A social network is often divided into many factions. People are friends within each faction, while they are enemies of the other factions, and even my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. This configuration can be described in terms of a weak form of structural balance. Although weak balance explains a number of real social networks, which dynamical rule achieves it has remained relatively unexplored. In this work, we show that the answer can be found in the field of indirect reciprocity, which assumes that people assess each other's behavior and choose how to behave to others based on the assessment according to a social norm. We begin by showing that weak structural balance is equivalent to stationarity when the rule is given by a norm called ‘judging’. By analyzing its cluster dynamics of merging, fission, and migration induced by assessment error in complete graphs, we obtain the cluster size distribution in a steady state, which shows the coexistence of a giant cluster and smaller ones. This study suggests that indirect reciprocity can provide insight into the interplay between a norm that individuals abide by and the macroscopic group structure in society.

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• Self-organized systems
• Social dynamics
• Coarse graining
• Markovian processes
• Mean field theory