title: A generic model of dyadic social relationships.
abstract: We introduce a model of dyadic social interactions and establish its correspondence with relational models theory (RMT), a theory of human social relationships. RMT posits four elementary models of relationships governing human interactions, singly or in combination: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. To these are added the limiting cases of asocial and null interactions, whereby people do not coordinate with reference to any shared principle. Our model is rooted in the observation that each individual in a dyadic interaction can do either the same thing as the other individual, a different thing or nothing at all. To represent these three possibilities, we consider two individuals that can each act in one out of three ways toward the other: perform a social action X or Y, or alternatively do nothing. We demonstrate that the relationships generated by this model aggregate into six exhaustive and disjoint categories. We propose that four of these categories match the four relational models, while the remaining two correspond to the asocial and null interactions defined in RMT. We generalize our results to the presence of N social actions. We infer that the four relational models form an exhaustive set of all possible dyadic relationships based on social coordination. Hence, we contribute to RMT by offering an answer to the question of why there could exist just four relational models. In addition, we discuss how to use our representation to analyze data sets of dyadic social interactions, and how social actions may be valued and matched by the agents.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zürich, Scheuchzerstrasse 7, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Maroussia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Favre
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zürich, Scheuchzerstrasse 7, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland; Swiss Finance Institute, c/o University of Geneva, 40 blvd. Du Pont d'Arve, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Didier
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sornette
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D012919:Social Behavior
references.citation: PLoS One. 2012;7(1):e29796
references.pmid: 22253784
references.citation: J Pers Soc Psychol. 1991 May;60(5):656-74
references.pmid: 2072252
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010 Aug 3;107(31):13636-41
references.pmid: 20643965
references.citation: Sci Rep. 2014 Oct 06;4:6526
references.pmid: 25283998
references.citation: Psychol Sci. 2004 Jul;15(7):437-41
references.pmid: 15200626
references.citation: J Pers Soc Psychol. 1994 Oct;67(4):575-84
references.pmid: 7965605
references.citation: PLoS One. 2013 Dec 16;8(12):e81558
references.pmid: 24358115
references.citation: Neuroimage. 2004 Mar;21(3):1167-73
references.pmid: 15006683
references.citation: Psychol Psychother. 2002 Mar;75(Pt 1):19-31
references.pmid: 12006197
references.citation: Science. 1946 Jun 7;103(2684):677-80
references.pmid: 20984256
references.citation: Science. 2007 May 18;316(5827):998-1002
references.pmid: 17510357
references.citation: Cognition. 1994 Oct;53(1):59-90
references.pmid: 7988106
references.citation: Psychol Rev. 1992 Oct;99(4):689-723
references.pmid: 1454904