Dynamic social balance and convergent appraisals via homophily and influence mechanisms

Social balance theory describes allowable and forbidden configurations of the topologies of signed directed social appraisal networks. In this paper, we propose two discrete-time dynamical systems that explain how an appraisal network converges to social balance from an initially unbalanced configuration. These two models are based on two different socio-psychological mechanisms, respectively: the homophily mechanism and the influence mechanism....