PLoS ONE (Jan 2024)

Modelling the creation of friends and foes groups in small real social networks.

  • Alberto García-Rodríguez,
  • Tzipe Govezensky,
  • Gerardo G Naumis,
  • Rafael A Barrio

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298791
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19, no. 2
p. e0298791

Abstract

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Although friendship networks have been extensively studied, few models and studies are available to understand the reciprocity of friendship and foes. Here a model is presented to explain the directed friendship and foes network formation observed in experiments of Mexican and Hungarian schools. Within the presented model, each agent has a private opinion and a public one that shares to the group. There are two kinds of interactions between agents. The first kind represent interactions with the neighbors while the other represents the attitude of an agent to the overall public available information. Links between agents evolve as a combination of the public and private information available. Friendship is defined using a fitness function according to the strength of the agent's bonds, clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality and degree. Enmity is defined as very negative links. The model allows us to reproduce the distribution of mentions for friends and foes observed in the experiments, as well as the topology of the directed networks.