Networks with positive and negative ties

 

JURE LESKOVEC

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

 

The social networks in many on-line applications encode a mixture of positive (friendly) and negative (antagonistic) relationships, but the bulk of research on these networks has focused almost exclusively on the positive interpretations of the links. Here we study how the combination of positive and negative relationships affects the overall functioning of on-line social networks, and the interactions of the users who constitute them. We analyze the interplay of positive and negative relationships in these networks using classical theories of structural balance from social psychology; in addition to providing a perspective for reasoning about the underlying applications, our work provides one of the first large-scale evaluations of these theories using on-line datasets. We find that these existing theories fail to explain many of the fundamental phenomena we observe --- particularly related to the evolving, directed nature of the networks --- and we develop an alternate theory of status that provides insights into the mechanisms underlying these phenomena.