Social Networks, Role in Relationship Initiation

Choice and Chance in Relationship Initiation

Human cultures vary in the degree to which they attempt to regulate contact between strangers. The clearest examples of this can be found in the regulation of contact between unattached men and women who might become sexual partners. In many cultures and groups, relationship initiation is heavily regulated by norms about contact between opposite-sex strangers, as well as mechanisms for sexual segregation and surveillance. When young women and men meet, they meet in a relatively “closed field” that is actively managed by the families and institutions to which they belong.

In other cultures, particularly contemporary European-American cultures, relationship initiation is widely presumed to occur in an “open field,” in which individual choice is maximized and larger social influences are minimized. The romantic literature of these cultures celebrates the role of chance or “destiny” in human encounters, although it frequently contains cautionary tales regarding the risks of consorting with strangers as well.

Two things are apparent when we look across the continuum from “closed” to “open” relational fields. First, although cultures differ, all are concerned to one degree or another with regulating contact between strangers, and all have complex literary and cultural traditions regarding the virtues and risks of such meetings. Second, although some cultures regulate relational initiation to a greater degree and more explicitly than others, there is no such thing as a pure “open field” when it comes to relational choices. That is, whom we meet and who is judged to be a potential relational partner is never solely a matter of chance or choice. There are other factors at work even in the most open of cultures. Before looking at those, it is useful to consider how the myth of [Page 1549]the open field has limited our understanding of relationship initiation.

Blind Spots in the Study of Relationship Initiation

Until recently, researchers typically sought to examine relationship initiation by asking arbitrarily selected strangers to interact in a laboratory setting. Sometimes they were not even asked to interact. In one popular technique, for example, subjects were asked to form impressions or make relational choices based on extremely limited information—such as pictures or brief printed descriptions of others' attitudes. This was called the phantom-other technique because there wasn't actually another person with whom subjects interacted. Subjects in these stripped-down situations naturally used the few scraps of information they were given, but how they did so probably tells us little about how people seek and use information in real settings.

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