{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-enmity-paradox","title":"The Enmity Paradox","arxiv_id":"2304.10076","date":"2023-04-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Amir Ghasemian","Nicholas A. Christakis"],"abstract":"The \"friendship paradox\" of social networks states that, on average, \"your friends have more friends than you do.\" Here, we theoretically and empirically explore a related and overlooked paradox we refer to as the \"enmity paradox.\" We use empirical data from 24,687 people living in 176 villages in rural Honduras. We show that, for a real negative undirected network (created by symmetrizing antagonistic interactions), the paradox exists as it does in the positive world. Specifically, a person's enemies have more enemies, on average, than a person does. Furthermore, in a mixed world of positive and negative ties, we study the conditions for the existence of the paradox, both theoretically and empirically, finding that, for instance, a person's friends typically have more enemies than a person does. We also confirm the \"generalized\" enmity paradox for nontopological attributes in real data, analogous to the generalized friendship paradox (e.g., the claim that a person's enemies are richer, on average, than a person is). As a consequence, the naturally occurring variance in the degree distribution of both friendship and antagonism in social networks can skew people's perceptions of the social world.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10076v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.10076v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-enmity-paradox","repo_url":"https://github.com/aghasemian/enmityparadox","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}