June 12th, 2020 | The Balance Theory.

Have You Ever Heard About The Balance Theory?

Have you ever wondered why whenever two of your friends argue, you immediately get that itchy feeling that this will end up badly for you in one way or another? Or why, once you have just one conflict in a group of people, it starts propagating across the group like a virus? There is a forgotten theory in psychology that explains all this.

What to do if your friends have a conflict with each other? I haven’t thought about this issue for a long time. In academia, people don’t really fight all that much—if you don’t like someone as a person or feel hurt by them, you simply don’t cite their papers, you don’t follow them on Twitter, and you avoid them in person as much as you can. 

Since you usually attend just one or two major conferences in the field per year, avoiding these people is not all that difficult. As a matter of fact, it’s relatively easy to avoid personal conflicts in academia—unless you have a deep disagreement with a person with whom you are bound with your employment contract, for example, your direct boss. And even in that case, many people choose to change their job and go on and just forget about the traumas or the passband the associated people.

But I recently realized that things get much more complicated when there is a monetary exchange between people, namely when friends do business together and when every social contact that you have has a value that could be quantified in one way or another. 

Money can be an awesome thing—a great motivation, a means of commitment to the project, a reward, or proof of value—but it can also become an awful thing and turn people against each other. I always try to avoid conflicts so it’s hard for me to function among people who have harsh relations with one another. Especially given that I know about the balance theory by Fritz Heider, the proponent of the Gestalt school of psychology.

The Balance Theory By Fritz Heider.

I first heard about this theory at some lecture as an undergrad over 15 years ago when I was a junior student of Psychology, and I have never heard about it again—it seems that in today’s literature, the theory is marginalized and rarely cited. Yet, it is so useful!

So, what does this theory state? Let’s simplify the world and assume that every relationship you have with another person, can be either constructive (“positive”) or destructive (“negative”)

Or in other words, you either like or dislike each other, and there is no middle ground. In this case, you only have two possible relations with another person. But what happens if there are three of you, namely when you have two friends who know each other? 

The Four Scenarios Between Three People Who Know Each Other.

Then, four cases are possible:

A) You are a clique in which everyone likes each other;

B) You like both of your friends but they don’t like each other (which is a situation I mentioned above)

C) You have a friend whom you like, and you both dislike a third person;

D) You know two people whom you dislike, and they dislike each other as well.

The Stable VS The Unstable Formations.

What is interesting, is that some of these configurations are stable while others are unstable. Now, a quick IQ test: which of these options are stable, and which of them are unstable? To proceed to the solution, please read the text below the figure.