The Heider balance and social distance

Abstract

The Heider balance is a state of a group of people with established mutual relations between them. These relations, friendly or hostile, can be measured in the Bogardus scale of the social distance. In previous works on the Heider balance, these relations have been described with integers 0 and $\pm1$. Recently we have proposed real numbers instead. Also, differential equations have been used to simulate the time evolution of the relations, which were allowed to vary within a given range. In this work, we investigate an influence of this allowed range on the system dynamics. As a result, we have found that a narrowing of the range of relations leads to a large delay in achieving the Heider balance. Another point is that a slight shift of the initial distribution of the social distance towards friendship can lead to a total elimination of hostility.