Balance Theory
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What do you do if you dislike a person who is loved by your best friend? In this relationship there is a lack of balance because the ones you dislike should be also disliked by the ones you love. This imbalance within the relationship will create a change of attitudes. Either you will decide that your best friend is not your best friend after all. Or you will realize that the one you disliked is not that bad after all. This attitude change will restore balance in your relationship.
This scenario accurately describes the Balance Theory. According to this theory, when tensions arise between or inside people, they will attempt to reduce these tensions through self-persuasion or by trying to persuade others.
Balance theory, originated by Fritz Heider, analyzes systems consisting of two or three persons (or two persons and an object), with any two of these entities related to each other by either positive or negative sentiments, or not related at all. In brief, there are likely to be either two minus (e.g., "dislike") links or none. Put more generally, such cycles will tend to have an even number of minuses, so that the product of the link signs will yield a positive value. Theodore Newcomb expanded the model to include communicative acts as linkages, examined its motivational basis, and elaborated it in terms of role theory, in his A-B-X model. Cartwright and Harary (1956) mathematized it, clearing up some ambiguities, extending it to systems of any number of elements, and solving for consistency level by the use of graph theory. Feather (1967) built further upon Cartwright and Harary's improvements in a communication context.
Application in classrooms and similar settings
Evidence of effectiveness
Critics and their rationale
The balance theory asserts that balanced states will be preferred over imbalanced states, and imbalanced states will lead to activities to change them to balanced states. Some critics contend that the theory was vague and incomplete, citing some more specific problems with it:
- Unsymmetric relations. Should all relations be conceived as symmetric? The answer is that they should not; it is possible for P to like O while O dislikes P. Theoretical discussions of balance have sometimes recognized this possibility - Heider, for example, states that unsymmetric liking is unbalanced - but there has been no general definition of balance which covers unsymmetric relations. The empirical studies of balance have assumed that the relations are symmetric (Cartwright and Harary, 1956).
- Two directions of relationship. The three-entity relationship did not take into account the fact that liking and disliking usually flow in two directions (with only two people involved, mutual liking or disliking represents balance). Though in many situations there are both positive and negative feelings toward a person or object and though affects vary greatly in intensity (both "like" and "adore" are positive, but they are hardly equivalent), there was no way to assess the relative or absolute strength of sentiments.
- Units containing more than three entities. Nearly all theorizing about balance has referred to units of three entities. While Horowitz, Lyons, and Perlmutter studied units with four entities, they did not define balance for such cases. It would seem desirable to be able to speak of the balance of even larger units (Suedfeld, 1971).
- Negative relations. Is the negative relation the complement of the relation or its opposite? All of the discussions of balance seem to equate these, but they seem to be quite different, for the complement of a relation is expressed by adding the word "not" while the opposite is indicated by the prefix "dis" or its equivalent. Thus, adding the word "not" while the opposite is indicated by the prefix "dis" or its equivalent expresses the complement of a relation. Thus, the complement of "liking" is "not liking"; the opposite of "liking" is "disliking." In general, it appears that ~L has been taken to mean "dislike" (the opposite relation) while ~U has been used to indicate "not associated with" (the complementary relation). Thus, for example, "specifically, '+L' symbolizes a positive attitude, '-L' symbolizes a negative attitude, '+U' symbolizes the existence of unit formation, and '-U' symbolizes the lack of unit formation" (Jordan, 1953).
- Coginitive fields and social systems. "Heider's intention is to describe balance of cognitive units in which the entities and relations enter as experienced by a single individual. Newcomb attempts to treat social systems which may be described objectively. In principle, it should be possible also to study the balance of sociometric structure, communication networks, patterns of power, and other aspects of social systems"(Cartwright and Harary, 1956).
Alternative explanations due to Diversity considerations
Signed life experiences, testimonies and stories
References and other links of interest
Summary of the theory and its creators
Social experiment at the University of Mississippi regarding the Balance Theory
Cartwright, D. and F. Harary. "Structural Balance: A Generalization of Heider's Theory," Psychological Review, 1956, 63, pp. 277-93. Cited from http://www.ciadvertising.org/studies/student/97_fall/theory/cognitive_coc/balance.htm
Suedfeld, P. "Models of Attitude Change: Theories That Pass in the Night," In Attitude Change: The Competing Views, P. Suedfeld, ed. Chicago, Ill: Aldine Atherton, 1971, pp. 1-62. Cited from http://www.ciadvertising.org/studies/student/97_fall/theory/cognitive_coc/balance.htm
Jordan, N. "Behavioral forces that are a function of attitudes and of cognitive organization," Hum. Relat. 6, 1953, 273-287. Cited from http://www.ciadvertising.org/studies/student/97_fall/theory/cognitive_coc/balance.htm
