Why does Everybody Hate me? Balance, Status, and Homophily: The Triumvirate of Signed Tie Formation

Despite being one of the foundational theories of signed (positive/negative) tie formation, the evidence for balance theory is far from conclusive. A recent promising alternative is status theory, but a theoretical and explanatory gap still remains, with a dearth of theories and evidence. We put for...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: YAP, Janice, HARRIGAN, Nicholas
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1540
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/2796/viewcontent/Why_does_everybody_hate_me_pv.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:Despite being one of the foundational theories of signed (positive/negative) tie formation, the evidence for balance theory is far from conclusive. A recent promising alternative is status theory, but a theoretical and explanatory gap still remains, with a dearth of theories and evidence. We put forward and test eight separate theories of signed tie formation on two face-to-face networks of friendship and esteem of 282 students. We use dimension reduction (factor analysis) on the results tables comparing the predictions of these eight theories for 50 ERGM parameters with our estimated models. We find three main paradigms explain the majority of signed network formation: balance, status, and homophily.