Glassy States of Aging Social Networks

Individuals often develop reluctance to change their social relations, called “secondary homebody”, even though their interactions with their environment evolve with time. Some memory effect is loosely present deforcing changes. In other words, in the presence of memory, relations do not change easily. In order to investigate some history or memory effect on social networks, we introduce a temporal kernel function into the Heider conventional balance theory, allowing for the “quality” of past relations to contribute to the evolution of the system. This memory effect is shown to lead to the emergence of aged networks, thereby perfectly describing—and what is more, measuring—the aging process of links (“social relations”). It is shown that such a memory does not change the dynamical attractors of the system, but does prolong the time necessary to reach the “balanced states”. The general trend goes toward obtaining either global (“paradise” or “bipolar”) or local (“jammed”) balanced states, but is profoundly affected by aged relations. The resistance of elder links against changes decelerates the evolution of the system and traps it into so named glassy states. In contrast to balance configurations which live on stable states, such long-lived glassy states can survive in unstable states.