What kind of Structural balance exists between group of people ?

This is continuation to previous chapter. Please go through it before you read this blog or else you will find it very difficult to understand this article.

As we discussed previously all the possible cases with three people. So, if we there are more than three people in the network, then How do stable network or stable relationships look like ?

Assuming three people fighting in a tug-of-war game (“Anoy” , “Seret” and “Cures”).

It ends up into “CHAOS”. This fight goes on… , there is no resolution to this situation.

But, when two people joins as one team and fight against other

When two people form as one team and fight against third person, then one team among two teams will win (which is a stable case). Which is, same as “Seret” and “Cures” form as a team and fight against “Anoy”.

Intuitively thinking, this is same as Case-2 in previous chapter.

Imagine four people “Anoy”, “Seret”, “Cures” and “Jeta”. These four people are playing “Tug-of-war”. Again there will be chaos between all, because there will never be an end to this game, if all four try to play and win at a time.

If “Cures” and “Seret” form as a one team as shown in right of Fig-2, then compete with “Anoy” and “Jeta” (who didn’t form a team yet), then it same as above example (where three teams will be in the fight and still there will be chaos in the fight).

So, here the ideal situation(stable situation) is, where four people fight as forming two teams (in any manner) — “Anoy”, “Jeta” , “Seret” in one team and “Cures” in other team(or) “Anoy” and “Jeta” in one team and “Cures” and “Seret” in other team as in Fig-3.

So, What can be inferred from these two examples ? (Just think for a second).

Even if there are 10 people in the wrestling ring (based on our “Enemy’s enemy is a friend” scenario), all these 10 people will form into two different teams and fight against each other.

In the previous chapter,we have seen that Stable relationship between three people is “When all the relations are positive” & “When two negative and one positive relationship exists”.

So, by using these concepts let’ try to see “How triangular stable relations exists between these 6 people with Fedde” ?

In the Fig-5, it is clear that, all the triangular relationships are stable (as on the right of “Fedde”), there are two negative and one positive relationship in each triangular network, which is indicating friendship between friends on one side, even though they have some dispute with “Fedde” and (on the left of “Fedde”), there are all positive relationships, which is indicating relationship between people on one side as well as with “Fedde”.

It is simple, it should be negative relationship (as stable relationships exist, if either all connections are positive or with two negative and one positive relationship).

Stable network in a group of people exists if and only if

Let’s assume, there are six people in the IT- startup company (“Anoy”, “Haman”, “Navik”, “Jeta”, “Seret” and “Cures”).

As there are only six people, everyone will know each other. So, number of possible connections between all six people are 20, which are 6C3=20 (order doesn’t matter).

It is very common that, all people in one company will not have positive relationship with other (there will be some negative relationship with each other), which looks as shown in Fig-9.

‘ — ’ sign indicates negative relationship and ‘+’ sign indicates positive relationship.

If there is complete unstable relationships in the startup company, then it is difficult for that company to function well. But, slowly (as the time passes) relationships in the company will become stable, which looks as shown below

‘Cures’, ‘Anoy’, ‘Haman’, ‘Navik’ formed as one group in the company, indicated with green.

‘Seret’ and ‘Jeta’ formed as another group in the company, indicated with blue.

As discussed above ‘connection between two green nodes(intra-network connection) is positive’ and ‘connection between green node and blue node (inter-network connection) is negative’.

Even though, all the concepts above are discussed with less than 7 or 8 people. The same inferences and conditions will hold true for any number of people in the network.

Stable relationships in the group of people should exist in order to maintain the connections in the network for longer time.

I would like to thank Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar for an amazing course on Social networks.

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