Heider balance, asymmetric ties, and gender segregation

摘要: Abstract To remove a cognitive dissonance in interpersonal relations, people tend to divide their acquaintances into friendly and hostile parts, both groups internally mutually hostile. This process is modeled as an evolution toward the Heider balance. A set of differential equations have been proposed validated (Kulakowski et al., 2005) model dynamics this social psychological process. Here we generalize by including initial asymmetry relations direct reciprocity effect which removes asymmetry. Our applied data on enmity friendship 37 school classes 4 teachers Mexico. For each class, stable balanced partition obtained two groups. The gender structure reveals stronger segregation younger classes, i.e. age below 12 years, fact consistent with other general empirical results.