American psychological anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose Relational Models Theory holds that people build their social relationships from four elementary models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing.
Contribution
Fiske developed Relational Models Theory from fieldwork among the Moose (Mossi) of Burkina Faso and from comparison across cultures. Its full statement is Structures of Social Life (1991), with the journal version in Psychological Review (1992). The four models are cognitive structures people use to build, interpret and judge relationships. Cultures differ in how they carry out each model and in which model they apply to which domain, and most real relationships combine several. Later work extended the theory to violence (Virtuous Violence, with Tage Rai, 2014) and to the emotion of being moved (kama muta).
The theory has a measurement tradition. Haslam and Fiske’s Modes of Relationships Questionnaire (1999) fit its four factors poorly; a 20-item revision by Zakharin and Bates (2023) fits well and replicates.
Contribution to the corpus
Relational Models Theory is the closest measured framework to the four TIME forms. Communal sharing, authority ranking and market pricing map strongly onto the T, I and M forms. Equality matching splits between T-form reciprocity and E-form peer parity, and no model corresponds to outward-reaching E-form collaboration, which may be a configuration of models more than a fifth elementary form. These mappings are the corpus’s inference; Michel Bauwens linked TIMN to Fiske’s models in commentary on Ronfeldt’s work as early as 2009.
Fiske’s finding that people apply different models in different domains is the main support for measuring TIME orientation as a domain-sensitive profile, and the revised MORQ is the recommended anchor for validating one. See A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance.
Selected works
- Fiske, A. P. (1990). “Relativity within Moose (‘Mossi’) culture: Four incommensurable models for social relationships.” Ethos, 18(2), 180-204.
- Fiske, A. P. (1991). Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations. Free Press.
- Fiske, A. P. (1992). “The four elementary forms of sociality.” *Psychological Review*
- Haslam, N., and Fiske, A. P. (1999). “Relational models theory: A confirmatory factor analysis.” Personal Relationships, 6(2), 241-250.
- Fiske, A. P., and Rai, T. S. (2014). Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships. Cambridge University Press.
Related pages
- A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance
- TIME and TIMN (glossary)
- David Ronfeldt
- Michel Bauwens
Sources
- Fiske (1992)
- Zakharin and Bates (2023)
- UCLA Department of Anthropology. “Alan Page Fiske.” https://anthro.ucla.edu/person/alan-page-fiske/
Provenance
Written 26 September 2026 alongside the source entries for Fiske (1992) and Zakharin and Bates (2023). Affiliation checked against the UCLA Department of Anthropology faculty page.