# Modelling the creation of friends and foes groups in small real social networks

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a model to explain how friendships and rivalries form in small social networks based on agents' private and public opinions.

## Contribution

A novel model that explains the formation of directed friendship and foes networks using private and public opinions of agents.

## Key findings

- The model successfully reproduces the distribution of mentions for friends and foes observed in real experiments.
- The model captures the topology of directed networks in Mexican and Hungarian school experiments.

## Abstract

Although friendship networks have been extensively studied, few models and studies are available to understand the reciprocity of friendship and foes. Here a model is presented to explain the directed friendship and foes network formation observed in experiments of Mexican and Hungarian schools. Within the presented model, each agent has a private opinion and a public one that shares to the group. There are two kinds of interactions between agents. The first kind represent interactions with the neighbors while the other represents the attitude of an agent to the overall public available information. Links between agents evolve as a combination of the public and private information available. Friendship is defined using a fitness function according to the strength of the agent’s bonds, clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality and degree. Enmity is defined as very negative links. The model allows us to reproduce the distribution of mentions for friends and foes observed in the experiments, as well as the topology of the directed networks.