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 a..