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Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Assessment of Social Interaction Behaviors
Published on: February 25, 2011
Categories of social relationship
1New School for Social Research, New York, NY 10003.
Abstract:
The study of social relationships lies at the heart of the social sciences, but our understanding of the cognitive structures that support them has received little attention. This paper develops an account of the form and content of these structures, arguing that social relationships are represented by a small number of categories, rather than by dimensions as proposed by others. Taxometric analyses demonstrated that categories proposed by Fiske (1991) are truly discrete, controverting dimensional representation and one possible form of prototype structure. The categories appear to combine in the specification of actually existing social relationships, and are more informative, or "basic", then colloquial relationship categories.
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