How To Relate 6.0

How to Relate to People:
The Extra-Terrestrials Guide to Homo sapiens

Alan Page Fiske1 and Lisa Schubert2
Abstract There are four fundamental relational models (RMs) that people use to coordinate virtually all aspects of social relationships in all cultures: Communal Sharing (CS), Authority Ranking (AR), Equality Matching (EM), and Market Pricing (MP). Each RM consists of a structure in which certain relations and operations are socially meaningful, motivating, and morally significant. The RMs are innate but their use depends on learned complements that specify how they are culturally implemented in specific domains. There are specific motives for forming each RM, as well as emotions specific to engaging in good relations of each type, and emotions evoked by transgression of each RM. People constitute and modulate each RM in a distinct semiotic medium: indexical consubstantial assimilation for CS, iconic physical dimensions for AR, concrete ostensive operations for EM, and arbitrary conventional symbolism for MP. The specific emotions and motives that regulate aspects of interaction framed by each RM are expressed in the specific conformation system of that RM, and in turn have the potential to evoke corresponding emotions and motives in the recipient of the conformational acts. Moreover, trust and commitment are facilitated by the fact that conformational acts reflect back to amplify the actors own motives. The targets response depends on his or her emotions and motives with regard to the other, in that situation, depending on the implications for other relationships, as well as cultural norms and role obligations. There is always latitude for forming and sustaining relationships of specific types at different levels of intensity and involvement, as well as corresponding ambiguity about which RM people are using or will use at which level. Consequently, relating is a dynamically nuanced dance of advances that are accepted, ignored, or rejected back and forth.
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles; Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA. afiske@ucla.edu
2
Department of Psychology II, Social Psychology, University of Wrzburg, Roentgenring 10, 97070 Wrzburg, Germany. lisa.schubert@uni-wuerzburg.de
Advances and responses
Imagine you are an extra-terrestrial landing on earth (or a child newly born into this world). In order to survive, you will need to be able to cooperate with humans to exchange or distribute things, utilize resources, organize work, make decisions, judge your own and others actions and perhaps to play. You will need to know what forms of coordination what kinds of social relationshipshumans will attempt to form with you, how to identify each type of relationship, and how to recognize what part people are offering you in each relationship. You will also need a way of committing to cooperating in each type of relationship, and, conversely, appreciating and responding to others commitments. Learning the local language would certainly be helpful, but would be neither necessary nor sufficient. You would find that people rarely state explicitly what kind of social relationship they expect, and virtually never articulate just how to coordinate to sustain meaningful complementary action in a relationship. You would also find that you could form and sustain meaningful and fairly satisfactory relationships without having a language in common. This chapter is a guide to such aliens, explaining how to relate to humans. You may wish to keep a copy on hand, in case you ever meet an alien who wants to rate to you. You might even find it useful, yourself, as a guide to relating to people in an alien culture. Aliens take note: Human life is all relative, and this guide is about how to relate. The first part of this guide for extra-terrestrials, immigrants, anthropologists and other outsiders introduces relational models theory (RMT, Fiske, 1991, 2004b) to describe the four elementary ways in which humans organize their interactions. The next section shows how people create, sustain, and modulate interaction, using a distinct conformational system (consyst) for each of the four relational models (RMs). The following section describes how consysts function by cyclically expressing and evoking motives to relate. We next discuss the culturally framed requirements, opportunities, and barriers to forming or sustaining social relationships. Then we discuss how, within or outside these culturally legitimate possibilities, people use the consysts of the RMs to initiate and form a relationship, and accept or reject others invitations. Then we show how, through the proper consyst, people dynamically modulate the intensity of the relationship over time, developing or reducing their commitment to the relationship. Finally, we briefly draw attention to the fact that each consyst has distinct affordances and imposes distinct problems for forming and modulating social relationships, depending on the technologies available, the number of persons, their locations, and related factors.
2.1 Relational Models Four Fundamental Ways to Coordinate

There are four fundamental ways to coordinate: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing (Fiske, 1991, 2004b). People in all cultures use these four
relational models (RMs) to organize most aspects of nearly all social activities. When people are Communal Sharing (CS), they coordinate as if they were equivalent, organizing an aspect of an activity in terms of what they have in common. Common examples include being in love, identifying with ones family, or the all-for-one and one-for-all altruism of a tight-knit team or platoon. Less intense sharing and identification organizes citizens of a community or nation, members of an ethnic group or profession, or peoples sense of the interdependence of living beings on earth (the ideal of adherents to the Jain religion). The structure of CS corresponds to the structure of a nominal (categorical) measurement scale, in the sense that what is socially meaningful are the categories to which people belong; with regard to the relevant aspect of coordination, there are no distinctions among members of any given category. Authority Ranking (AR) is an asymmetrical relationship in which people recognize legitimate differences in status, rights, responsibilities, or prerogatives. Examples are military and bureaucratic hierarchies, systems of seniority, filial piety, and worship of ancestors or gods. When people rank, subordinates owe respect and deference to superiors, who are pastorally responsible for leading, guiding, standing up for, protecting, and looking out for their followers. AR contrasts with pure power based only on coercive force or material control; AR influence is based on the conviction that the ranking is natural, legitimate, inevitable, and right (Cheng, Tracy, and Henrich, 2010). The social relations that are meaningful in AR are homologous to the measurement relations of an ordinal scale. That is, when people are ranking, they are attending to ordinal positions and not to quantitative amounts of status or quantitative differences in rank. Equality Matching (EM) is a relationship of balance between peers, in which participants keep track of whether they are even or what they need to do to balance the interaction. Examples are taking turns, flipping a coin or throwing dice in a game, voting, dividing something equally, in-kind reciprocity of gifts or favors, rotating credit associations, and eye-for-an-eye, tooth-fora-tooth vengeance. The rules of most games and sports around the world are implementations of EM. The operations and relations that are socially meaningful in EM are the ones that are defined in an interval scale of measurement. So people can add and subtract turns or contributions, but there is no socially meaningful operation of multiplication or division. Likewise, to know whose turn it is, or how many turns one is owed, or who should exact vengeance next, there is no need to know when the turn-taking stared: that zero point is undefined. Market Pricing (MP) is organized with reference to ratios, rates, or proportions, such as those of prices in a market, cost-benefit calculations, utilitarian moral reasoning, fines or penal sentencing. Pricing need not be monetary (and money can be used in any of the four RMs). When a judge or jury determines a prison sentence, the currency is the duration of
incarceration; when people imagine the gods determining the fate of the deceased, the gods are represented as weighing the persons good and bad deeds on some scale of moral significance. When people are pricing in any of these ways, they are using the same relations and operations defined by a ratio scale of measurement. When people price, they multiply, divide, apply the distributive law, and make calculations with reference to a defined zero the price of something that is free. In sum, each RM is a different structure, in which different relations and operations are meaningful, much as different relations and operations are meaningful in different measurement systems. When sharing, what is important is simply what category each person belongs to: what are the kinds of persons? When ranking, what matters is the hierarchical order: who is above whom? When matching, what is meaningful are the interval differences: if I owe you two turns, and then give you one, then I own you one more. When pricing, people care about ratios: how many apples can I get for three hours of work washing dishes? People use these four RMs to organize work, material transactions, decision making, the social meanings of land and other resources, and the social uses of time (Fiske 1991). The RMs are the foundations for moral judgment (Rai & Fiske, in press) and are the coordinating principles of social violence. The RMs are discrete structures (not dimensions; see Haslam, 1994a, 1994b, 1999). People use combinations of RMs to organize complex social relationships, groups, and institutions, implementing different RMs to structure different aspects of different activities. People seek to form relationships of each of the four types largely because they find them intrinsically meaningful. There probably are distinct appetites (needs) for each RM, distinct feelings of satisfaction when engaged in good relationships of each type, distinct emotions when one violates each, and distinct emotions when a partner violates each (Fiske 2002, 2010a). Children innately understand, expect, initiate, and seek to form all four kinds of relationships. However, infants cannot innately know how, when, with whom, or with regard to what each RM will function in any given domain of their particular culture: the implementations of the RMs vary across cultures and across practices within each culture. To implement each RM, children (as well as extra-terrestrials, immigrants and anthropologists) have to discover the local precedents, prototypes, principles, and precepts that govern how each RM operates in each specific aspect of each activity in their particular culture (Fiske, 2000).
2.2 Conformation Systems

The extra-terrestrial reader may ask: How do people communicate their relational intentions? And how do people actually constitute each of these RMs? That is, how do people form, sustain, modulate, or terminate them? And how do people actually conduct each of the four types of relationshiphow are participants actions in each RM coordinated? The answer is
that each RM has a distinct conformation system (consyst) for constituting and communicating it. For example, kissing indicates and mediates CS, while bowing is a way to display and coordinate AR. To signal and conduct EM, people match each others objects or turns. To do MP, people use symbols representing the ratios that organize the interaction; prices, currency, or bidding signals, for example. The CS bond is a bond of shared essential bodily substance, so we can call the constitutive process consubstantial assimilation, in which the equivalence of the substance, surface, and motion of bodies indexes the social equivalence of the persons (Fiske 2004a). This is not merely an indexical system of representation, it is a manner of creating relational bonds: kissing and food-sharing make people feel closer, and often make them feel more committed. Consider the bride and groom kissing, feeding each other wedding cake, dancing, and later making love. These are constitutive acts that create or modulate the intensity of CS. When soldiers march and drill in synchrony, they come to identify with each other, and sometimes to care about each other to the point of altruistic self-sacrifice (McNeil 1995; for the conceptualization of indexicality, iconicity, and symbolism as purely representational signs in thought and communication, see Pierce 19311958, 1985). Acts of consubstantial assimilation such as these are also indexically communicative: they inform participants and observers about the intentions and commitments of the kissers or the marchers. Moreover, these acts are externalizations of mental representations of CS connections: when relating though CS, people implicitly imagine that their bodies are one and the same, so they act out what they imagine. Conversely, these acts resonate with and activate mental representations of essential bodily unity of the participants who are sharing food, dancing or marching in synchrony, caressing or kissing. CS is evident in toddlers (Over & Carpenter, 2010); by age 6 children understand subtle CS interactions (Greenfield et al 2011). Indeed, CS is probably present at birth, as demonstrated by infants bonding to parents (at 46 months, see Feldman, Gordon, & Zagoory-Sharon, 2010). From the moment infants emerge from their mothers body, they are held, snuggled, caressed, groomed, nursed, and, later, fed. And they respond to these experiences, which identify acts of sharing of relating communally. Consubstantiation is the consyst of CS: it is the natural, primary, intuitive, and most effective way to evoke the emotions and motives that make CS. The feeling of closeness and oneness that is the experience of CS is mediated by oxytocin (OT) and vasopressin, in conjunction with prolactin, dopamine and other hormones (Gordon, Zagoory-Sharon, Leckman, & Feldman, 2010; Insel, 2010; Ross & Young, 2009). OT is crucial to maternal caretaking and pair-bonding; arginine vasopressin (AVP) is crucial to male pairbonding. OT promotes trust and the CS sense of connection. The few fMRI studies that have been conducted indicate that the network of neural substrates involved in passionate love includes the ventral tegmental area (where there are many receptors for OT, AVP, and dopamine), as well as the caudate nucleus (Ortigue, Bianchi-Demicheli, Patel, Frum, & Lewis,
2010), which is activated by thinking about CS and AR relationships (Iacoboni et al 2004). Neural substrates for compassionate and maternal love involve, among other regions, the periaqueductal (central) gray matter (where there are also many AVP receptors; Ortigue, et al., 2010). Humans have special sensory receptors that are tuned to slow, gentle stroking (Lken, Wessberg, Morrison, McGlone, & Olausson, 2009; Olausson, Wessberg, Morrison, McGlone, & Vallbo, 2010). It seems likely that these CT afferents are one of the dedicated neurochemical systems that mediates CS. These unmyelinated C tactile afferents project to the middle insular cortex. The insula is crucial to processing interoception, including visceral sensations, feelings of warmth and coolness, gustatory and olfactory sensations (Craig, 2009). Posterior and medial regions of the insula seem to be more directly involved with monitoring of interception, including warmth and coolness, the feeling of fullness or distension of the esophogeal-gastrointestinal tract, and pain. The mid-insular region is involved in feelings of bodly self and agentic control of action. Bartels & Zeki (2003) found that maternal and romantic love both activate the middle insula. The frontal regions of the insula are substrates for most emotions, especially empathy and compassion, admiration, trust, the feeling of union with God, and emotions related to social transgression or discrepancy, including social exclusion, indignation, inequity, aversion, anger, fear, disgust and perception of others digust (Craig, 2009, 2010; ImmordinoYang et al, 2009; Karnath& Baier, 2010; Lamm & Singer, 2010). Sensual touch, sexual arousal and orgasm also activate the anterior insula, as do music and rhythm (Craig, 2009). Woodward and Allman (2007) go so far as to argue that the insula is the core substrate for moral intuition. In general, the left anterior insular cortex is more activated by affliative and other appetitive or approach emotions. Motivation to connect is deficient in autism, and a metaanalysis shows reduced insular activity in autistic subjects (Di Martino et al 2009). Frontotemporal dementia patients, who are deficient in moral emotions and social motives and who have very little sense of self or selfawareness (Fiske 2010), lose von Economo neurons in the anterior insula and cingulate cortex (Allman et al, 2009). Von Economo neurons are numerous in the anterior insula of humans, with higher numbers in the right insula. In other great apes they present in much lower numbers (but in higher proportions to other neurons), and they are apparently absent in other primates (Allman et al, 2009). Von Economo neurons are also present in elephants and whales (Craig, 2009). The insula, and von Economo neurons in particular, regulate food intake and satiation. Craig (2009, 2010) recently suggested that the anterior insula, particularly on the right, is the core substrate of the sense of the sentient bodily self, including the sense of feeling something toward someone/something. We might call this the feeling this is meits my bodily self, and
perhaps, extending Craigs idea, this is us, conjoined with the feeling of connection, the emotion of union. The anterior insula is activated by the experience of disgust, and by observing others disgust expressions indicative of moral disgust and aversive interpersonal contact (von dem Hagen et al 2009), which suggests that this region is involved in social boundary defense. In rats, the insular cortex is activated by both pup suckling and oxytocin; the activation from pup suckling is reduced when an OT agonist is administered (Febo, Numan, & Ferris 2005). The insula is closely connected to the hypothalamus, which controls secretion of OT and AVP (Craig 2010). We theorize that if the recipient is appropriately disposed, caressing, snuggling, grooming, sex, commensalism, and synchronous rhythmic movement operate through the anterior insular cortex bilaterally, but especially on the right, releasing OT or AVP, resulting in the experience of CS. This insular cortex system, we theorize, also mediates anti-CS separation feelings such as disgust, and feelings arising from ones own violations of CS. Likewise, when a person bows, he evokes in himself and in the person to whom he bows certain emotions specific to Authority Ranking (Fiske, 2004a). The lower person feels subordinate, the higher person feels superior. The cognitive representation of ranking is ABOVEBELOW,
BIGGERSMALLER, MOREFEWER, IN-FRONTBEHIND, EARLIERLATER, STRONGERWEAKER. This
mental representation naturally, spontaneously evokes and is evoked by the positioning of people along these physical dimensions of space, time, magnitude, and force. Indeed, the same neurocognitive system that represents analog physical magnitudes and intensities represents social ranking (Chiao et al 2009). Again, this is not merely a representation of a pre-existing referentthese acts iconically create or modulate social ranking relationships. AR exists when, and because, people iconically array themselves along these physical dimensions. When people assume relative positions differing in time, space, magnitude, or force, they are assuming claimingrelative positions differing in social rank. Because the iconic cognitive representation of social rank is position on these physical dimensions, when people communicate about or claim social positions, they assume positions in time, space, magnitude, and force. Conversely, observing or experiencing being ABOVE, BIGGER, MORE, IN-FRONT, EARLIER, or STRONGER, people feel socially superior, feel pridefully entitled to their position, and feel responsible for leading, guiding, and looking out for their subordinates. When people find themselves BELOW,
SMALLER, FEWER, BEHIND, LATER, or WEAKER, they experience awe, reverence, and respect; they
are prepared to defer and obey. Presumably, AR is evolutionarily derived from (homologous with) the dominance hierarchies that are ubiquitous among social vertebrates and even many invertebrates. By 10 months, preverbal human infants expect that among novel agents, ABOVE,
BIGGER, and EARLIER should be congruent (Thomsen, Frankenhuis, & Carey, 2010). For a
shorthand, we can call this consyst iconic social physics.
The conformational acts of Equality Matching not only communicate but actively create the parity between interaction partners. A person who flips a coin to see who gets the first turn commits herself to the outcome (Fiske, 2004a). The winner of the coin flip feels entitled to take the first turn. Likewise, if two players have the same number of game pieces, play on a symmetrical board, and take alternating turns playing, these concrete operations evoke the sense of even matching that makes a game a gamemakes it a match. When players on each team, game pieces, rows to hoe, or cookies match up in one-to-one alignment, people intuitively understand that the relationship is even. Equality is constituted by such concrete operations: they are ostensive demonstrations of equality. The mental representation translates directly into the concrete operations that define social equality (for the concept of concrete operations as a developmental stage in cognitive representation, see Piaget 1945, 1952). Conversely, such concrete ostensive operations resonate with the mental representation of EM: the participant in (or witness to) the operations directly sees that the relationship is even, as manifested in the operations themselves. If the matching operation is violated, say, someone takes two turns or two cookies, then the participant who got only one gets mad (even if they dont like those cookies). By age 6 to 8, at the latest, children seek and respond to taking turns, getting equal time or opportunities to score, playing on a symmetrical board or court, having matching numbers of game counters or players on a team, beginning and ending play simultaneously, starting on an even line, lining up one-to-one, or using other concrete operations that are ostensive definitions of equality (Millen, 1943; Opie & Opie, 1997). Indeed, by age 3, children are unhappy about getting less than their peers (LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, & Haidt, 2009). Equality doesnt mean equivalence, of course: the two sides are distinct, but they should be even, like the level pans in a balance scale. When people perform these ostensive concrete operations they evoke the emotions and invoke the morality that binds people to matching. This is the consyst of EM. In contrast to Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking and Equality Matching, the conformation system of Market Pricing is composed of symbols, in the narrow sense that C. S. Pierce (1931 1958, 1985) defined them: arbitrary signs whose meaning depends purely on conventional use. The emotional and moral force of a symbol is completely dependent on traditional cultural practice, but none the weaker for this conventional basis. You make a moral and legal commitment when you sign a contract, write a check, enter a credit card number on an order form, key in a PIN number, or raise a hand with a finger sign bid at an auction or commodity exchange. These are arbitrary signs whose meaning is purely conventionaltheir meaning derives purely from their cultural use as MP commitments. In Yap, huge stone disks with a hole in the middle are money; in West Africa, cowry shells were the currency. Thus in C. S. Pierces (19311958, 1985) analytic taxonomy, their meaning is purely symbolic. But notwithstanding their arbitrary basis in nothing but conventional use, these symbols evoke the emotions and motives that mediate MP. Think what would happen if you said, Well, sure, I entered my PIN
number, but thats just a string of digits; I dont want the funds deducted from my account. Of course, your bank account is nothing but an immaterial string of binary bits interpreted through software, and the data has no intrinsic location at all: the accounts are on RAID and remote backup electronic vaulting services that may take a variety of electronic and optical forms, so that there is no particular material representation of your money at all. Even the value of material currency is purely conventional: its only worth what people will exchange it for. Will you sell me your goat for these iron rings? But money nevertheless has a lot of emotional value; if you lose some money, its no consolation to be told, Its nothing b ut a symbol, after all. As their brains mature, older children come to understand that when people post a price or make a bid, they have committed themselves to an MP relationship which they will transact using abstract, arbitrary, convention symbols such as currency, checks, or digital representations of payments. Children recognize that when people are pricing, they use such symbolic representations of value, and they are bound to the relationship through these symbols. Symbolism is the consyst of MP, and indeed it is extremely difficult to conduct MP relationships over large distances or time without symbolic coordination. Regarding AR, an fMRI study by Joan Chiao and colleagues (2009) reveals a key aspect of iconic physics. In animal and human cognition, an analog magnitude system (AMS) represents numerosity (approximately how many), size, spatial distance, temporal duration, and stimulus intensity. In humans, the core of the AMS is a segment of the intraparietal sulcus, which, Chiao found, is also strongly activated when participants rank military officers ranks, or the status of Toyota car models. This supports the contention that social rank is fundamentally represented as a physical dimension. Unfortunately, virtually nothing is known about the neurobiology of pricing or matching. In short, extra-terrestrial reader, each RM operates in a different semiotic medium, using a different sign typeconstitutively, as well as representationally. People mediate pricing with arbitrary conventional symbolic representations of ratios, including price tags, currency, or digital electronic databases distributed on a network. People create and carry on matching through concrete ostensive operations such as aligning or counting out one-for-one. To rank, people actually or ideally assume positions along physical dimensions such as ABOVE and BELOW. To share, people eat together, dance, or cuddle. The semiotically distinctive medium for each RM is its consyst. The consyst mediates five aspects of the relational processes (Fiske, 2004a): The cognitive representation of the relationship: the form of the mental encoding of, the medium for processing, and the intentional model for the RM. The attentional focus of children seeking to understand how to implement the RM in each domain of their culture, and hence the process of learning the cultural complements that
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must specify how to actually coordinate with the RM; conversely, this is the primary channel for the cultural transmission of the implementations of the RM. Communication to participants and observers of the participants relational intentions. Constitution of the RM by evoking the directive motives, eliciting the supporting emotions, and invoking regulating moral and legal commitments. Coordination of the on-going conduct of the relationship, by generating complementarity of actions, emotions, motives, and evaluations.
This five-part medium in which each RM operates is called its consyst: indexical consubstantial assimilation for CS, iconic social physics for AR, concrete ostensive operations for EM, and purely arbitrary conventional symbols for MP. These are the four fundamental forces of sociality. Physics has gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear interaction, and weak nuclear interaction. Those four fundamental forces give the entire universe its structure, variety, and local particularity. It happens that human sociality has four fundamental social forces, too, that give all human societies and social relations their structure, variety, and local particularity. The most basic feature of an RM is that the mental and communicative representations of the RM, the acts that constitute it, and the predominant mode of coordinating conduct all have the same semiotic form. The cognitive representation of CS is that participants are equivalent by virtue of their equivalent bodily essence. For example, kin in Western cultures think of themselves as having the same blood; in some New Guinea cultures, patrilineal kin are composed of the same seminal bone substance, while matrilineal kin share blood substance. In many cultures, including the Moose (pronounced MOH-say, a traditional culture from Burkina Faso, West Africa), close kin speak and think of each as related through m others milk. Because the cognitive representation of CS is shared substance or corporeal bodily identity, the desire to create, affirm, or enhance CS evokes acts that involve sharing or transfer or commensal ingestion of substances. These acts in turn resonate indexically with the mental representation of CS, evoking corresponding emotions. That is, both parties understand CS indexically: social identity means consubstantial assimilationhaving bodies that are one and the same, composed of a common essence. So they communicate about and constitute sharing by sharing bodily substances, motions, or surfaces. Relating requires more than merely dispassionate mutual understanding (Fiske, 2002, 2010a). There is no relating without complementary motives. Relational motives tend to be experienced as emotions that correspond to the conduct of the participants, perceived with reference to interactional events. Mental representations of each RM incorporate specific motivations to relate in accord with the RM, together with dispositions to respond emotionally to invitations to form and sustain that RM. Also inherent in each RM are emotions evoked by ones own and ones partners potential and actual transgressions of the RM. That is, under the
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right conditions, with the right people, and subject to metarelational and moral constraints, people like sharing, ranking, matching, and pricing for their own sake, as relationships. People generally find sharing more fulfilling than the other ways of relating, and pricing least. But the needs for each RM and the sensitivities to their violation vary from culture to culture and from person to person. The consyst of each RM is the manner in which they experience it. Each RM is intrinsically motivated by a distinct set of motives, and that motivation is motivation to enact and experience the consyst of that RM. When people seek sharing, what they want is to connect their bodies, making them substantially one and the same. In other words, consubstantial assimilation is what people indexically experience as CS. People experience different degrees of consubstantiation as different intensities of CS, and people seek the degree of consubstantiation that corresponds to the level of CS involvement they seek with the given person(s) in the given circumstances. When people seek ranking, what they are aiming to do is to feel ABOVE or BELOW, BIGGER or SMALLER, MORE or FEWER, IN-FRONT or BEHIND, EARLIER or
LATER, STRONGER or WEAKER. Assuming these relative physical positions, they experience
ranking. Likewise, when people engage in concrete ostensive operations that match what they do or get or contribute, they experience the consumatory satisfaction of being even. When people want to price, they want the symbolism of MP value: currency, bargains, just penal sentencing, symbols that mean high benefit to cost ratios or high efficiency or high kill ratios. Thinking about their bank account balance, people feel distress or satisfaction. Thinking about the price they paid or received, people are angry or pleased. It is barely possible to satisfy the MP, internally represented as a rate of exchange, by pure barter unmediated by symbolic communication. Nearly all pricing is coordinated symbolicallyunlike CS, AR, and EM, which may utilize symbols, but do not depend on them, and often cannot be adequately expressed and is only weakly evoked by arbitrary conventional symbols.
3.1 Expressing and Evoking Motives to Relate

A limitation of relational models theory has been its somewhat static account of social relations, which has sometimes resulted in theorists and researchers (including ApF) imagining that it makes sense to describe people as being in, say, an EM relationship with someone. It makes more sense to write (and think) that people generate some aspect of their action, or interpret and evaluate some aspect of an interaction, with reference to an RM. That is, with respect to a given aspect of a given interaction, people share, match, rank, or price. The verbs capture the dynamic deployment of a framework of meaning and help us avoid thinking of CS, AR, EM, and MP as bins in which dyads or groups can be sorted. Instead of categorizing dyads (or groups) according to the RM they are in, it is more fruitful to think of people as, for
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example, motivated to rank, or as refusing to price, or as enjoying the sharing they are doing with someone. Social relationships are not static objects that people get into o r out of. Rather, people dynamically create and modulate their relations: they relate. So it may be felicitous, where feasible, to try to think, speak and write about people, for example relating in a CS framework, avoiding (so far as possible) the locution, in a CS relationship. Moreover, this way of thinking and writing has the advantage of reminding us that, even at any given moment, people may use different RMs to coordinate different aspects of the same activity. A social relationship is motivated, morally framed coordination in which the actions of each participant are meaningfully complementary. That is, the actions of the partners in a social relationship make sense only in terms of their complementarity to certain understandings of the others past actions and to expected actions of the other(s). But this raises two sets of questions: How is this complementarity achieved? How do people coordinate cooperatively? Cooperative coordination requires trust in each others commitment to the relationship. What motivates and commits people to be trustworthy? Second, how, when, and why do people accept or reject an invitation to cooperate? That is, how, when, and why do people choose not to act to complement the other(s)? More precisely, how, when, and why do people modulate the intensity of a relationship? Intensity may have several dimensions, but to simplify for the time being, we can conflate all aspects of selfinvolvement: emotional and motivational strength, moral and normative commitment, time and energy devoted to the relationship, and self-identification with the relationship. These two questions can be combined into one: how do potential partners communicate, negotiate, commit and establish trust in each others self-involvement in a relationship? Interacting in the same dyad or group, in different contexts or with regard to different issues, the same people may share, rank, match, or price. And they may share, rank, match, or price to varying degrees. This means that people must constantly communicate which of these modes of coordination they assume or invite the other to engage in with respect to any relevant aspect of the interaction, along with the degree of involvement in sharing, ranking, matching, or pricing they intend or propose. In short, relating is a joint activity or at least it is perceived as joint, even if the partner is an imaginary or inanimate being. It is joint because relating consists of coordinating motivation/emotion, action, and evaluation so they fit. Relating is coordinated when each participants motives, acts, and judgments complement the others (or others). A turn is only a turn if someone else takes one before or after. Purchasing requires a seller who understands the interaction as selling, and conversely there is no selling without buying. If you are trying to buy something that the other person regards as only sharable, the result is likely to be
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consternation or condemnationso dont ask your mother for the check after Thanksgiving dinner. Moving food around is only feeding if one person is putting food into anothers mouth. Bowing is only bending your back if there is no one to see it, or if the other people do not understand the abdominal muscle contraction as expressing deference. This means that coordination depends on implicitly understanding the RM that the other is usingjust as understanding an utterance depends on speaker and hearer using the same language to construct and decode the utterance. Social coordination also depends on something more: adequate correspondence in the degree to which each participant is motivationally involved. Coordination tends to work when each participants self is invested to more or less similar degree. This self-involvement in a relationship tends to be experienced, and sometimes communicatively expressed, as emotional intensity. The participants dont have to be emotionally involved to precisely the same degree, but if their motivational levels dont fit, the relationship usually will be unsatisfactory to one or both, and is likely to be unstable. Different RMs in different implementations may allow more or less latitude in relative levels of involvement, but the levels have to mesh unless one participant forcibly compels the other(s) to go through the motions of performing their part. If the levels of involvement dont mesh, complementarity fails. If you really want to sell your car, and Im only slightly interested, but not enough to pay your minimum price, there is no sale. If one person wants sharing sexual relations, but the other is averse to it, then theres no sharing sex. If I seek guidance and protection under you, but you dont want to take responsibility for me, ranking fails. Likewise, if a person from group A kills a person from group B, but no-one in group B is strongly enough motivated to take the risk of attempting a vengeance homicide, there is no feudingmatching never starts. However, sometimes motivations extrinsic to the particular relationship push people to engage in a relationship. One party can impose a RM on the other, or a particular implementation of the RM. For example, if Marians motivation to form or intensify CS with Lin is much stronger than Lins need to CS with Marian, the discrepancy may enable Lin to dictate the terms of their relationship. Even without discrepant motivational levels, when other relationships are embedded in AR the superior can simply decide to impose AR, or can mandate CS, EM, or MP.
3.2 Bonding, Binding, Commitment and Trust

Conformational actions enactively communicate the initiators RM-specific relational motivation, and tend to evoke the partners corresponding motives, if s/he is receptive to them (an issue we discuss below). Suppose person 1 is attracted to person 2; she wants to develop a sharing relationship with him. The natural, intuitive, automatic expression of this CS motivation is to make a bodily connection with him, to consubstantially assimilate. If she lives
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in a modern Western culture, her observation and experiences would translate consubstantial assimilation into kissing, among other acts: she would feel like kissing him. If she proffers a kiss, and he kisses back, a number of interesting things happen. Obviously, he understands the communicative aspect of her action, correctly interpreting her kiss as a desire to form or enhance CS with him. He understands, that is, provided that he, too, has grown up in a culture in which consubstantial assimilation is translated into kisses. And even if he has not, he is very likely to intuitively recognize what she intends. But the kiss is not just a communication: there is far more in it than information. The kiss evokes in him some degree of motivation to CS with her. That is, her kiss tends to elicit a motivation in him congruent with hers. These emotions may well elicit a return kiss, or more passionate kisses, from him. Figure 1 illustrates this. The red arrow, originating in her CS motive, evokes the action, kissing, that elicits his CS motivation, which evokes his return kissing, the green arrow. His kiss in turn elicits still stronger CS motivation in her, and so on.
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Thus creating, sustaining, and modulating the intensity of relating involve a cycle that can be depicted with arrows representing the motivational processes and subscripts indicating, in the simplest case, the two interacting persons in a dyad: motivationPerson 1 actionP1motivationPerson2 actionP2motivation P1 actionP1---- When the recipients are both receptive to increasing involvement in the relationship, their motivations can be said to resonate, and there is positive reciprocal feedback in the relational motives of the dyad. Thus the kiss may also make both of them want to connect more closely it may evoke more intense emotions. Of course, positive feedback produces ever increasing motivational amplification, until something dampens the resonance, and hence the feedback. We will consider this in a moment.
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But conformational acts do more: their enactment resonates with the actor herself, augmenting her own RM-specific motives. Performing the conformational act has an autosimulative effect. When she kisses him, if he accepts the kiss, her own kissing reinforces her own CS desire. This enactive resonance augments the original motivation. So her kissing actually makes her feel CS motivation more intense than the motivation that evoked the kiss! Hence her kiss, accepted, makes both of them feel more connected. Likewise, his kisses may enhance his own CS motives as well as hers. The motivation evokes a conformational action which, when performed and accepted, is simultaneously other-motivating and auto-motivating. Figure 2 shows this enactive resonance augmentation dynamic, which we can call the reflection effect. It is a process by which performing an act tends to evoke or enhance the same motives in the actor that initially evoked the act, while evoking with corresponding motives in the recipient. What enables conformation systems to coordinate and commit people to relationships is this bi-directional, auto-stimulative reflection linked to other-stimulating effect. Summarizing his analysis of the expression of emotions Darwin (1872:365) proposed a somewhat similar idea:
The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions. [5] He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage; he who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree; and he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind. These results follow partly from the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations; and partly from the direct influence of exertion on the heart, and consequently on the brain. Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds. [5: In this footnote, Darwin credits Gratiolet, 1865, p. 66]
What Darwin did not consider, however, is our core idea here: that the reflection effect of the action, by motivating the actor herself, deepens her own commitment to the social relationship that she initiates with the action, thereby making her a more trustworthy partner. Of course, there are cultural variations in how and where people kiss to evoke different degrees and kinds of CS, and in some cultures kissing is not an appropriate form of consubstantiation for some or any CS relationships. Sometimes people express affection by applying spit, or bond by cutting and bleeding into food or drink they then share commensally. There are myriad forms of consubstantiation which are always informed by the culture and the type and intensity of the CS relationship. But the reflection effect is not limited to consubstantial CS acts such as kissing, hugging, snuggling, caressing, grooming, moving in rhythmic synchrony, feeding or sharing food. It is also true of iconic AR acts in which people assume positions along physical dimensions. So a person who is motivated to bow, kneel, or prostrate himself in front of a superior or deity feels more respectful, deferential, or even awed than he did when he began to
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lower himself: the act amplifies the motivation that led to it in the first place. Congruently, receiving a welcome act of obeisance tends to make the recipient feel more superior, entitled, and pastorally responsible. Conversely, a person who dons a crown and robe that enlarges his personal presence; occupies a large, high-ceiling reception hall in an imposing palace; mounts a throne to receive visitors; is addressed and refers to himself in the plural; is greeted first and speaks first thereby makes himself feel greater. The same act impresses both the recipient and the actor himself. This evocative force of such acts goes beyond emotional evocation: if they are disposed to the acts in the first place, performing and receiving them enhances the participants sense of the legitimacy of the AR. Taking positions ABOVE and BELOW and making ones person GREATER or LESSER commits the participants emotionally: it motivates them to sustain cooperative AR.
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Perhaps to a somewhat lesser but still quite substantial degree, taking turns, flipping a coin, or performing a counting out routine (e.g., eeny meeny miney mo) strongly tends to elicit EM motives in all of the participants. Usually in these concrete ostensive operations there is less distinction between the roles of initiator and recipient(s), but in any case the motives that lead to drawing straws tend to be enhanced by actually preparing and drawing the straws. Performing these concrete operations tends to make the performers feel more strongly that it was justly equal and feel more bound to the result of the drawing than they did before they started. The act of taking a turn disposes the turn-taker to give a turn to the next participant. Casting a vote and, even more, tallying votes, makes the voter or tallier feel more equal: the results feel legitimate to the voter because she voted. This is true even in MP. Making a bid on eBay is exciting and involving: my perception of the value of an object in an auction is enhanced by offering money for it. (Heyman, Orhun, & Ariely, 2004, present data consistent with a reflection effect, though they interpret them as resulting from quasi-endowment and competition). Receiving the bid elicits the sellers sense of the object as a commodity suitable for sale. Likewise, jury members may initially have great difficulty deciding on a fine or penal sentence, but they become surer of the due proportionality of the penalty when they impose it. In much the same way, a cost-benefit analysis of public health program policies or war strategies tends to enhance the analysts sense that proportional MP thinking is legitimate and effective, and that their particular solution is right. So, for example, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had his staff calculate killratios and used them to choose war strategies, we theorize that he thereby strengthened his commitment to the validity and necessity of this MP mode of decision-making. We hypothesize that the enactive resonance of reflective conformational acts operate by an experiential releaser mechanism that does not require logical inference or semantic processing of any kind, and that may be hormonally mediated. Although the terms are problematic, one could say that the reflection effect is primarily direct and automatic, in the sense that it does not depend on reasoning, reflection, or explicit, readily articulable processes. Expanding on Craigs (2009) model, we hypothesize that the neural processes in the reflection effect involve circuits linking the anterior insular cortex (AIC) a to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The AIC instantiates the emotional feeling of wanting to engage or to enhance the relationship, which then activates the ACC, which translates the feeling into a motivation leading to action, accompanied by the feeling of effort and agency. Circuits going back from the ACC to the AIC in turn enhance the original motivation. Mirror neuron systems connect to the AIC (Carr et al, 2003), which suggests the additional possibility that ones own and ones partners actions may both also activate the AIC in a similar manner. If indeed the AIC mediates the reflection effect for all four RMs, this suggests that perhaps all other RMs are in some functional neurological
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sense embedded in CS relationships, which would not be suprising, since the structures of the RMs are embedded with MP inside AR inside EM inside CS (Fiske, 1991). Because the motives in the initiator that evoke a conformational act tend to elicit corresponding motives in the recipient, the conformation system fosters mutually congruent involvement. Moreover, because of the auto-enhancing process of motivational resonance, the recipient of a conformational act who is himself receptive and responds by feeling closer to the girl who kisses him knows more: he knows that she herself is very likely to be congruently motivated. He recognizes that the initiation of the kiss is a signal of her CS motivation, and moreover, implicitly knows that her performance of the kiss, if he responds appropriately, increases her own CS motivation. If the recipient of the initial act accepts the act and reciprocates, the original initiator in turn knows that the recipients motives are congruent with her own. That is, if he kisses her back, she knows that he wants to CS, and that actually acting upon his desire has an auto-stimulating, reflective effect on him. This cycle can proceed in incremental steps that ratchet up the motivation of the participants as they test and confirm each others motivational commitment at each successive step. When each participant experiences the others reciprocation of their conformational acts, they know that the others growing involvement is congruent with their own growing involvement. The result of this is that a succession of ratcheting reciprocal steps of conformational action back and forth make trust possible. Because an act that motivates you (if you are receptive) simultaneously motivates me, you can trust that I am motivated, and thus, to some degree, committed. With each cycle of action, the participants can experience the others motives, and, step -by-step, build their involvement as they build their trust in each other and their commitment to each other. This combination of reflection and other-stimulating effect tends to result in mutuality. It tends to solve the trust/commitment problem (Gambetta, 1988; Hardin 2002; Nesse, 2001).3 Hence the motivational intensity, emotional evocation, and moral commitment to social relationships often develops through a progression of steps in which the participants invite each other to participate at ever more binding levels. This is also common in the courtship behaviors described by ethologists (Lorenz, 1981). This progression in a relationship depends on both the appetitive motives of the participants what they want and the consumatory rewards they experience from their respective and conformation actions (Tinbergen, 1951).
Readers familiar with evolutionary signaling theory and game theoretic analyses of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) may object that faking is possible: a person may be fooled by a kisser who is not actually motived by CS and does not actually experience the reflective effect, but merely pretends to. Exploitive psychopaths certainly exist as a small percentage of modern populations, suggesting the possibility that this may, indeed, be an ESS when its frequency is low. We acknowledge that exploitively deceptive kissing occurs, but believe that in small stable communities of humans who gossip, people are protected against false kissers by the interdependence among social relationships (Fiske 2010) and the life-long knowledge that everyone has of everyone else.
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A cycle of positive feedback is not indefinitely sustainable: motivation cannot increase to infinity. Inevitably the positive feedback loop is dampened by its interference with other motives that interfere and distract: the participants get tired or hungry, feel embarrassed or guilty, or become anxious about something else they have to do. They may simply be interrupted: it may start raining, or they may be splashed by a passing truck. Moreover, in any given situation, with respect to any one of the four RMs, there may be cultural or personal barriers to action, to receptivity, or to both. We address these below. Theory is only as good as it is simple. However, if we wanted to make the theory more complex while still limiting its scope to the dyad, we could consider the fact that the motivation elicited by any action often depends not only on the immediately preceding action, but also by both participants earlier actions, and their respective anticipation of the others and ones own possible future actions as the sequence develops. So your response to this kiss depends in part on earlier kisses in this or earlier sequences, and on your hopes or fears about whether your response to this kiss will lead to further kissing, or to his expecting of future kisses.
4: Cultural Legitimation and Proscription of Relationships

When someone presses tightly against you head-to-toe, it can be quite significant, and can evoke strong CS responses in both of you. But if youre in a crowded subway or in the press of people trying to get into a concert, the body contact may mean nothing at all, and neither of you will have any CS reaction. Similarly, you may bend down in front of me in obeisance, or simply to tie your shoe. You may stand on a platform above me to dominate me, or to change a light bulb. The window cleaner above you is not claiming authority over you, hes up there to wash the 8th floor windows. Somehow you have to know whether the person touching you or taking a position above you intends thereby to initiate a social relationship, or has some other purpose that has little or nothing to do with you. One issue that remains to be worked out is how people know whats up, or rather, how they know when UP ABOVE means claims superior rank. Cultures vary considerably in how they frame potentially consubstantial acts. In some Micronesian cultures, a person cannot climb a palm tree anywhere in the vicinity of a chief without obtaining permission. In some cultures, it is unproblematic for a physician to see and touch people, even the genitals of a person of the opposite sex. But when Alan Fiske was working to eradicate smallpox in Bangladesh, searching for cases and trying to vaccinate potential contacts, he was not allowed to even view, let alone touch, a womans forearmeven though she and her family knew that his doing so might save her life. It was too great a dishonor. Responses to conformational acts like elevating or lowering oneself depend on whether the actions are legitimate. For example, some people in some situations are culturally entitled to
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certain positions in a hierarchy (Weber, 1978). Authority or entitlement to be led and lookedafter may derive from ascribed membership in an ethnic group or caste, from socially inherited position, or from achieved status. Similarly, one persons willingness to eat with or have sexual relations with a specific person does not depend merely on their personal desires or attractiveness, or the specific of the situation, is also depends, for example, on their castes. Among the Moose, it was prohibited for blacksmith (Saba) women to have sexual relations with men who are not Saba. Traditionally, Brahmin women would not have marry or have sex with untouchable dalit/Harijan; other Japanese would not marry eta (; more politely, burakumin, ); and White American women were once prohibited from sex or marriage with Black men. Violations of such taboos may evoke disgust, outrage, and lynching. Traditional Moose take for granted that it is legitimate and respectful to offer and accept money for sex, which is immoral and illegal in some cultures. Conversely, village Moose regard offering or accepting money for land as bizarre and offensive. Some cultures buy and sell humans chattel, much like livestock; other cultures regard slavery as extremely immoral. Likewise, in democracies every voter is entitled to one vote, but not every person is entitled to vote: the culture may exclude people who dont own land, women, lower castes, felons, or young people. In sum, cultures define who may legitimately engage in what conformational acts with whom. In the old South of the United States, a White man who playfully kissed a White woman on the cheek might be cheerfully received, while a Black man doing the same would be lynched. The entitlementor obligationto engage in specific conformational acts with specific others is also determined by the participants culturally defined roles. Husbands and wives a re supposed to have sexual relations with each other, but not with others. Members of a stock exchange are entitled to buy and sell stock on behalf of themselves and their clients, while others may not. To determine which side each team defends, the coin is flipped by an umpire and called by a team captain, not the cheerleaders. The generals stand on the reviewing stand above their troops marching by, but there are no rituals where a private should stand above the generals marching below. Roles legitimate the ways that role-incumbents are entitled and obligated to relate, and hence the conformational acts through which they are entitled to relate. People typically take on roles by virtue of participating in rituals: baptism into a church or first communion; induction into an organization; initiation; commissioning; promotion to a higher grade in an organization; conferral of a degree, title, or honor; and weddings. Rituals of this kind are institutionalized, stereotyped practices that constitute, reconstitute, or deconstitute entitlements and obligations to form the relationships that the role defines. The consyst of the framing RM usually provides the salient framework for such rituals. The American bride and
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groom kiss, feed each other wedding cake, dance, and (traditionally) sexually consummate the marriage. The knight swearing fealty kneels in front of his lord and the novice being ordained prostrates himself before the bishop.
5: Wanted and Unwanted Advances Determinants of Receptivity to Conformational Acts

Culture establishes relational possibilities and imposes relational requirements. But interacting with the cultural opportunities and constraints there are always situational factors, and, to a greater or lesser degree, choices. What determines whether the dynamic processes of relationship construction that we have considered above ever get started in the first place? To illustrate, lets go back to kissing. What inclines you to kiss another at some point, to refrain from kissing, or to kiss in a particular manner? Conversely, what makes you receptive to a kiss, or inclines you to reject one? If someone tries to kiss you, you can block the kiss, return it perfunctorily or casually, kiss back at the same level of involvement, or kiss more passionately. What informs the kisses you initiate, your responses to kisses, and how you jointly engage in kissing? Of course, we could ask the same questions about any of the actions that modulate communal sharing: shaking hands, hugging, snuggling, caressing, dancing, preparing food for or sharing food or drinks with someone, or any other acts of consubstantial assimilation. But kissing is more fun. To create and sustain a coordinated interaction, conformational acts have to facilitate the evocation of appropriately balanced levels of motivation in the participants. Adaptive, mutually beneficial coordination depends on the complementarity, the fit, between the participants motives. This meshing of motives occurs by virtue of the four sides to a conformational act: it is the product of a motivation, it communicates motives and intentions, it tends to evoke a corresponding motivation in the recipient, and it augments the performers own motives. When you feel inclined to intensify a romantic CS relationship with someone, that motivates a kiss, perhaps. Your partner recognizes your motivation and your intent to communicate an invitation to intensify the relationship. If your partner accepts, your motivation is augmented. If he is motivated to accept your kiss and kiss you back. Depending on the intensity of the return kiss, the kiss may reinforce your CS motives directly. At the same time, its communication of the original recipients intentions and your implicit sensitivity to the commitment that his kiss entails through its au motive effect may evoke still stronger romantic emotions in you, which in turn motivate more intimate kisses or touches. These may or may not be accepted and reciprocated at a level of intensity that is lower, the same, or higher. This reciprocal evocation of escalating romantic feelings continues unless and until one or both parties reaches a level where it is consummated or blocked. At this point, the CS conformations become aversive to one or both of you, and are rejected. This process depends, then, on these
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four sides of the kiss: it is generated by CS motives, it communicates those CS motives to the recipient of the kiss (and to anyone who observes or learns of the kiss), it potentially evokes corresponding CS motives in the recipient of the kiss, and it augments the kissers own motives. But this reverberating resonance may never begin. Suppose you are shopping for a jacket. The sales associate helps you try one on, then kisses you on the mouth. Does it shock you? Is it repellant? You might feel excited, and it could be the beginning of a wonderful CS relationship that you might want to explore. But more often than not you would feel offended and perhaps probably disgusted. Your reaction could be shaped by four kinds of factors. One has to do with you and your current emotional state and motives. You might not have time for such encounters, you might be afraid that you have bad breath or you might be in a yelling but definitely not in a kissing mood. In this case you wouldnt want to be kissed by anyone, let alone a stranger. Also, a lot depends on your eventual relational intentionsnot just what you want now, but what commitments you are open to, or aim to avoid. Even if you would enjoy being kissed here and now, you might not want to establish a relationship that the other would expect to continue. Second, your response would be shaped by characteristics of the person who kisses you. He or she might be beautiful or ugly; smell good or bad, appear warm and romantic or hostile and intimidating; be of the same, higher or lower status race, ethnicity or caste; be of the same or different sex; and so on. If a drunk, unkempt, smelly person comes up on the street and kisses you on the mouth, you will be grossed out. Most of the time your desires and expectations are not likely to be violated as strongly as this, but similar smaller incidents of that kind happen to all of us all the time. Suppose the sales associate kisses you: You have to decide how to react. You can open your arms, lean back, and let them kiss you, enabling you to interact unconventionally but smoothly. Or if you do not want to be kissed at that moment or by that particular person you can refuse to be kissed, which will result in an embarrassing or irritating awkward breakdown of complementarity. The situation is a third important factor. Kissing in a store in the daylight feels different from kissing in a park at night. A kiss that might be welcome at the end of a party might be quite unwelcome in a corporate board room during a meeting. You might be eager to kiss when the two of you are alone, but scrupulously avoid kissing in front of your parents, your previous boyfriend, or your spouse. This is the third factor: how the kiss accords with your relationships with others, and more particularly, how the relationship fits into metarelational models for configurations of relationships that are obligatory, prohibited, or permitted (Fiske, 2011). This is connected to the moral and normative considerations about being kissed: is it illegal to kiss in public? Is it morally acceptable for a young woman to allow herself to be kissed?
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But what will probably inform your reactions to the kiss most of all is the history and mutual understanding of the preexisting relationship between you and the other person, and the state of that relationship. If you were looking for a new jacket and searching for someone to sell you one, you were expecting a MP relationship. Your schema is shopping. Thus, the shop assistant violated your expectations by presuming to propose an intimate (CS) relationship. At the same time, s/he was lacking the professional distance you expect from a MP relationship. When people attempt to initiate the wrong kind of relationship that is, propose a culturally inappropriate RM people react with incredulity, horror, or anger, and may judge that the proposer is insane or completely incompetent (Fiske & Tetlock, 1997; McGraw & Tetlock, 2005). Of course, if the sales associate is your partner you might be very pleased, if you dont mind having your CS relationship trump the setting with its impersonal roles. In general, people are more responsive to consubstantial actions when they already have even a minimal CS relationship with the other, but more sensitive to the concrete operations of EM when dealing with someone in a contrasting minimal group (Waldzus, Louceiro, Brito, & Schubert, 2011). Your emotional state and motives, your perceptions of the person, and the situations you enter into are all pervasively shaped by your pre-existing relationship, which is the most important factor. But reaction to kissing, or any social advance, depends on all four factors. Their interaction is also crucial. A person you might not want to kiss in public you might be eager to kiss in private, and an irritable mood might incline you to avoid kissing your partner but kiss someone else to provoke him. Your emotional state and motives, your perceptions of the person, the situation, and your relationship can make a particular social advance appealing, so that a kiss enhances and intensifies your CS bond with the kisser. The same factors can also make the same social advance extremely aversive, so that you reject an unwanted kiss and, indeed, the kiss greatly increases the CS distance: the kiss is revolting, making the kisser disgusting to you. The kissing example we used so far deals with a conformational behavior that is very intimate, and is hence associated with very strong emotions and reactions. But the same mechanisms also work for other domains and social relations such as AR relationships. If we look at instances in which authority or differences in rank and power play a role, we have to distinguish between two different issues each manifesting in different behaviors: leadership and followership. Regardless if people want to lead or want to be led, the RM that helps us to organize our thoughts, feelings and behaviors is AR. As discussed above, it is often communicated and constituted through order in space (i.e., being ABOVE or BELOW) or time (i.e., being EARLIER or LATER). As in the case of the gross kisser, such a behavior can elicit different feelings in you. If someone is elevated in space compared to you, you might welcome this difference or dislike it, depending on your emotional states and motives, features of your interaction partner, the situation, and the relationship between you and the other person.
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Imagine you are in court and the elevated person is a judge. You will probably regard this as natural because it is culturally legitimated by the other persons role. Your reaction will be quite different, however, if the other person is someone you think should be equal or subordinate to you. A beggar looking down on you from a pedestal will look presumptuous, and indeed, judging by the way most beggars present themselves in the street, they understand how to appeal to the pastoral responsibility of passersby. Their crouching down on the pavement resonates with others feelings of superiority and responsibility for less fortunate creatures. Too low a bow can have an inverse effect however: gestures of deference that are inappropriately strong, do not feel right either, leading to reactance in the perceiver. In both cases, you will only feel good about states and behaviors suggesting differences in AR if they enact distinctions you think exist. If you think there should not be rank differences, or that the ranking is incongruent with the iconic physical position the other adopts, you will most likely level these differences out by changing your or the others position in space or by do ing so in a figurative sense, for example by derogating the other person. Two recently conducted experiments investigating the impact of actual elevation in space on person perception back up this claim (Schubert & Schubert, 2010). German undergraduate participants were confronted with the elevated or non-elevated life-size model of a target person and were asked to judge this person on various dimensions including respect and liking towards the person, as well as bodily features like estimated height and weight. In Study 1 no information about the person was given, so participants could only judge from his visible features; he looked like a typical undergraduate. The little empirical research that has been conducted on effects of elevation (and height) till now would have suggested an increase in respect towards an elevated person regardless of the perceivers gender. But in fact, whereas women respected and liked the other person more when he was elevated, men showed no such liking effect and showed a decrease in respect towards an elevated target. Evidently while women could accept the confrontation with an elevated interaction partner, men derogated the other person, probably to level out an elevation they perceived as an illegitimate challenge. Study 2 backs up this claim. To determine whether legitimacy modulates the effects of elevation on person perception, we manipulated the targets status. The same target as in Study 1 was described as either being successful (high status) or not (low status) and was again elevated or not elevated. We found that elevation increased respect if this elevation was legitimized by high status, but elevation of a low status person decreased the perceivers respect for him. In this socially enriched context, no gender effects were obtained. In sum, Schubert and Schubert (2010) found that the perceiver respected an elevated target only when the elevation iconically corresponded to a pre-existing status difference. It still needs to be determined whether women felt that the elevation of the target in Study 1 was legitimate
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because the target person was male, or if women are just not as concerned about status differences, or do not perceive males as competitors in the same hierarchies, and can therefore tolerate different positions in space without derogating the target. Consysts are not only used when they have a true essence and are likely to really tell you something about the other persons role or intentions, they can also be used heuristically: If you are looking for someone to take responsibility in an emergency, you will go for someone who is tall or in an elevated position, because these are cues you associate with authority and this is what you are looking for in this situation. Thus, sometimes consysts can actually determine the nature of the relationship two people engage in from the very first moment.
6 Communicative Functions, Affordances, and Constraints of Consysts

In situations in which people are unsure about their role and right place and behavior, they often choose ambiguous behaviors that can be interpreted in different ways, thus leaving the actors thoughts and feelings open for interpretation. Apparently accidental or marginally conformational actions allow plausible alternative interpretations but encourage an appropriately disposed recipient to accept and respond with other actions that intensify the relationship. (See Lee and Pinkers 2010 analysis of the similar functions of deniability in indirect speech when negotiating a RM that the other partner may not agree to accept, or may wish to avoid making explicit.) For example, a person seeking to share more closely but not sure whether the other person wishes to do so may brush against him, place her hand near him, or offer to share food with him. A person hoping to claim higher rank but not wishing to make the claim explicit may take a seat at the end of the table, or sit up on the table above others. Or imagine you are supposed to accomplish a task with a new colleague and you dont know his rank in the organization compared to yours. You start with the first task, leaving it unclear if you expect the other person to do all the rest, because he is subordinate to you; or if you expect the other to decide about the rest of the work, because he is superior to you; or if you just intended to take equal turns and have volunteered to take the first turn. And you allow the other person to pitch in communally if he is so disposed. From the other persons reaction you can then see how he thinks your relationship should proceed. Using these ambiguous or marginally conformational acts interaction partners negotiate the nature and intensity of their relationship. The consyst of each RM facilitates the formation and modulation of relationships in certain ways and impedes the constitution of relationships in other ways, depending on the unique semiotic-constitutive properties of that, in interaction with technology. This is a complex matter with extensive implications the long-run selection of the RMs that people use in any given domain. We cant address this extensively there, but lets look at two aspects: the
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number of people involved, and the immediacy versus delay in the completion of the interaction. When symbols can be conveyed only by direct visual or vocal communication, pricing is limited to face-to-face interaction. Writing of numbers and language make it possible for humans to engage in MP over long distances and times, and indeed there are indications that this was the function (or one of the basic functions) for which writing was invented, or at least for which it was first used in Sumeria (Schmandt-Besserat, 1986). The invention of currency further facilitated indirect and deferred MP over long distances. The subsequent invention of letters of credit, checks, digital representations of money, the World Wide Web, and then eBay have further developed the scope of MP. Technological developments have also been driven by and in turn facilitated the expansion of AR. When people could only array themselves ABOVE
BELOW, BIGGERSMALLER, MOREFEWER, IN-FRONTBEHIND, EARLIERLATER, STRONGERWEAKER
in person, AR was limited to face-to-face interaction. The Neolithic invention of social and political technologies that enabled rulers to raise awe-inspiring megaliths, pyramids, temples, palaces, and walls reified ranking architecturally, literally solidifying authority. Discovering how to sculpt giant statues of kings and gods, rulers were then able to evoke awe and reverence in viewers, even when the rulers and gods were not themselves biologically present. With the invention of modern depiction technologies, it became possible to mount huge posters of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Kim Il-sung looking down on people from every edifice. The concrete ostensive operations of EM are maximally persuasive when the participants conduct the procedure jointly, with their own hands, for example, doing rock-paper-scissors or flipping and calling the coin. Looking-on to see for themselves that the procedure is correctly matching is also effective, for example, when someone is serving even bowls of ice cream while others kibitz. One common technique is for one person to divide the substance or the task into even parts, and then let everyone else choose, so the divider gets the part no one else selects. The conformational efficacy of these procedures depends largely on the concreteness of their operationsthe matching operations that equilibratein combination with their ostensive demonstration of one-to-one correspondence. People feel rather less confident of and less committed to concrete matching operations when they have to rely on the accounts of witnesses. So casting ballots enables unlimited numbers of participants to have equal say, but requires trust in the poll-watchers, in the integrity of ballot boxes, and in the tallying and reporting procedures. So concrete operations dont scale up as well as symbolism. Consubstantial assimilation is the most difficult to scale up. Large numbers of troops can march in synchrony, but the number is limited by vision, acoustics, terrain and other factors. Although hundreds of people can participate in a feast, there is a fairly small limit to the number of people who can experience the more direct features of commensalism, such as drinking from a
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common vessel, or sharing a joint. Cuddling is a challenge with more than three or four cuddlers. No existing technology circumvents these limits, which means that the most intense experiences of sharing are still only possible in dyads and small groups. You can send an XOXO IM, but there are no true kisses or hugs over the Internet. Consysts in interaction with technology affect more than the immediacy or temporal and spatial distance at which it is possible to constitute social relationships. But limits to our word count and our imaginations prevent us from expatiating on this matter here and now. Clearly this is a promising direction for ethnologic, ethnographic, and experimental research. 7 Pocket Guide to Forming Social Relationships with Humans Once the extra-terrestrial reader has familiarized itself with the principles outlined in this chapter, it may wish to cut out this pocket guide to forming social relationships with humans (if you have pockets). 1. Nearly all aspects of nearly all human relationships are coordinated according to one of four fundamental patterns of interaction: Communal Sharing, based on social equivalence categories; Authority Ranking, based on ordinal differentiation of prestige and responsibility; Equality Matching, based on additive interval differences with reference to even balance; Market Pricing, based on socially meaningful ratios, rates, or proportions. 2. Each of these Relational Models has its corresponding conformational system (consysts), the semiotically distinct medium in which a relation is cognitively represented, culturally transmitted, communicated, constituted, and coordinated. Communal Sharing is indexically mediated by consubstantial assimilation (e.g., kissing), Authority Ranking by iconic physics (e.g., bowing), Equality Matching by concrete ostensive operations (e.g., taking turns), and Market Pricing by conventional symbolism (e.g., currency and prices). 3. All of the Relational Models are used in all human cultures, but they are implemented to varying extents, in different ways, in specific domains. 4. An act is not just an act; it informs your interaction partner about your motives, elicits motives and corresponding actions in the other which may again have an impact on your motives, actions. Human conformational acts also reflect back to amplify their own motives. So be careful what you do, and think before accepting conformational acts from humans. To avoid major mistakes, including unintended commitments, observe carefully and consult this pocket guide before acting or responding. If a human starts trusting you, consult your advisor. 5. Humans use writing and now an Internet which enables them to communicate verbally and visually with people all over the planet. Networking through technical means changed
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the way they interact. Instead of kissing by pressing their lips on someone elses, earthlings can send the letter X over the computer which is meant to mean the same thing. Sending an X is only an extremely attenuated facsimile of a real kissit will elicit much weaker emotions than the real thing, and generally has little reflective effect on the sender. At the same time, the Internet enables humans to kiss even when their interaction partner is far away, and it enables them to meet and kiss more people than they meet and kiss in their non-virtual surroundings. Preliminary intelligence indicates that kissing is an effective way to form Communal Sharing relationships, so please report any kisses that you give or receive, in person or on the Internet. Your report should describe the precise consequences of each kiss for you and the human involved.
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Notes: We thank Glenn Adams, Lauren Ban, Rodrigo Brito, Omri Gillath, Bahiyyih Hardacre, Adrianne Kunkel, Mariana Preciado, and the International Relational Models Lab participants for their kind, perceptive, astute, and speedy comments on an earlier draft. You wouldnt believe all the ridiculous stuff that was in the draft they read!

How To Relate 6.0

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How to Relate to People:

The Extra-Terrestrials Guide to Homo sapiens

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2.1 Relational Models Four Fundamental Ways to Coordinate

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2.2 Conformation Systems

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shorthand, we can call this consyst iconic social physics.

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3.1 Expressing and Evoking Motives to Relate

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3.2 Bonding, Binding, Commitment and Trust

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4: Cultural Legitimation and Proscription of Relationships

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5: Wanted and Unwanted Advances Determinants of Receptivity to Conformational Acts

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6 Communicative Functions, Affordances, and Constraints of Consysts

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