title: The four elementary forms of sociality: framework for a unified theory of social relations.
abstract: The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 different methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104-6196.
authors.forename: A P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Fiske
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012933:Social Identification; D012951:Socialization