Tag Archives | Network Structure

The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks

Alexander Isakov, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, Nicholas A. Christakis

Sociological Science, March 6, 2019
10.15195/v6.a8


Negative (antagonistic) connections have been of longstanding theoretical importance for social structure. In a population of 24,696 adults interacting face to face within 176 isolated villages in western Honduras, we measured all connections that were present, amounting to 105,175 positive and 16,448 negative ties. Here, we show that negative and positive ties exhibit many of the same structural characteristics. We then develop a complete taxonomy of all 138 possible triads of two-type relationships. Consistent with balance theory, we find that antagonists of friends and friends of antagonists tend to be antagonists; but, in an important empirical refutation of balance theory, we find that antagonists of antagonists also tend to be antagonists, not friends. Finally, villages with comparable levels of animosity tend to be geographically proximate. Similar processes, involving social contact, give rise to both positive and negative social ties in rural villages, and negative ties play an important role in social structure.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Alexander Isakov: Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University; Department of Sociology, Yale University
E-mail: alexander.isakov.11@gmail.com

James H. Fowler: Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego; Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego
E-mail: fowler@ucsd.edu

Edoardo M. Airoldi: Department of Statistical Science, Fox School of Business, Temple University; Department of Statistics and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
E-mail: airoldi@fas.harvard.edu

Nicholas A. Christakis: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University; Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University
E-mail: nicholas.christakis@yale.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Emily Erikson, Dan Gilbert, David Rand, Yongren Shi, Hiro Shirado, Maggie Traeger, Tom Snijders, Gijs Huitsing, and Arnav Tripathy for their helpful comments. We are also grateful to the data collection and software teams for the Honduras project, including Rennie Negron, Liza Nicoll, and Mark McKnight. This research was supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Tata Group, the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (grant P30-AG034420), the National Science Foundation (grant IIS-1409177), and the Office of Naval Research (grants N00014-17-1-2131). The authors declare no competing interests.

  • Citation: Isakov, Alexander, James H. Fowler, Edoardo M. Airoldi, and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2019. “The Structure of Negative Social Ties in Rural Village Networks.” Sociological Science 6: 197-218.
  • Received: January 16, 2019
  • Accepted: February 10, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a8


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