Implicit relationship prototypes: Investigating five theories of the cognitive organization of social relationships

Abstract

Categorical approaches have been fruitfully applied to many domains of social cognition. However the domain of social relationships has yet to receive such attention, despite a number of prominent categorical theories of the elementary forms of relationship. This article reports a study comparing the mappings of five disparate theories of basic categories of relationship onto subjects' implicit organizations of their own relationships, elicited by free sorting and similarity rating tasks, and explores the interrelations among these theories. The theories compared were Fiske's theory of relational models, Foa and Foa's theory of resource exchange, Parsons' theory of role expectations, Mills and Clark's theory of communal and exchange relationships, and MacCrimmon and Messick's theory of social motives or orientations. Categories from the five theories were found to form several discrete clusters. The first three theories were superior predictors of implicit groupings, and six of their categories correspond most closely to the observed groupings. Implications are drawn about the organization and basic level of relational prototypes, about the omissions and strengths of the respective theories, and about the optimal structure of an empirically informed typology of elementary implicit relational forms.