Cheating and Unbalanced Complete Graphs
After a cheating scandal was discovered in June at Stuyvesant High School, an article by New York Magazine was written analyzing the motives and seeming popularity of “cheating upwards” by “bright kids.” Some students defended cheating as a way to be generous to friends, while others described it just as the “ethos” of their school.
The article describes that a study at Temple University in 2010 observed that “when playing a driving video game, teenagers were more likely to take big risks and even crash when their friends were watching than they were when playing the game alone.” The Temple University study and the article’s description of cheating’s diluted negative associations relate to our course’s topic on strong and weak ties. Let a node be a student, and nodes are connected in friendship networks. If a node begins cheating at least once, then nodes connected by strong ties are half as likely (50%) to cheat as well. Positive links are between friends who believe cheating is acceptable, and negative links are between friends who believe cheating is not acceptable. In a complete graph with unbalanced triangles, the friendship is very likely to fall apart. Because social groups encourage members to act in ways in order to stay within the group, the 50% probability of cheating if your friends cheat is strong.
Source: http://nymag.com/news/features/cheating-2012-9/index4.html