Relational Models Theory

Definition

The relational models theory describes the four fundamental forms of social relationships: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. People in communal sharing relationships feel that they have something essential in common, whereas outsiders are different. Participants in an authority ranking relationship see themselves as ordered in a legitimate linear hierarchy. In an equality matching relationship, people keep track of whether each separate individual is treated equally. In market pricing, people use ratios or rates, according to some standard of due proportions, such as price. People in all cultures use combinations of these four models to organize nearly all interactions, from close relationships to casual and distant ones. The relational models are innate and intrinsically motivated. But children rely on cultural prototypes and precedents to discover how to implement them in culture-specific ways.

Relational models theory integrates classical theories of social relations and society, and it connects natural selection, neurobiology, child development, cognition, emotion, communication, psychological disorders, norms and ideology, religion, social and political structures, and culture. The theory is supported by ethnographic and comparative cultural studies, and by psychological experiments using a variety of methods. Alan Page Fiske formulated the theory; Nick Haslam did much of the early experimental work on it and developed the theory in relation to clinical psychology and social cognition. Research using relational models theory has provided insights into political psychology, cross-cultural interaction, attitudes toward immigration, behavioral and anthropological economics, the social systems of classical Greece, sociolinguistics, business management, group and family processes, moral judgment, social motives and emotions, gifts and other exchanges, time perspectives, tobacco use, personality disorders, autism, schizophrenia, and vulnerability to other psychological disorders.

Four Relational Models