In this case, the researchers created a new comparison model to understand the structure of how people form friendships. Analysis requires a lot of data to create a comparative model and show that the structure actually exists.
“Thanks to social sites with large numbers of users, such as Slashdot, it has become very easy to collect large sets of data that can be searched groups,” says Juul.
Astrophysicists designate connections between people with a plus or minus sign. They then look at the compounds in the triangles, where the plus is marked with a blue line and the minus with a red line, and as a result, there are compounds of each type.
Astrophysicists carried out a statistical evaluation and concluded that there is a certain structure and that the distributions — these are not just coincidences.
The problem with previous studies was that they did not take into account two important things: some people tend to have more positive attitudes towards others, and not everyone knows each other, and this needs to be taken into account in the statistical model.
By According to Jonas Liebker Juul, creating good comparison models is an underappreciated discipline. If a model is too simple, it can hide structures that actually exist in reality.
“In the world of anthropology, we talk about counter-identification. This means that you identify yourself in contrast to what you are not: I am not someone else, and therefore I am Henrik Wig, explains anthropologist Henrik Wig. “People tend to identify themselves based on who we are not or what we don’t like, rather than who we are and what we like.” Likewise, a person may feel like he belongs to others who don't like the same things that he doesn't like.»
He thinks it's worth creating comparative models to test what people think they like. they already know.
“It’s a good tool for visualizing things and reminding us of things that might seem trivial,” he concludes.