The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations

The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 differ-ent methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures. From Freud to contemporary sociobiologists, from Skinner to social cognitionists, from Goffman to game theorists, the prevailing assumption in Western psychology has been that humans are by nature asocial individualists. Psychologists (and most other social scientists) usually explain social relationships as instrumental means to extrinsic, nonsocial ends, or as con-straints on the satisfaction of individual desires. Consequently, the individual and the situation have long been the principal units of analysis in social psychology. So researchers studying the various facets of social interaction in diverse domains have offered explanations of each particular kind of interaction in terms of the particular situational constraints and unique fea-A number of people read earlier drafts of this article and made man