Categories of social relationship

The study of realized social relationships lies at the heart of the social sciences. However, the study of the cognitive structures that support social coordination remains very much in the hinterlands. The four investigations reported here develop an account of the form of the representation of these structures, and attempt to fill out some of their content. It is argued that cognition concerning social relationships is organized around a small number of implicit categorical forms, in contrast to extant accounts proposing dimensional representations, or general rules of symmetry and complementarity. The first two studies map forty subjects\u27 prototypicality ratings over a field of hypothetical social relationships defined by the interpersonal circle, an established dimensional account of social behavior. These ratings were found to be better modelled by a few discrete relational forms than by models based on communality and authority dimensions, or by models based on various complementarity and symmetry rules. The third study compares the fit of five categorical theories of the elementary forms of social relationship to thirty-five subjects\u27 implicit organizations of their relationships with personal acquaintances. These organizations were operationalized by free sorting and by cluster analysis of pairwise similarity ratings. Superior models were identified, and an improved and hybrid account of elementary categories was bootstrapped. The fourth study tests the categoriality of the cognitive forms of social relationship using taxometric methods. Eight categories proposed by two of the superior theories identified in the third study were investigated with fifty subjects. Evidence for categoriality and against dimensional representations was obtained for most of the proposed categories. The findings constrain the form of the obtained categories. controverting one possible form of prototype structure and suggesting that the obtained categories are truly discrete or qualitative. Further analyses and discussions address the degree to which the categories co-specify realized relationships, their exhaustiveness, and whether they are more informative, or \u27basic\u27, than lexicalized colloquial forms of social relationship. Steps toward a more adequate cognitive psychology of social relationships are proposed