Fiske Configuration of Social Relationships

European Journal of Social Psychology, Eur. J. Soc. Psychol.
42, 218 (2012)

Published online 23 October 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.847
Horizon Metarelational models: Congurations of social relationships

ALAN PAGE FISKE*
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abstract Beyond cognizing persons and social relationships, people also think about combinations of relationships: metarelational models (MeRMs). If relationships are words, then MeRMs are syntax; if relationships are atoms, MeRMs are chemical compounds. MeRMs are the motivated, emotionally experienced, morally directive models for generating, understanding, coordinating, planning, evaluating, modulating, sanctioning, and redressing congurations of social relationships. Previous research and theory on triads and balance, networks, cross-cutting ties, and kinship systems has explored the causal connections among social relationships, but MeRM theory posits something more: shared, culturally informed MeRMs that people use to jointly construct meaningful coordinated action. The social interactions of nonhuman animals and pre-verbal infants indicate that they use MeRMs, supporting the contention that core innate cognition includes the basic structures of MeRMs. There are six elementary kinds of MeRMs, and recursive linking of relational models (RMs) generates indenitely more. MeRMs shape individual psychology, relationships, groups, institutions, and cultures. Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wifes mother or even avoid all interaction with her. In cultures where honor and shame are fundamental to morality, people refuse to allow their children to marry the siblings of a woman who has had sexual relations outside of marriage even if she has been raped. A citizen who actively supports an enemy nation is a traitor and may be executed for combining her citizenship in one nation with her support of another. What these examples illustrate is that we cannot understand individual psychology, dyadic social relationships, or group psychology unless we understand the combinatorics of social relationships. There are syntactical models for conjoining relationships, including models whereby particular relationships entail other specic relationships. And some relationships preclude certain other relationships. The interdependence among relationships affects the constituent relationships; it affects how we perceive and evaluate ourselves and others; and it affects the emotions, motives, physiology and, in general, the psychology of each participant. Furthermore, the interdependence among social relationships is fundamental to societal, cultural, and evolutionary processes. Obligations to combine certain relationships in certain ways, or not to combine relationships in specic ways, have dramatic consequences for social action, moral motives, emotions, and indeed for the very understanding of the meaning of social action. These combinatorial, syntactic congurations of social relationships are important features of cultures. Cultures of honor differ from cultures in which a persons moral standing is largely independent of the moral standing of the other members of their family. A culture in which a mans marriage to a woman precludes his being married to other women is
INTRODUCTION Imagine that you are married and you fall in love with your spouses best friend, who is also married. Obviously this would have profound implications for all six relationships and all four individuals involved, as well as their siblings, children, and friends. Or think about favoring one child; it would provoke envious resentment in your other children. Likewise, as a participant in a market, you know that the price of a commodity depends on the fact that the buyer could obtain the commodity from another supplier and the supplier could sell to another buyer. Clearly, spouses, friends, and lovers relationships are interdependent; parents relationships with their various children are interdependent; and sellers and buyers relationships are interdependent. In all of these cases, it is not simply that one social relationship causally affects another relationship. The point of this article is that people have culturally informed, motivationally powerful, emotionally imbued, morally directive but often implicit models of how social relationships must, may, or must not be combined. If you hurt my child, I will angrily retaliate indeed, I must retaliate. If my son or daughter has a child, I should love my grandchild; indeed, the joyful, permissive grandfathergrandchild relationship is actually constituted by the combination of the two linked parental relationships. In many cultures (although not mine), my wifes younger sisters and I are supposed to tease, jokingly insult, sexually provoke, and playfully steal from each other. In contrast, in many of the same cultures, I must exhibit extreme circumspection in speech and action with my
*Correspondence to: Alan Page Fiske, Department of Anthropology, UCLA, 341 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, PO Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 900951553, USA. E-mail: aske@ucla.edu
Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received 20 May 2011, Accepted 19 August 2011
Metarelational models structurally different from a culture that condones men having multiple wives or women having multiple husbands, or one that condones both (Fox, 1967; Keesing, 1975). There are cultures in which it is desirable for two sisters to marry the same man and cultures in which it is considered incest to do so. There are cultures in which it is preferred that a man marry his fathers brothers daughter, and ones where that is abhorrent or illegal.
PSYCHOLOGIES OF THINGS, ANIMATES, PERSONS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND RELATIONAL COMBINATIONS When people think about or behave with reference to other persons, they use at least ve types of psychological mechanisms. The most encompassing psychological mechanisms are those used to understand and think about anything in the world: cognitive processes concerned with the spatial position, shape, color, sound, smell, feel, substance, motions, and invisible properties of all objects and entities. A more specialized set of mechanisms is concerned only with animate beings and their perceptions, knowledge, capabilities, motives, intentions, health, sleep, wakefulness, death, and other psychobehavioral states (Barrett, 2004, 2005; Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Still more narrowly oriented psychological mechanisms are specically concerned with humans and anthropomorphized beings such as spirits, ancestors, gods, and sometimes pets or computers. These human-oriented cognitive mechanisms include categorization, inferences about traits, responses to the presence of others, and inuence processes (Boyer, 2002; S. Fiske & Taylor, 2007; Nisbett & Ross, 1991; Cialdini, 2008). A still more specialized set of psychological processes is concerned with social relationships (Baldwin, 2005; Fiske, 1991; Fiske & Haslam, 1996). Relationships have properties that are irreducible to the properties of the participants or to individuals thinking about other individuals. Properties of relationships include, for example, being entitled to a turn, feeling one with each other, being in awe of someone, or owing a debt. But there is yet another level of social psychology: thinking about how to combine relationships. People constantly use metarelational models (MeRMs) that specify how to combine relationships. Cognition related to MeRMs builds on all of these lower level cognitive processes but transcends them to understand, motivate, and evaluate combinations of social relationships. Humans cannot cognize MeRMs without building on these lower levels of psychology, but these lower, more general cognitive capacities are not sufcient to cognize MeRMs. MeRMs are not reducible to the physical properties of objects, the mental qualities of animate beings, the traits of individuals, or the features of social relationships. Roughly speaking, we can contrast two types of MeRMs: entailments and prohibitions, sometimes conjoined. Here is a constitutive entailment: Barbara Fiske and Donald Fiske gave birth to me, Alan. Later Barbara and Don had a daughter, Susan. The combination of those two relationships made me Susans brother, with all the sentiments and obligations of siblingship. More generally, as I will discuss later, the kinship relations that organize traditional societies consist largely of
MeRMs. Consider another constitutive MeRM: in many northern Mediterranean and Central American cultures, godparents are responsible for their godchilds religious upbringing and must take care of a godchild if his or her parents die. Interestingly, one of the most trusting, solidary, and socially important relationships in these societies is between a persons parent and their godparent. The father of my godchild, or the godfather of my child, is my compadre, and compadres may ask each other for anything and rely on each other totally. (Likewise, the mother and godmother of the same child are comadres.) Compadres or comadres are often closer and more trusting than siblings. The compadrazgo relationship itself is the entailment of two other relationships: parenthood and godparenthood of the same child. Intriguingly, in both siblingship and compadrazgo, there is a very strong taboo against sexual relations, so the same MeRM comprises both positive entailments of support and a prohibition. An example of purely prohibitive MeRMs includes the sense that my friend cannot be the friend of my enemy, or the idea of monogamy: Alphas marriage to one person precludes Alphas simultaneous marriage to any other person. Cultural prescriptions and hence the social psychology of these combinations differ considerably from culture to culture. But universally, people are intensely concerned about how social relationships should or should not be combined. The crucial point to keep in mind is that the cognitive representations of these combinations of relationships, the emotions they evoke, the obligations and commitments they entail, and the behaviors typical of them are not reducible to the component relationships, to the properties of the individuals who relate to each other, to anyones cognitions about the individual participants, or to the material properties of the persons. Metarelational model theory posits that emotion, motivation, moral evaluation, norms, identity and self, property, production, exchange, family dynamics, group formation and function, intergroup relations, political processes, and myriad other processes at the heart of social and behavioral science are crucially shaped by links among relationships and can only be understood with reference to them. Moreover, they are shaped not only by causal effects of relationships on each other but also by MeRMs. MeRMs specify how relationships must, may, or must not be combined, and they dene the meaning and implications of specic combinations. People use MeRMs to motivate, generate, interpret, coordinate, modulate, judge, sanction, and redress combinations of social relationships. Presumably, the sources and the consequences of MeRMs are, at the same time, evolutionary, neurobiological, ontogenetic, individually learned, socially transmitted, and culturally shared to a considerable degree. Many of these sources and consequences are not yet known, but we do know that MeRMs inform processes that link these systems in many ways. In this article, I will not directly address natural selection, neurobiology, learning, and cultural transmission because hardly anything is known about these aspects of MeRMs. However, there are a number of studies showing that nonhuman animals have MeRMs, which I will describe. In this article, my rst aim is simply to demonstrate that MeRMs are ubiquitous, important components of human psychology, social relations, social organization, and culture. My second aim is to provide an initial, analytically derived
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Alan Page Fiske conguration of social relationships. In regard to all of these properties, a MeRM is much like an RM (Fiske, 1991, 2004), but rather than governing relations among social entities such as persons or institutions, it governs congurations of RMs: it species how to combine relationships or not to combine them. A MeRM may be explicit in some manner, but many MeRMs are not explicitly or fully articulated. In important respects, a MeRM exists in the minds of many participants and observers of a given culture and generates their actions together with the interpretations, evaluations, and responses to the actions. A MeRM is a representation of action, reecting an interpretive encoding of past and present congurations of relationships in the world. But it is also a template or vector for imagining and generating action that has not yet been performed. To make that distinction with regard to RMs, I have previously used the term presentation to denote that such a model does not merely represent something that already exists externally, prior to and independent of the model; it also presents a pre-existing goal and standard for action. That is, absent the model, people do not generate meaningful action, and people cannot understand their own or others behavior as meaningful action. An integral aspect of a MeRM is the set of emotions, attitudes, motives, and moral evaluations regarding the specic conguration of relationships, whether people apply the MeRM to relationships in which they themselves participate, or consider participating in, or whether people are considering congurations of relationships among third parties. Consider the MeRM that connects the celibacy of Roman Catholic priests to their relationship with God and to priests mediation of Catholics relationships with God. The priestly celibacy MeRM species that men who perform the communion service that mediates between Catholics and God must not have sexual relations. Sexual relations in general are not forbidden, only participation in sexual relations by those who are giving communion that is, priests (Brown, 1998). This MeRM evokes priests emotions and motives that, ideally, tend to steer them away from sex and inform their guilt or excuses if they engage in sex. Adherence to this MeRM enhances Catholics reverence for the priests, whereas transgression evokes parishioners disgust and anger and, people believe, the punitive anger of God. Transgression also is supposed to require sanctioning responses by bishops. So the celibacy MeRM organizes Catholics perception of their priests, interpretation of priests actions, and moral evaluations of them. The celibacy MeRM is also a foundation for the coordination of interaction between priests and other Catholics, as well as among Catholics: it imbues laypersons sexual relations with a meaning derived from the ideal abstinence of priests. People act, or refrain from action, or judge action, with reference to the MeRM. Each persons actions, inactions, and judgments make sense only within the framework of the MeRM, and each person acts with the implicit assumption that others are interpreting everyones actions within this framework. As this example illustrates, like RMs, MeRMs may involve beings who are not physically present, not alive, nonhuman, or immaterial. What matters is that people perceive the participants as social actors. The owner of two dogs may punish one of them for growling at the other. A child may be angry at someone who maligns her imaginary friend or her deceased
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taxonomy of MeRMs; this amounts to exploring the possibilities for a syntax of relational combinations. (For an insightful application of the syntax idea to the combinatorics of RMs, see Bolender, 2011.) My third aim is to show that MeRMs typically motivate cooperative moral behavior, binding, integrating, and regulating social relations. That is, looking inward, MeRMs are crucial to maintaining functional coordination in their component RMs because they sustain and enforce cooperation. Looking outward, MeRMs help give societies their structural form, substantially shaping the integrative order that we recognize as social institutions, social organization, and many norms. Elementary particles combine to form atoms, which combine to form molecules, which combine to form organelles, which combine to form cells, which may combine to form tissues, which combine to form organs, which combine to form organ systems, which combine to form organisms, which combine to form populations, which combine to form ecosystems. For language to be understood, knowledge of phonemes alone is not sufcient nor is it sufcient to understand isolated words: we need to understand syntax, we need to understand how utterances t together into conversations, and we need to understand how conversations cumulate to constitute communicative practices. Although some processes can be more or less adequately described at one of these levels while ignoring other levels, a complete understanding of life requires knowledge of the structures and processes at each level and how they interact. Humans have been extensively studied at the level of individuals, relationships, groups, institutions, societies, and world systems. My contention here is that we also need to understand order and dynamics at a level above dyadic relationships and below groups and institutions: MeRMs. The next section of this article theoretically denes the properties of a MeRM. The following sections very briey review previous approaches that consider how social relationships affect each other: theories of triads, networks, markets, cross-cutting ties, and kinship. These theories focus on causal connections among relationships, mostly ignoring the existence of agents emotionally imbued, motivationally effective, morally loaded and normatively obligatory, cognitive, and culturally informed representations of how relationships must, may, or must not be combined in certain congurations. I then summarily review research on MeRMs in nonhuman animals and young children. The next section presents an analytic typology of MeRMs, with examples of each, followed by a section analyzing an apparently universal MeRM composed of communal sharing (CS) relationships involving commensalism and sexual relations. This leads to a discussion of how MeRMs regulate their component relationships and the actions of their individual participants, often enabling cooperative commitment. I close with some ideas about some directions in which MeRM theory could be developed and extended. WHAT IS A METARELATIONAL MODEL? A MeRM is a motivated, emotionally evocative, and morally constructive model for thinking about, creating, understanding, coordinating, judging, sanctioning, and redressing a
Metarelational models mother. On more than one occasion during my eldwork among the Moose of Burkina Faso, deceased victims identied the witches who had killed them, whereupon villagers immediately exiled the witches. Moose commonly sought their ancestors protection from witches and sorcerers; when they suffered illnesses or setbacks, divination often revealed that their ancestors were punishing them for transgressions against lineage mates, especially sexual relations with the wife of a lineage mate. Indeed, people in every culture may be motivated to refrain from adultery, theft, or violence against their co-religionists if they believe that their god(s) would be angered and would punish them, and a person believed to be cursed by a god is often shunned by other worshippers of that god (Ricoeur, 1967). In short, an extremely important and widespread set of MeRMs involve supernatural beings who are believed to be concerned about the social relations among humans. This third-party punishment by gods, ancestors, and spirits has a major function in regulating relationships. Intrinsically and intimately connected to this is the disposition of humans to interpret misfortune and suffering as intervention by ancestors, spirits, or gods who are punishing transgressions in human social relations. This leads to religious fear that is likely to promote cooperative, affable, courteous, and generous sociability among humans (Rossano, 2007). In addition, many cultures transmit myths about MeRMs among their gods, recounting alliances, jealousies, betrayals, and thirdparty punishments of other gods. Today, MeRMs involving immaterial or nonpresent actors are still ubiquitous: Folktales, novels, songs, poetry, television, movies, Internet sites, and video games commonly represent MeRMs among animals, imaginary humans, avatars, droids, or supernatural beings. Metarelational models are morally loaded: they specify how to combine relationships. Moral psychology consists of emotions, motives, judgments, and ideals that regulate social relationships (Rai & Fiske, 2011), including the regulation of congurations of relationships. This crucial moral aspect of MeRMs includes presentations of how to sanction, redress, and terminate dened congurations. More broadly, many values and goals are formulated with respect to MeRMs. For example, a Moose man may aim to have the paramount chief appoint him village chief, or strive to keep peace among his wives. Or a woman will end her friendship with a woman who, divination reveals, is the witch who has been killing and eating the children of their mutual friends. In the individual, emotions that can be described as remorse, guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, awe, or duty may often reect adaptive representations of the implicit expectation that actions in one relationship will have ramications in other relationships linked through a MeRM. For example, a persons remorse about stealing from a friend may be an adaptive response that addresses the deleterious consequences that the transgression is likely to have for the perpetrators other relationships (Fiske, 2002; Rai & Fiske, 2011). Much of moral psychology is embedded in MeRMs, including taboos against incest and adultery, the honor and shame complex, norms of equal treatment, and ideas about justice either as universal prices that everyone should pay at the same rates for the same transgression, or that each person should be rewarded in proportion to their merit or their contribution. Sometimes, especially when cultures are in contact or other factors make traditions problematic, MeRMs may be explicitly
articulated, prescribed, discussed, or debated, but often they are not. MeRMs, like syntax, typically shape behavior without people being reectively aware of them. It is also possible for individual reection or culturally shared folk models to misrepresent MeRMs: when people have explicit folk theories of MeRMs, these theories may not correspond to the actual MeRMs implicitly shaping their motives, emotions, judgments, or actions. There is nothing exceptional or unique to MeRMs in this regard, of course: people are typically unaware of, or misunderstand, many of their psychological processes, cultural practices, and social structures. Thats why the world needs social scientists!
THEORIES OF RELATIONSHIP LINKAGE Triads Several theorists have suggested in various ways that there are causal interdependencies among social relationships although without addressing the possibility that humans might have models consisting of motivated representations that coordinate their interdependent relationships. Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown (1952 [1939]:140141) posited that social relationships are inherently triadic: While some measure of agreement about values, some similarity of interests, is a prerequisite of a social system, social relations involve more than this. . . . When two or more persons have a common interest in the same object and are aware of their community of interests a social relation is established. They form, whether for a moment or for a long period, an association, and the object may be said to have a social value. . . . In the simplest possible instance we have a triadic relation; Subject 1 and Subject 2 are both interested in the same way in the object and each of the Subjects has an interest in the other, or at any rate in certain items of the behavior of the other, namely those directed toward the object. Subsequent research revealed that this kind of triadic interaction, in which two persons coordinate their attention to or action with an object, called joint attention, emerges around 9 months of age in Western infants and is very important for social and linguistic development (Carpenter et al., 1998; Carpenter, 2010). Unfortunately, there is very little research yet on infants joint attention to humans (or other agents), much less shared evaluations of the social actions of third parties. Independently of Radcliffe-Brown, Heider (1958) graphically analyzed the triadic dynamic character of attitudes and relationships. He theorized that when a person and an other both have positive attitudes or both have negative attitudes toward an object, the attitudes and social relationship are stable. But when one person has a positive attitude and the other has a negative attitude toward the object, the conguration is unstable, so that that an attitude or the social relationship will change. Radcliffe-Browns conceptualization, Heiders theory of balance, and later theories of balance, congruity, and dissonance all focus on the contingencies among attitudes toward
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Alan Page Fiske relationships: In primitive society, many of the possible paths leading away from any A lead back again to A after a few links; in modern society a smaller proportion lead [directly] back to A (Barnes, 1954:44). Network theorists have also been interested in studying the extent to which two or more persons have similar relations with the same persons (see Burt, 1982:42). Burt argues that similarity in relations with others is a major source of interests (utilities), as well as similarity in attitudes or normative perceptions, but may also result in competition. Many other well-known phenomena demonstrate the interdependence among social relationships. The economic relations of supply and demand result from the fact that the price paid in a given transaction depends on the prices that other sellers are offering and the prices that other buyers are willing to pay. That is, the price relationship between the buyer and the seller is informed by the actual and potential market relationships that the buyer has with alternate suppliers, and the supplier with other buyers. Likewise in more intimate relationships, relational commitment and satisfaction are affected by the relationship market (the comparative attractiveness of alternative partners) and by the partners joint connections to family and friends (Agnew, Martz, & Rusbult, 1998). Evolutionary theorists have analyzed mate choice and mutualism from this supply and demand perspective (e.g., No, 2001). By addressing the causal geometry of webs of relationships, these approaches complement MeRM theory. Role theory makes clear that relationships come in socioculturally dened sets, so that entering into one relationship entails assuming other relationships. Network research addresses the topology of sets of relationships. But neither role nor network theory commonly considers the possibility that actors seek to create or avoid certain constellations, morally evaluate or emotionally respond to constellations, or use shared representations to coordinate connections among social relationships. The nearest that network researchers come to this is to acknowledge that actors may make strategic decisions about forming ties that will provide opportunities for entrepreneurship, inuence, leadership, or information in other relationships. Hence, these theories do not consider how people intend to create or to avoid meaningful combinations of social relationships they ignore the possibility of MeRMs that consist of thinking about how their relationships t together. Economic and rational actor market theories incorporate the idea that people take into account interactional alternatives but have little to say about the cognitive models involved, much less the emotional, motivational, and moral-evaluative aspects of these MeRMs.
impersonal objects or ideas (see Brown, 1965 Chapter 11). Where they consider social relationships as such, they treat the social relationships among people as functionally equivalent to conceptual relationships among objects or ideas, or to relationships usually attitudes between people and nonagentic entities. Moreover, work in these traditions generally ignores the actors own models of the conguration as such. Furthermore, it reduces cognition to positive and negative attitudes or unit relations (e.g., ownership, making, or doing something). Much although not all of the research in this tradition ignored the fact that this interdependence among relationships operates strongly with respect to social relationships as such but only very weakly with regard to nonsocial attitudes, beliefs, preferences, or values (see the review by Abelson, 1983). However, Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels (1997:2224) seem to recognize the social psychological aspect of the links among relationships when they discuss the fact that there are third-party stakeholders who have interests in most couples sexual relations. So the sexual partners interaction is often strategically and morally framed in consideration of their respective relationships with such stakeholders as their parents, children, other partners, or friends. Privacy, secrecy, and lovers emotional withdrawal from third parties all reect MeRMs. The interests of others in the sexual relations of a dyad and the partners desire to maintain relationships with these others may function to curtail or to sustain the sexual relationship, depending especially on the moral and other valuation of the MeRMs (Laumann et al., 1997:125126).
Role, Network, And Market Theories Relationships often form connected aspects of a social role, and sociological role theories can be reinterpreted as descriptions of institutionalized constellations of MeRMs. A professor may be teacher to her students; co-author, co-teacher, or colleague to fellow professors; subordinate to the dean; and editor-in-charge of one journal and a submitting author to other journals. These relationships are interdependent, and people are generally aware of how they are connected. The deans and students respect for the professor is substantially determined by editors and reviewers evaluations of the professors research. An airline pilot is an employee of the company, master of the aircraft, and peer in his union. The pilots captaincy of the aircraft and membership in the union are determined by her employment relationship with the company. More subtle but pervasive is the traditional authority ranking (AR) with CS role of a lineage (or family) elder who coordinates the CS labor of a the lineage, manages the sharing of its land and consumption of its harvest, and acts as spokesman for its collective interests vis--vis other elders. Network theory and research looks at social relationships are linked with each other in large webs (see, e.g., Wasserman and Galaskiewicz, 1994; Christakis & Fowler, 2010). Network theory has explored the factors associated with the proportion of possible dyadic links that actually exist in a region or center on an individual, as well as second-order relations (e.g., friends of friends Boissevain, 1974). Barnes (1954) in particular emphasizes another feature, the importance of the closure of loops of
CROSS-CUTTING TIES, SOCIAL ORDER, AND AUTHORITY Sociologists have studied how conict is dampened and social order is maintained by the multiplicity of each persons crosscutting loyalties and commitments. Writing in 1908, Simmel (Simmel & Wolf, 1950) analyzed how a triad differs from a dyad. Most signicantly for our purposes, he pointed out that in a triad two persons can join forces to constrain the third, and conversely, each person can mediate between the other
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Metarelational models two, moderating conicts that might destroy the group (see Coser, 1977:188). Fourteen years later, Simmel (1955) analyzed the sociological implications of each persons belonging to a number of different social circles, and hence each person being the intersection of a distinct set of circles. Simmel suggested that the conicting demands of different social circles produce psychological tensions that generate consciousness of the persons core of inner unity that is, the self. The ego can become more clearly conscious of this unity, the more he is confronted with the task of reconciling within himself a diversity of group interests (p. 142). Political scientists have long recognized that AR relationships have a particular potential to regulate other relationships. Hobbes (1651) postulated that people contract to jointly submit to a Leviathan to reduce conict among themselves. Locke (1689) and Rousseau (1762) later developed this contractual theory. And indeed, there is ample ethnographic evidence that human leaders in all cultures do intervene to try to stop and resolve conicts (Boehm, 1999:155). Later political theory recognizes that states, by denition, are entities that claim the power to regulate certain relationships among citizens, mediate certain disputes, and punish certain infractions. States themselves form alliances for support in conict, or to create international bodies that can mediate conicts (Falger, 1992). However, there are many human communities and societies that do not have chiefs, kings, or presidents. Anthropologists have long been interested in how such acephalous societies are integrated so as to maintain social order. In his analytic introduction to Peristianys ethnography of the East-African Kipsigis, Evans-Pritchard (1939) highlights (without reference to Simmel) the diversity of distinct groups to which each Kipsigis belongs and the many strands of his social networks. This net dampens conicts because whenever there is a dispute or transgression, the potential allies of each party include many potential allies of the other. This theory of social order through cross-cutting ties, in which divided loyalties keep societal conict in check, became quite inuential in social anthropology (see LeVine, 1961; Gluckman, 1954, 1963) and sociology (see Rae & Taylor, 1970). This effect is produced by what I call the plywood principle: a sheet of plywood is strong because the grains of each ply lie at different angles and the plies are glued together, preventing the sheet from splitting along the grain of any one ply. The integrative social effect of cross-cutting ties results from moral models of how hostile relationships may be combined with other amicable relationships: people feel that it is wrong to ght the ally of their own ally. Later, Colson (1953) described similar mechanisms of integration among the Tonga (of what is now southern Zambia). In addition, Colson showed that Tongan kinship obligations are reinforced by fear of immanent supernatural sanctions from maternal ancestors who will punish anyone in the kin group who commits an offense against another member and indeed may punish anyone in the kin group for the offenses of anyone of their maternal kin. In short, linking social relationships with supernatural beings to social relationships among humans regulates the human relationships. An entirely separate line of research, game theory, comes to convergent conclusions through analytic and experimental methods. Behavioral research on economic games shows that most people in every culture studied will often choose to
punish others who defect against a third party, even if that punishment is costly to the punisher (Sigmund, 2007; Marlowe et al., 2008). The central issue is whether, under realistic conditions, third-party punishment could be selected and become evolutionarily stable because it is always vulnerable to freeriding on others efforts to punish (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005). However, under certain restricted conditions, multiparty cooperation relying on reputation and third-party punishment may evolve as cultural practices through cultural group selection (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). What seems to me more likely is that third-party punishment is often costless. People like to gossip, and people judge whether to form, sustain, or withdraw from relationships with others based on part on knowledge of the others social behavior with third parties (Dunbar, 2004; Sommerfeld, Krambeck, & Milinski, 2008). If there are more potential partners than needed, and each person selectively chooses partners who in the past generally have been cooperative in interactions with most cooperative partners, then uncooperative people suffer the cost of being deprived of participation in mutualistic cooperative activities. This could make cooperation advantageous in the long run, even where it requires refraining from defections that would provide short-term benets. KINSHIP The most advanced research on how relationships combine is the analysis of kinship, which anthropologists have studied for over a century because kinship systems form the frameworks of most traditional societies (Fox, 1967; Keesing, 1975). Although kinship terms and their referents differ dramatically across cultures, Kroeber (1909) observed that kinship terms in all cultures are composed of a limited number of component features, which he called principles or categories of relationship. Kroeber noted that these component relations of kinship could be combined recursively (although he did not use that term). Following Kroebers lead, most anthropological research on kinship focused on the terminology of kinship, aiming to understand the meaning of kinship words. Goodenough (1956), Lounsbury (1956), and Romney and DAndrade (1964) showed that the method of distinctive feature analysis that had been developed to describe phonemes could be used to analyze kinship terms (see DAndrade, 1995, for an intellectual history of this approach). These cognitive anthropologists posited features more or less similar to Kroebers. Although this approach confused types of persons with types of relationships, they made some important discoveries, which can be summarized in twelve conclusions. 1. Many social relationships are constituted by combinations of other relationships; for example, the daughter of a sibling is a niece. That is, the relationship of niece to aunt or uncle is the product of the relationships of siblingship and the parent-child relationship (with or without the additional relationship, marriage). Likewise, in polygynous cultures, the product of two simultaneous marital relationships is the co-wife relationship. 2. A limited set of fundamental relationships combine to form all of the terms in a kinship system.
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Alan Page Fiske her older sisters husband, often taking his property without permission. In short, mother-in-law avoidance relations are linked to joking relationships between sister-in-law and brother-in-law, combining to constitute a MeMeRM. (I will not discuss MeMeRMs much in this article, but see conclusions 11 and 12, below). 8. The eighth nding of kinship research is that in most traditional cultures, many or all marriages are arranged by the kin groups (especially the male elders) of the prospective spouses, who conceive of one kin group giving the bride to the grooms group. That is, the social relationship between two kin groups, in conjunction with the social relationship between elders and the bride in one group and the relationship between elders and the groom on the other, controls the formation of the marriage relationship. Conversely, marriage (French, alliance) creates an alliance between the two kin groups, just as whole states are linked through the marriages of their monarchs. 9. Freud (1911, 191213) analyzed the incest taboo as a boys renunciation of sexual relations with his fathers wife. Freuds observation was that the Oedipus complex is a triangular conguration, and it is this triangle of relationships that generates the taboo. That is, Freud posited that the taboo is not experienced with respect to the motherchild dyad as an isolated relationship. Likewise, Totem and Taboo recounts, using mythical history as a trope, the creation of a bond among a group of brothers that results from their killing and eating their feared father and then constituting a taboo on sexual relations with his women i.e., with the brothers mothers and sisters. In short, Freud described incest prohibitions as the product of a triadic conguration of three relationships, and indeed posited that morality itself, in the form of the superego, grows out of the resolution of this Oedipal triangle. Freud argued that the incest taboo MeRM was universal, but that its manifestations varied across cultures, sometimes being expressed as totemic food taboos. (We will explore these claims in the universal metarelational models section). 10. Taking incest taboos in another triadic direction, Lvi-Straus (1949) argued that the taboo against sex or marriage with close kin facilitates marriage outside the core kin group. Lvi-Strauss also famously contrasted two types of exchange of brides. In restricted exchange two groups reciprocally and directly exchange brides, so that egos marriage is generated by a prior marriage in the same or, often, a previous generation. This is a MeRM that prescriptively links the two marriages. In generalized exchange at least three groups give brides to each other, for example from group A to group B, who give to group C, who give to group A. More complicated patterns arise when there are more than three kin groups linked by marital exchange. Generalized exchange means that each group gives wives to a particular group but gets their wives from a different group, so that marriage between group A and B generatively depends on marriage between groups B and C and on marriage between group C and group A. Thus generalized exchange is based on a MeRM linking three or more groups. 11. MeRMs in a social system are interdependent, linking with and complementing each other to form a social
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3. Some important MeRMs are named by kinship terms and institutionalized as normative practices. That is, many MeRMs are explicitly recognized in the lexicon, enter into discourse and reective thought, and are normatively articulated. (Levy, 1973, would have said they are hypercognized.) For example, in most kinship systems, there is a term for fathers father and a reciprocal term for sons son, showing that the linkage of two successive paternal relationships generates a third relationship, grandfathergrandchild in English. 4. Gender is a key determinant of MeRMs all kinship systems make many important distinctions according to the sex of at least some the people in the relationships that compose most kinship MeRMs. Many kinship systems distinguish between sister and brother; and some distinguish between sibling of the same sex as myself and sibling of the opposite sex. Some kinship systems distinguish kin terms based on the sex of the speaker, so for example there may be two terms for brother depending on whether the speaker is male or female. 5. More than one combination of component relationships may generate the same third relationship. For example, in many kinship systems, the same term is used for fathers father and for fathers fathers brother. Or take English: we use the term aunt for fathers sister, mothers sister, fathers brothers wife, and mothers brothers wife. Although we contrast father with mother, and we distinguish sister from brothers wife, four different combinations of these component relationships yield the same term and the same concept, aunt. That is, in any given culture, some congurations of elementary relationships may be treated as psychosocially or semantically equivalent to other combinations: the same MeRM can be generated from distinct component relationships. 6. Certain types of MeRMs appear in many different cultures. E.g., in most cultures marriage and mother-child relationships are conjoined to generate a third relationship: mother-in-law with son/daughter-in-law. In most cultures this mother-in-law relationship is explicitly cognized and normatively salient. Moreover, in a great many cultures this relationship involves common emotional features: extreme respect from son-in-law to mother-in-law, embarrassment in each others presence, conversational avoidance of any allusions to sex, minimization of direct conversation, or outright avoidance of each other (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940, 1949). Thus, although MeRMs vary considerably across cultures, some, at least, are not completely arbitrary and in fact are often directly comparable. 7. Further, kinship research demonstrates that MeRMs can be associated in meta-metarelationships (MeMeRMs). For example, in most cultures where mother-in-law respect and avoidance are salient, people are expected to have mutually disrespectful joking relationships with their brothers- or sisters-in-law, relationships that often involve teasing sexual advances or insults, and taking liberties with each others possessions or bodies (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940, 1949). Men are especially expected to joke with and teasingly insult their wifes younger siblings, and most notably, to make jocular advances to their wifes younger sisters. Conversely, a woman teases, jokingly insults, and behaves licentiously with
Metarelational models system. Lvi-Strauss was one of many ethnologists who showed that the most important factor that predicts the type of kinship system is the type of relationship that mediates who marries whom (Fox, 1967). 12. Perhaps the most important nding of kinship research is that although kinship systems vary tremendously, most can be more or less classied into just eight types, which ethnologists name after the type case: Crow, Omaha, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Kariera, Aranda, Sudanese, and Eskimo (Murdock, 1970). What distinguishes each type of system are the sets of combinations of social relationships that are conceptualized (or at least treated in the lexicon) as culturally equivalent, identied with the same kin term (see principle ve). For example, what distinguishes the Hawaiian system is that one refers to all males in a given generation by the same kin term, and one uses a single kin term to refer to all females in a given generation. E.g., a person uses the same term to refer to his or her sister, mothers sisters daughter, mothers brothers daughter, fathers brothers daughter, and fathers sisters daughter. If most kinship systems can validly be classied into this eight-fold taxonomy, this implies that there are only eight stable systems of kinship MeRMs. The rst half of this article can be summed up simply: various subelds of psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and cultural anthropology have independently discovered that human social relationships affect each other and form stable congurations that have important behavioral and societal consequences. Freudian theorists and cultural anthropologists came right to the verge of recognizing that people have directively potent culturally informed cognitive models of congurations of relationships. MeRM theory builds on these discoveries to formulate an integrative and comprehensive theory of the structures and functions of these models of and for combining relationships in certain congurations. Now let us look at where MeRMs come from, phylogenetically and ontogenetically.
NONHUMAN ANIMALS USE METARELATIONAL MODELS Animals evolve to make adaptive choices, including choices among social relationships. These choices include selection of mates, choices of investment in specic offspring, and choices between seeking further reproductive opportunities versus care of offspring and/or, in some species, care of siblings, nephews, nieces, and/or grandchildren (Komdeur & Heg, 2005; Hunt, Breuker, Sadowski, & Moore, 2008). Evolutionary theory and observation converge on the conclusion that animals take into account the past and expected nature and quality of each relationship when making such choices. For example, alloparental care of a close kins offspring is often inuenced by experienced or threatened aggression by the parents, by the parents afliative contact or grooming of the alloparent, or by some sort of algorithm that represents the likelihood of leaving, mating, and successfully forming a new reproductive unit (Ginther & Snowdon, 2009; Silk, 2009).
More generally, animals of many species act differentially toward another animal as a function of the rst or second partys actual or potential relationship with a third party. Malemale competition for mates is ubiquitous across diverse phyla, and in many avian and mammalian (including primate) species, males often attempt to interfere with copulations by other animals (e.g., Manno, DeBarbien, & Davidson, 2008). Mate-guarding males attempting to keep other males from copulating with their mates is common in species of insects, spiders, crustaceans, sh, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including primates (e.g., Wilson & Daly, 1992, Brotherton & Komers, 2003; Haselton & Gangestad, 2006). In some mammal and bird species, coalitions of males cooperate to guard females, tolerating each others mating with the female(s) but driving others away (see Watts, 1998). Such coalitions could represent MeRMs linking four or more relationships: egopartner, egofemale, partnerfemale, female interloper, and possibly partnerpartner. Sperm whales take turns protecting calves on the surface from predatory orcas (Whitehead, 2003). Alliances of pairs or triplets of male bottle-nose dolphins often coordinate to capture and herd an estrous female; these alliances are often stable for years, with the males associating in other contexts as well (Connor et al., 2000). Sometimes two sets of dolphin allies will form a second-order alliance to aggressively take a female from the dyad or triad that is herding her, or to defend the females that they themselves are each herding. This suggests a MeRM incorporating four or more relationships or a MeRM comprising a recursive embedding of alliance within alliance. Nonhuman coalitions are not limited to males: Bonobo females and, in some populations, chimpanzee females form coalitions to deter and retaliate against aggressive males (Newton-Fisher, 2006). In some primate species, dominance ranks among females are determined by the rankings of their respective matrilines and, within each matriline, by the mothers support of each successive offspring against her or his older siblings (Chapais, 1992; Cheney & Seyfarth 2007:6575; Silk, Alberts, & Altmann, 2004). Some birds form alliances to defend territories or feeding grounds (Harcourt, 1992), and this could be mediated by MeRMs linking relations among allies with their respective relations to outsiders or interlopers. Rooks (Corvus frugilegus, in the crow family) evidently understand relationships among other rooks. Captive juvenile rooks form partnerships (both across and within sex). After a ght between two birds that belong to different partnerships, the victims partner is more likely to attack the aggressor, the victim is more likely to attack the aggressors partner, and the victims partner is more likely to attack the aggressors partner, compared with control periods (Emery, Seed, von Bayern, & Clayton, 2007). Similarly, in baboons, rhesus macaques, Japanese macaques, vervet monkeys, and spotted hyenas, when animals from different matrilineal kin groups ght, other members of the respective matrilines who were not involved in the original conict are more likely to attack each other in the ensuing hours (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1992; Engh, Siebert, Greenberg, & Holekamp, 2005; Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007:96103). This means that rooks, hyenas, baboons, macaques, and vervets must be motivated by the conguration of four social relationships: their membership in their own partnership or matriline, other animals
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Alan Page Fiske language is not necessary for MeRMs, and if you believe that animals lack fully conscious or truly symbolic thought, then you would have to conclude that MeRMs do not depend on conscious symbolic representation. Understanding of relationships between third parties and evaluatively motivated reactions to others relationships are evident early in human life (Over & Carpenter, 2009; Johnson et al., 2010; Beier & Spelke, 2011; Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, & Carey, 2011). In a series of studies, Hamlin and colleagues have shown that infants at 10, 6, and 3 months prefer an agent that helped another agent trying to go up a hill, compared with an agent that pushed the same agent back down the hill or to a novel agent (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2010; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011). Hamlin and colleagues also studied infants to see how they reacted to a puppet that either helped or hindered another puppet that previously either had helped or had hindered another puppets attempt to open a box. At both 19 months and 8 months, infants preferred the puppet that helped a helpful puppet over the one that hindered the helpful puppet. Moreover, at both ages, infants preferred a puppet that punished an antisocial puppet to a puppet that helped an antisocial puppet (Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, & Mahajan, 2011). This demonstrates that very young infants have motivated quasi-moral MeRMs.
membership in another partnership or matriline, the conict relationship between the original combatants, and the ensuing conict relationship between the allies of the combatants (cf. de Waal & Harcourt, 1992). Most social primate species (and many other taxa) tend to form approximately linear dominance hierarchies, which imply that they are using a transitive representation of dominance that links three or more relationships. Transitivity consists of making inferences from two relationships to a thtird: if A > B and B > C, then A > C. Pinyon jays defer to an unfamiliar bird that has dominated a bird that has dominated them, an inference that indicates understanding of transitivity and action based on that understanding (Paz-y-Mio, Bond, Kamil, & Balda, 2004). Moreover, dominance hierarchies in primates, especially, are typically based on, stabilized by, and transformed by alliances: an animal (alpha) is dominant over another (beta) when more numerous or higher-ranking allies are more likely to support alpha in confrontations with beta (e.g., for male chimpanzee and female bonobo dominance hierarchies, see Chapais, 1992; Boehm, 1999, Smith et al., 2010). This is evidence for motivating, emotionally-imbued cognitive representations of MeRMs consisting of links among four or more relationships: B defers to A because A has higher-ranking allies and more of them. Male baboons often form coalitions when challenging a male consort of a receptive female, in contests over meat or other food, and when defending an infant or other baboon against aggression by other group members (No, 1992). Conversely, in many primate species, a third party may intervene in ways that tend to halt conicts between two animals, either by threatening or attacking one or both combatants or by afliative gestures toward either or both (e.g., Petit & Thierry, 1994). For example, silverback gorillas frequently intervene in conicts between females and in conicts involving immature members of their troop, usually supporting the younger of the immature opponents (Boehm, 1999:155, Robbins, 2007). Friendships between females and malefemale pair bonds may have evolved because these relationships reduce the risk that male interlopers will kill a females infant (Van Schaik & Dunbar, 1990; Reichard & Boesch, 2003; Palombit, Seyfarth, & Cheney, 1997). Third-party intervention in conicts is known to occur in several other mammalian orders as well (Schilder, 1990; Zabel et al., 1992; Smith et al., 2010; Ward, Trisko, & Smuts, 2009), and in young humans (Grammer, 1992; van Hoogdalem et al., 2008). Some primates handle or grab an infant to buffer against attacks or gain access to its mother (Ogawa, 1995; MacKinnon 2007:584; Kmmerli & Martin 2008). All together, the animal behavior research demonstrates that animals of many species think about, are motivated by, and act with reference to the implications of relationships for other relationships. These nonhuman animals cognize congurations of at least four relationships, and sometimes relationships such as alliances recursively nested in other alliances. Moreover, the adaptive function of nonhuman animals metarelational action is to use social relationships to create, modulate, preclude, or regulate other relationships and the actions or dispositions of individual participants. We will see in the following that these are also the core features and functions of human MeRMs. The evidence from nonhuman animals also demonstrates that
FORMS A TYPOLOGY Let us take stock. Many species of mammals and even birds adjust their relationships to take into account other relationships, including relationships among third parties. In a number of cases, it is clear that animals action is a product of congurations of three or four social relationships. By the third month, infants have preferences for agents depending on the actions of that agent with a third party; by the eighth month, infants relational preferences integrate three relationships. Thus, something resembling MeRMs are present early in infancy and long before language and other reective and symbolic capacities mature. Analytic proofs, simulations, and behavioral game theory research shows that the sort of thirdparty punishment that infants seem prepared for is crucial to establishing cooperation. Likewise, conceptualizations of cross-cutting ties demonstrate that patterns of divided allegiance reduce conict and enhance social integration. Componential studies of kinship terms show that there are similar MeRMs in many different cultures, and that MeRMs form linked systems that can be identied across cultures. Freuds analysis notably highlights the salience of a widespread type MeRM that links close familial CS relationships with sex and food taboos. Taken together, these independent research traditions establish that MeRMs are ubiquitous and crucial to the sociality of humans and many other animals, especially because of their function in regulating their component social relationships. The next step in understanding MeRMs is to develop a taxonomy that might provide some guidance to the study of MeRMs. We can construct a straightforward taxonomy based on the number of persons, the number of relationships among
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Metarelational models
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Figure 1. Type 1 metarelational model; entailments among two relationships of two kinds between two people; 2p2r2k Figure 2. Type 2 metarelational model; entailments among two relationships of one kind: 3p2r1k
them, and the number of different kinds of relationship in the conguration.1 To simplify (but perhaps without losing much validity), I assume here a binary qualitative interdependence among relationships, rather than one that varies continuously by degree. Note that we are concerned here with MeRMs and not merely with the causal effect that one relationship has on another. Hence, our focus is on congurations that are implicitly or explicitly represented by the participants (and possibly observers), with which people coordinate the ways they conjoin relationships, that are emotionally imbued, that are motivationally directive, and that are morally evaluated. We can construct a useful heuristic taxonomy of MeRMs based on the number of persons, the number of social relationships among them, and the number of kinds of relationships in the MeRM. 1. The simplest type of combination occurs with two people who have two distinct kinds of relationships with each other, where these relationships inform each other (2p2r2k; Figure 1). Combinations of relationships within the same dyad or collectivity are often essential to both kinds of relationships, such as CS and AR relationships between a parent and child, or Market Pricing (MP) and AR relationships between an employer and employee. Conversely, the two kinds of relationships may preclude each other. For example, military, educational and other institutions prohibit sexual relations between a supervisor and a supervisee. A judge with nearly any kind of relationship with a defendant, prosecutor, or party to a suit must recuse him- or herself. 2. In order to keep the analytic taxonomy tractable, let us hereafter adopt the simplifying assumption that any two people only use one RM to organize their interaction. Given this false but useful assumption, the simplest type of MeRM consists of three people relating in two
1
relationships of the same kind (3p2r1k; Figure 2). If the two relationships are interdependent in a binary fashion, there are just two possibilities: either one relationships entails implies or requires another relationship of the same kind, or the two relationships are incompatible the combination is prohibited, taboo, or inconceivable. An example of relationship A precluding a second relationship A is monogamous marriage: if Alpha is married to Beta, Alpha cannot marry Gama. AR relationships of fealty to a lord or god may also be of this type: Alpha must make a choice between being ruled by one lord or the other. In this 3p2r1k (3 persons, 2 relationships of 1 kind) conguration, entailment may be uncommon; my impression is that usually where there is entailment there is a third relationship involved. But one example of entailment in a 3p2r1k MeRM is that some Market Pricing (MP) relationships require one of the parties to engage in other MP relationships: for example, a contract may require that a contractor purchase supplies or components from, or make sales to, a third party. 3. If three people relate in two connected relationships of different kinds, the same two possibilities exist (3p2r2k; Figure 3): either one relationship entails the other (Figure 3, left side), or subcontract with, one relationship precludes the other (right). Examples of relationships which create taboos on another kind of relationship include former pro-
Whether a MeRM consists of one, two, three, or more kinds of relationships depends on the psychsociocultural typology of relationships. Thus, a girls relationship with her sexual partner and her friendship with a gay friend may both be CS relationships, yet these two CS relationships may be psychologically, sociologically, and culturally contrasted as completely different kinds of CS. We need to study how cultural implementations of RMs affect the ways the RMs combine in similar or dissimilar MeRMs.
Figure 3. Type 3 metarelational model; entailments among two relationships of two kinds: 3p2r2k
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Alan Page Fiske
hibitions against military personnel having homosexual relationships, and norms in some cultures that married women should not work outside the home. Relationships that entail a second relationship of a different type include, for example, an authority requiring a subordinate to protect or attack a third party. Another example is a CS relationship in which one partner (the bread winner) construes a MP relationship as essential to procuring sustenance for the other. A MeRM of the same type consists of hiring a baby-sitter to supervise young children. Another one is drawing straws to determine who will care for a dependent parent or, as the Athenians did, holding lotteries (Equality Matching EM) to determine who would hold each council and administrative ofce (AR). 4. If three people relate in three connected relationships of one kind, either the combination of the rst two relationships entails the third, or precludes it (3p3r1k; Figure 4, left). The case of entailment (top left) is simply transitivity. Transitivity is an important feature of many or most AR, CS, (EM), and MP relationships. For example, if within a given hierarchy, Alpha is superior to Beta, and Beta is superior to Gama, then Alpha is superior to Gama. Likewise with regard to a specic EM activity, if Alpha is equal to Beta and Beta is equal to Gama, then Alpha is equal to Gama. Whether relationships are the same or different depends on how they are conceived. Three relationships all may be CS yet differ in signicant respects. In cultures where ritual friendships (blood brotherhood) are formed, either sexual relations with the blood-brothers wife is taboo whereas sex with his daughter is expected and anticipated or else sex with his daughter is taboo whereas sex with his wife is expected and accepted. Between blood brothers, there is always a taboo on sex with one woman and normative access to the other (Teganeus 1952). Or consider compadrazgo: If my daughter had a godfather, he would be my compadre. In many cultures, it is considered a terrible sin to have sexual relations with my compadres wife. In both MeRMs, all three relationships have crucial elements of CS, yet they differ in other crucial respects. 5. When three people are related in three relationships of two kinds (3p3r2k), there are four possibilities. Two relationships of the same kind may entail or else preclude a third relationship of the other kind (Figure 5, top). For example, the CS relationships between a father and his children, between a mother and her children, or, in certain Mediterranean and Islamic cultures between a woman and the milk-children she has suckled, entail a CS bond between the children and preclude sexual relations
Figure 5. Type 5 metarelational model; entailments among three relationships of two kinds: 3p3r2k
between them. Also, in many circumstances, two people who are each in an AR relationship with the same leader, such as soldiers, priests or worshipers of the same god, are supposed to have an EM or CS relationship with each other. Employees of the same rm may make common cause in a union. A king often claims to rule by divine right, i.e., by virtue of his relationship with a god. An extremely important form of 3p3r2k is third party intervention or punishment: if you hurt my friend, I am obligated to retaliate against you. The other case of 3p3r2k is that two relationships of different kinds may either entail or preclude a third relationship of the same kind as one of the rst two (Figure 5, bottom). For example, people often regard it as wrong for a person to have sex with the sexual partner of a teammate or close friend. And you should not be friends with your friends mortal enemy. 6. If three people relate in three relationships of three kinds, either the rst two entail the third, or they preclude it (3p3r3k; Figure 6). The 3p3r1k examples mentioned in (3) could be analyzed as 3p3r3k, depending on which relationships are psychosocioculturally equivalent. There are three distinct kinds of relationship when my marriage to my wife combines with her being a daughter to her parents: the relationship of son-in-law to mother-in-law and to father-in-law. In some cultures, there is a strong expectation that people should marry their fathers brothers child; in others this is prohibited as incestuous (Fox, 1967). As we
Figure 4. Type 4 metarelational model; entailments among three relationships of one type: 3p3r1k
Figure 6. Type 6 metarelational model; entailments among three relationships of three kinds: 3p3r3k
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Metarelational models considered earlier, in many African and other cultures, my wifes younger siblings are my joking relations: we tease and insult each other, take playful sexual liberties with each other, and make free with each others possessions. One example where there are three clearly different social relationships is a person hiring a tutor for her child, but is there a true MeRM concerning how to combine those three relationships? Triads composed of three people in three distinct kinds of relationship are ubiquitous, and in each of these relationships, people inevitably take into account the other two relationships. However, it is not clear where our analysis should draw the line between simply taking one relationship into account with respect to another relationship and MeRMs as such. The CS sex and eating taboos (which I discuss further in the UNIVERSAL METARELATIONAL MODELS? section) are very important and are clearly MeRMs. But perhaps, many other 3p3r3k congurations have somewhat less emotional, motivation, evaluative, and normative force than the other types of MeRMs we have considered, and such congurations often lack such explicit cultural recognition or salient cultural formulation. Metarelational models connecting four or more persons in from three to six relationships also exist and can be psychosocially and culturally important. For example, a man and his wife may be godparents of a child; in many cultures, this entails compadre and comadre relationships with the childs parents: the ve people are bound to help and trust each other. Often, they may feel that their relationships with each other are linked to their relationships with God or the Virgin Mary. In nonhuman animals, as we considered earlier, and obviously among humans, if a person from group A attacks someone from group B, other members of group B are likely to retaliate against other members of group A. Higher-order MeRMs also exist; for example, the honorshame complex involves at least ve persons (nearly always, many more) in at least 10 connected dyadic relationships (Fiske, 2011). However, these higher-order MeRMs whose graphs increase in geometric complexity are probably composites of the six types considered previously. Further analyses, ethnographic research, and experiments will be needed to see whether this is the case.
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Another important issue for future analysis is whether CS, AR, EM, and MP each enter into distinctive MeRM congurations. Are certain RMs more prone to generate certain of the six basic types described here? Another pivotal issue concerns the question of whether a set of relationships involving three or more persons, where the relationships in the set are all CS, all AR, all EM, or all MP, are psychologically construed, or function, as one collective group relationship or as networks of dyadic relationships. If they are construed as networks, do people have MeRMs linking the component dyadic relationships? For example, (when) is a sports team or a platoon a MeRM composed of a conguration of dyadic CS relationships or a single CS relationship encompassing the group as a whole? (When) is a circle of turn-takers construed and experienced as one inclusive EM relationship among all of the participants, and when as a network of pairwise dyadic EM relationships?
RECURSION Metarelational models are often composed by recursively combining RMs, so that an RM is hierarchically nested or embedded in another RM of the same or a different kind (Figure 7). This recursion can, in principle, be indenite, although various cognitive limitations impose actual constraints (Thomsen, Fiske, & Sidanius, 2011; Bolender, 2010, 2011). Where the recursively nested relationships are morally, emotionally, or semantically linked to each other, such recursion composes a MeRM. For example, CS families may combine to form CS lineages or communities, which in turn combine to form a CS ethnicity or nation (the classic analysis is Evans-Pritchard, 1951). Similar nested CS relations obtain in military platoons, companies, brigades, armies, and armed forces. Dolphins appear to have at least three levels of CS-like alliances (Connor et al., 2000). In many species of Old World monkeys, dominance relations organize each primate matriline, while the matrilines are themselves ordered in a dominance hierarchy (Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007). The employees of individual rms may have MP relations with each other, while the rms in turn have MP relations with each other. If people merely shift frames, using only one RM at a time in each context, then recursion, and for that matter any other serial deployment of RMs, does not involve MeRMs. But most RM recursion probably does involve MeRMs that represent the nesting of the relationships inside each other. If a hierarchy is linear (rather than containing cycles where A > B > C > A), the transitivity suggests the existence of a MeRM. Likewise, if there is consistent transitivity in CS or EM or MP relationship, the source is likely to be a MeRM. Note that recursion does not necessarily involve nesting of the same RM in itself; recursion can nest one type of RM in another. (Figure 7 shows only the simplest type of recursion where one type of relationship is embedded in other relationships of the same kind.) Pretense is an important form of recursion and sometimes contestation; the pretense may be unilateral deception or mutually understood but not explicitly acknowledged or even, in unusual cases, mutually understood among the participants but hidden from observers. A salesperson may
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Figure 7. Recursion
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Alan Page Fiske in a community or network (Simmel, 1900; Polanyi, 1957). That is, money functions as a medium of exchange, a means of storing wealth, a system for settling accounts, and a standard of value only insofar as people expect that in future transactions others will in turn accept this currency in payment (see Malinowski 1922 for the same dynamics of ritual gifts). A given dyad or group may shift from one RM to another; such a transformation is a dynamic MeRM when people (re)present the links between the respective RMs. For example, if in an EM framework you do me huge favors that I cannot reciprocate, the unmet obligations may transform the RM into one of deferential AR. Or a long history of reciprocated EM may build trust and affection that transforms the relationship into CS.
offer a customer a special deal because I like you. Two business people negotiating a deal may host each other at meals or clubs; the frosting of EM and CS may foster trust or otherwise facilitate reaching the MP deal. A spy may participate in a relationship with some combination of intrinsic motives and extrinsic motivation coming from other hidden relationships. Pretense is closely related to the ambiguity and negotiation of potential RMs that Lee and Pinker (2010) analyze. When RMs are recursively embedded, the top RM often determines or actively controls the RMs that are nested below it. However, where explicit or covert pretense is involved, the pretended relationship may be largely determined by the true relationship underneath it. MeRMs based on recursion may have special cognitive and social structural properties that distinguish them from MeRMs composed of RMs that are linked at the same level. This possibility merits further investigation, but I myself do not yet have any particular insight into it. DYNAMIC SEQUENCES Relational models and MeRMs are dynamic, in the sense that the actions that they organize occur over time and are represented as temporally constructed. For example, people often model their relationships on other peoples relationships, particularly the relationships among persons of higher status or previous generations, or among people with whom they identify. For example, a daughter may model her marriage on her parents marriage. Figure 8 depicts this dynamically recursive chaining; to simplify, the Figure ignores the often important relationships between persons of different generations in the dynamic chaining. There are important dynamic recursive sequences in which the value or validity of a relationship is legitimated in terms of a previous relationship that, participants claim, is the basis for the current relationship. This occurs in many contexts, including the Christian Eucharist modelled on the Last Supper of Christ and his disciples and, more generally, traditional sacrices to gods, ancestors, or spirits that are intended to reproduce a sequence of previous sacrices. Likewise, the son of a king may rule over his subjects as his father did, by virtue of the validity of his fathers rule and the legitimacy of his descent from his father. Or people hold EM elections to name persons to AR ofces. A dynamic MeRM underlies every monetary transaction. In the taxonomy of signs of Pierce (1985), money is symbolic its value is purely conventional, based entirely on its actual use
UNIVERSAL METARELATIONAL MODELS? Are there MeRMs that are universal across cultures? Are historically contingent, culturally particular, domain-specic MeRMs sui generis, or are they often generated by universal combinatorial proclivities? I have analyzed RMs into universal innate mods and the cultural preos that complement them (Fiske, 2000). Are some MeRMs like this, with universal innate structures that each culture implements in distinct and unique congurations? Let us look very briey at one case from which I have already drawn examples that of the ubiquitous sexual and food taboos entailed by CS relationships. Virtually without exception, whenever CS relationships are strongly motivated, emotionally intense, and normatively institutionalized, they entail highly moralized sex taboos and sometimes closely related eating taboos. That is, strong CS relationships often enter into strong MeRMs in which the CS relationship precludes sexual relations with some other being (Figure 9). The most salient example is the incest taboo, in which, according to Freuds (19121913) analysis, male bonds between father and son or among brothers preclude the brothers/sons from engaging in sexual relations with their mothers/sisters. There are innumerable homologous MeRMs. Ritual blood bonding (blood brotherhood) in Africa and elsewhere nearly always commits the partners to refrain from sexual relations with each others wives (while condoning marriage with each others daughters) or else commits the partners to avoid sexual relations with each others daughters (while condoning sex with each others wives; Tegnaeus,
Figure 8. Dynamic recursive chaining in which relationships are modeled on previous relationships
Figure 9. The fundamental communal sharing and sex taboo metarelational model
Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 218 (2012)
Metarelational models 1952). As mentioned previously, in many traditional Catholic communities of the Mediterranean and Central America, the strongest CS relationships are between compadres (and, often to a lesser degree, comadres), that is, between a persons father and godfather (or mother and godmother). Invariably, informants stress that the worst possible sin would be sexual relations between compadre and comadre (Fiske, 2011). Among East-African pastoralists, the strongest CS relationship is among members of an age-set, dened by the interval of years when they were initiated. Although they often have sex with or marry other young women, age-mates must never have sexual relations with each others daughters (Fiske, 2011). Likewise, because of their special CS relationship with god, monks and priests in many cultures are supposed to be celibate. Again, in a number of cultures, particularly around the Mediterranean, inviolable CS relationships of milk kinship are created when a woman nurses another familys child; the two families are bound together like blood kin, and sexual relations between members of the two families are absolutely precluded. There are a great many other MeRMs of this type that link intense CS bonds to sexual taboos and/or food taboos. Often these CS and sex MeRMs incorporate a commensal relationship: the CS relationship may be constituted by a ritual meal (e.g., the ingestion of the mixed blood of the blood brothers), and often what is entailed is not just a sex taboo but also a food taboo there is a category of persons with whom one cannot eat or drink or a type of being (such as a totem) who must not be eaten. Among the Moose, the core CS relationship is among members of a patrilineage. Moose lineage membership is constituted largely by daily commensalism, together with joint sacrices where lineage mates offer up chickens and pour beer libations to feed the ancestors and then eat the chickens and drink the beer together. Married men and women routinely have lovers, but it is a terrible transgression for a woman to have sexual relations with a lineage mate of her husband the immanent consequence is the death of everyone in the lineage. More generally, if a woman has sexual relations with a man who then eats or drinks or shares tobacco or kola nut with her husband, her husband will die from the violation of the metarelational taboo. These congurations, which I can only allude to here, illustrate a family of MeRMs that are evidently generated by one root MeRM that each culture implements in various ways. A central goal of future MeRM research will be to identify and analyze other families of MeRMs and the processes that generate them.
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ISSUES FOR FUTURE EXPLORATION Metarelational models matter. The linking of social relationships through MeRMs affects structures and processes at both higher and lower levels of organization. MeRMs make relationships interdependent, often in such a way that violating one component relationship evokes sanctions from partners in other component relationships or jeopardizes the prospects for those relationships (Henrich et al., 2006). This has the effect of
regulating and stabilizing relationships and generally constraining opportunities for defection, making people more trustworthy and therefore facilitating cooperation. Where social relationships are connected by multiple, thriving MeRMs, trust and cooperation may prevail. In modern, urban, mobile, anonymous settings where fewer and weaker MeRMs link social relationships, there are fewer constraints and often less trust (cf. Barnes, 1954). But although MeRMs stabilize their component relationships, when one relationship in a MeRM does change, it potentially destabilizes the others, starting a cascade of changes in other relationships. For example, transforming marriage from predominantly AR to a combination of EM and CS transforms both of the parents relationships with their children and the wifes relationships with everyone outside the family. This introduction to MeRMs leaves a great many issues to be more fully explored. One major question requiring further investigation is the matter of the constraints and proclivities on how specic RMs combine to form specic MeRMs: are certain types of MeRMs predominantly composed of certain RMs? Perhaps the deepest question is whether the six MeRMs characterized here are the elementary ones. In principle, it seems that these six elementary MeRMs are sufcient to build higher-order combinations of relationships comprising more than three persons in more than three relationships: perhaps we do not need any other pieces in our Tinker Toy set. But is there nonetheless any psychosocial or cultural sense in which at least some complex MeRMs are irreducible to the elementary six? There are also a multitude of methodological issues to address; we need multiple ways of identifying MeRMs and, for experimental purposes, evoking them. There is also the question of the self, which a modern American can hardly avoid addressing, but I will only mention in passing. It is plausible to imagine that the self emerges in large part as the mediator among social relationships. That is, relationships naturally compete and conict, pulling in different directions. Participating in multiple relationships absolutely requires nding accommodations among the demands of different relationship and among the opportunities provided by them. A social person has to allocate attention, time, and effort among multiple relationships and sometimes must choose which side to take when two partners are in conict with each other. The self is the chooser, aware of choosing. That is, the self is the product of metarelational thinking. Finally, there is the issue of whether RMs ever function independently of MeRMs.2 Do pure and simple RMs exist at all? This problem is evident, for example, because RMs have been dened (Fiske 1991: 207230) as transitive; transitivity is a logical relation among relations. When you think about a superior, does your AR model inherently incorporate the idea that your superiors superior is your superior too? Or can the idea of social superiority, AR, exist as simple dyadic asymmetry, without that additional metarelational feature? Likewise, if the model of dyadic CS is also the model for group CS, this seems to imply that the model incorporates the (re)presentation of transitivity of belonging to any particular equivalence class (social identity group). Can I represent the CS idea that Muhango and I are Bruins, together with the idea that Isa
2
Tage Rai cogently insisted on this point. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 218 (2012)
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Baldwin, M. (Ed.) (2005). Interpersonal cognition. New York: Guilford. Barnes, J. A. (1954). Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish. Human Relations, 7, 3958. Barrett, H. C. (2004). Cognitive development and the understanding of animal behavior. In B. Ellis, & D. Bjorklund (Eds.), Origins of the social mind (pp. 438467.). New York: Guilford. Barrett, H. C. (2005). Adaptations to predators and prey. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 200223.). New York: Wiley. Beier, J. S., & Spelke, E. S. (2011). Infants understanding of social gaze. In press, Child Development. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boehm, C. (2000). Conict and the evolution of social control. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, 79101. Boissevain, J. (1974). Friends of friends: Networks, manipulators and coalitions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolender, J. (2010). The self-organizing social mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bolender, J. (2011). Digital social mind. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Boyer, P. (2002). Religion explained. New York: Basic Books. Brotherton, P. N. M., &, Komers, P. E. (2003). Mate guarding and the evolution of social monogamy in mammals. In U. H. Reichard, & C. Boesch (Eds.), Monogamy: Mating strategies and partnerships in birds, humans and other mammals (pp. 4258.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P. R. L. (1998). The body and society: Men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, R. (1965). Social Psychology. New York: Macmillan. Burt, R. S. (1982). Toward a structural theory of action: Network models of social structure, perception, and action. New York: Academic Press. Carpenter, M. (2010). Social cognition and social motivations in infancy. In U. Goswami (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development, 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. With commentary by G. Butterworth & C. Moore. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 63(4), 1174. Chapais, B. (1992). The role of alliances in social inheritance of rank among female primates. In A. H. Harcourt, & F. B. M. de Waal (Eds.), Coalitions and alliances in humans and other animals (pp. 2960.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (1992). How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (2007). Baboon metaphysics: The evolution of a social mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2010). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown. Cialdini, R. (2008). Inuence: Science and practice, 5th edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Colson, E. (1953). Social control and vengeance in plateau Tonga society. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 23, 199212. Connor, R. C., Wells, R. S., Mann, J., & Read, A. J. (2000). The bottlenose dolphin: Social relationships in a ssion-fusion society. In J. Mann, J. Mann, R. C. Connor, P. L. Tyack, & H. Whitehead (Eds.), Cetacean societies: Field studies of dolphins and whales (pp. 91126.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coser, L. A. (1977). Masters of sociological thought: Ideas in historical and social context. 2nd edn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. DAndrade, R. (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology, 8, 100110. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.8.2.100 Emery, N. J., Seed, A. M., von Bayern, A. M. P., & Clayton, N. S. (2007). Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in bird. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 36, 489505. Engh, A. L., Siebert, E. R., Greenberg, D. A., & Holekamp, K. E. (2005). Patterns of alliance formation and postconict aggression indicate spotted hyenas recognize third-party relationships. Animal Behaviour, 69, 209217. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1939). Introduction to J. G. Peristiany. The social institutions of the Kipsigis. London: Routledge. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Falger, V. S. E. (1992). Cooperation in conict: Alliances in international politics. In A. H. Harcourt, & F. B. M. de Waal (Eds.), Coalitions and alliances in humans and other animals (pp. 323348.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 218 (2012)
and I are Bruins, without representing the idea that Muhango and Isa are Bruins that they are CS to each other? Can I represent the price for my exchange with you without representing the price that either of us have or would have in exchange with others? The same issues obtain with regard to third-party ramications of RM performance, including thirdparty punishment (Fiske 1991:170176). When people plan or judge relational action in one relationship, do they ever totally ignore the ramications of their actions for their other relationships? If you are deeply in love with someone, does that love intrinsically incorporate the implications for either of you being in love with other people? Can you observe a friend of yours transgress her relationship with another friend of yours without any feelings about whether or how her transgression affects your relationship with her? Hamlins research shows that by 3 months infants prefer agents who are nice to others and by 8 months infants prefer an agent who hinders a hindering agent (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Hamlin et al., 2007, 2010; Hamlin et al., 2011). But of course showing that infants do (sometimes) have relational preferences based on MeRMs does not tell us whether infants can think about the component dyadic relationships in isolation from the MeRMs in which they are, or can be, embedded. Putting aside these unsolved questions, the message of this article is that MeRMs are ubiquitous and salient in everyday sociality. They are emotionally imbued, motivationally powerful, and morally laden. MeRMs inform the self, shape individual psychology, constitute and constrain dyadic relationships and groups, and are the framework for social structures. Many animals and young human infants appreciate and respond to them. There appear to be a limited set of basic MeRMs, but the variability of their cultural implementations is an important factor in cultural diversity. Hence, we need to understand MeRMs in their own right, but we also need to study MeRMs to more fully understand the basic mechanisms of sociality, emotion, motivation, morality, individual psychology, relationships, groups, social structure, social development, and culture.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I gratefully thank John Bolender, Rodrigo Brito, Hans IJzerman, Catherine Lee, Harriet Over, Tage Rai, Thomas Schubert, Sven Waldzus, Ming Xue, and the other participants in the International Relational Models Lab who kindly read an earlier draft and made very helpful comments. Roy Goodwin DAndrade also raised a tough issue for me to wrestle with. Thank you all.
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Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 218 (2012)

Fiske Configuration of Social Relationships

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European Journal of Social Psychology, Eur. J. Soc. Psychol.

42, 218 (2012)

Horizon Metarelational models: Congurations of social relationships

Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 20 May 2011, Accepted 19 August 2011

Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Alan Page Fiske

Alan Page Fiske

Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Alan Page Fiske

Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 42, 218 (2012)

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