The Structure and Function of Antagonistic Ties in Village Social Networks
Image courtesy of Cavan Huang.
Our social experience is influenced not only by our positive but also by our negative connections. Using uncommon data from 176 isolated villages in Honduras, we investigate how social network structure and function might be affected by negative ties amid the positive ties of friendship and kinship. We show that having negative ties is associated with people being more peripheral within their subgroups, but closer to other groups within a population, which can have the effect of bringing the whole population closer together. Furthermore, at the collective level, information diffusion is facilitated, and polarization is reduced, by the presence of negative ties. Negative ties can be constructive.
The relationship of the number of negative ties (undirected, inbound, and outbound) with four topological characteristics: 1) average geodesic distancefrom all other nodes in the giant component of the network; 2) average geodesic distance of a node’s neighbors from all other nodes in the giant component of the network; 3) local clustering coefficient; and 4) betweenness centrality. The predictions estimating the average marginal effect for the number of negative ties. As indicated, nodes that have more negative ties are situated on the outskirts of the communities, acting as bridges. These nodes show smaller clustering coefficients, larger betweenness centralities, and smaller average geodesic distances to other nodes in the network. Furthermore, nodes with higher negative connections have neighboring nodes that exhibit a smaller geodesic distance from other nodes in the network, on average. This indicates that the neighbors of nodes with higher negative degrees are more globally dispersed compared to nodes with lower negative degrees that are more locally dispersed.
References
2024
The structure and function of antagonistic ties in village social networks
Amir Ghasemian, and Nicholas A Christakis
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024
Negative or antagonistic relationships are common in human social networks, but they are less often studied than positive or friendly relationships. The existence of a capacity to have and to track antagonistic ties raises the possibility that they may serve a useful function in human groups. Here, we analyze empirical data gathered from 24,770 and 22,513 individuals in 176 rural villages in Honduras in two survey waves 2.5 y apart in order to evaluate the possible relevance of antagonistic relationships for broader network phenomena. We find that the small-world effect is more significant in a positive world with negative ties compared to an otherwise similar hypothetical positive world without them. Additionally, we observe that nodes with more negative ties tend to be located near network bridges, with lower clustering coefficients, higher betweenness centralities, and shorter average distances to other nodes in the network. Positive connections tend to have a more localized distribution, while negative connections are more globally dispersed within the networks. Analysis of the possible impact of such negative ties on dynamic processes reveals that, remarkably, negative connections can facilitate the dissemination of information (including novel information experimentally introduced into these villages) to the same degree as positive connections, and that they can also play a role in mitigating idea polarization within village networks. Antagonistic ties hold considerable importance in shaping the structure and function of social networks.
@article{ghasemian2024strfun,title={The structure and function of antagonistic ties in village social networks},author={Ghasemian, Amir and Christakis, Nicholas A},journal={Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},volume={121},number={26},pages={e2401257121},year={2024},publisher={National Acad Sciences},note={Image courtesy of Cavan Huang},}
