ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2020
The effect of social balance on social fragmentation.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of the association between alcohol-related deaths and area-level socioeconomic deprivation and other geographic characteristics in high-income countries.BMC public health · 2026Pooled it
- Exploring quantum Heider balance theory.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Empirical evidence for structural balance theory in functional brain networks.Frontiers in network physiology · 2025Article
- Analogies and Relations between Non-Additive Entropy Formulas and Gintropy.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Antimicrobial Resistance in the Global Health Network: Known Unknowns and Challenges for Efficient Responses in the 21st Century.Microorganisms · 2023Review
- Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Balance and fragmentation in societies with homophily and social balance.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Dynamics of collective action to conserve a large common-pool resource.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Dense and influential core promotion of daily viral information spread in political echo chambers.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
With the availability of internet, social media, etc., the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased tremendously over the past decades. Across the same timespan, an increasing level of fragmentation of society into small isolated groups has been observed. With a simple model of a society, in which the dynamics of individual opinion formation is integrated with social balance, we show that these two phenomena might be tightly related. We identify a critical level of interconnectedness, above which society fragments into sub-communities that are internally cohesive and hostile towards other groups. This critical communication density necessarily exists in the presence of social balance, and arises from the underlying mathematical structure of a phase transition known from the theory of disordered magnets called spin glasses. We discuss the consequences of this phase transition for social fragmentation in society.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.