In Burkina Faso, West Africa, I am going to meet the chief of a Moosé village, seeking permission to live and do participant observation in his village. Knowing that I should accord him a large area of personal space, I stop about thirty feet away. Then I kudi kantɩɩsse: I prostrate myself, forehead against the dusty earth, my arms on the ground in front of me with my forearms rising and falling together. Only men show deference this way; women crouch on their knees, head down and arms folded against their torso, making themselves as small as possible, while speaking in a quiet, extremely high-pitched voice which evidently acknowledges their “smallness” and “weakness” vis-à-vis the chief.

The chief, wearing a conical hat, sits up on a hassock, looking down at me; he verbally acknowledges my greeting. Remaining prone throughout, I try to explain who I am and request his permission to do research on social relations for my PhD. To be formally and fully respectful, and because I do not yet speak Mooré very well, I speak to my temporary assistant in French, who corrects and improves what I said and says it in Mooré to the chief. When the chief speaks to me, he actually addresses my assistant in Mooré, who translates to French when he tells me what the chief said. The chief is courteous and wishes to accommodate me, though he is not familiar with the concepts of research or university.

I have been told by my assistant that I must scrupulously follow the proper temporal sequence of paying my respects to the authorities. So, when I came to the village once before this and found that the chief was absent, I understood that no one else in the village would speak with me until I met the chief. And now, as soon as the chief and I have exchanged formal greetings, he indeed checks to confirm that, before coming to greet him, I have already been to greet the paramount chief. Likewise, when I had gone to visit the paramount chief, his first question had been whether I had already paid my respects to the subregional administrator; he will only receive my visit when I tell him that I have done so. Before going to pay my respects to the subregional administrator, of course I had made a formal visit to the regional administrator, seeking his permission to work here. And, before that, I had sought the permission of his superiors at the Ministry of the Interior. I absolutely had to observe the correct temporal order of precedence, thereby acknowledging the hierarchy of authority.

Once we had paid our respects to the village chief we next went to the religious leader of the village, who belongs to the same ethnic subgroup as my assistant. The next several times we returned to the village, we also went to see the chief before doing anything else. My assistant took great pains to ensure that we observed this rule, even when it meant him postponing greeting personal friends and members of his own clan.

Over the following months, on ritual occasions where a chief appears, I hear drummers loudly beat out that chief’s praise proverbs, using the tones and cadence of the drums to reproduce the verbal declaration of their “war names,” such as “hippopotamus” and “elephant.” Metaphorically, chiefs are huge and powerful animals. Consonant with this, when villagers speak of their relationship to a chief or a village elder, they say Eb yiida maam, “They exceed me, they are greater than I” – always speaking of higher-ranking persons in the plural. And to respect a chief or village elder, others refer to him as taorendamba, “in-front people, leaders,” and refer to themselves as porendamba, “behind people, followers.” People also speak of a chief or village elder as paeseramba, “the strong ones.” On ceremonial occasions the chief and others of his clan also differentiate themselves with a light–dark contrast: they wear white robes, while others wear robes heavily dyed with indigo to a dark blue.

Do you see what is going on here? All of these practices make sense if we recognize that they are based on an underlying representation of relative ranks as relative positions on dimensions and magnitudes.

Some features of these practices, such as the tonal drum beating to imitate speech, are more or less unique to the region. Yet there are obviously deep resonances between these twentieth-century West African practices and the practices and speech of innumerable other societies. In this book I show that, around the world and throughout history, people tend to represent hierarchical social relationships as bigger–smaller, more numerous–fewer, plural–singular pronouns of address and reference, above–below, temporally preceding–following, in front–behind, more force (“power,” strength) – less force, louder–quieter, and brighter–darker. That is, people represent social ranks as relative positions on physical dimensions.

A great number of studies of infants’ core knowledge of physics show that when preverbal infants watch events, they look longer at unexpected events than they look at events that are consistent with their intuitive expectations. So infant researchers use relative looking time to assess what infants intuitively expect, versus what surprises them (Margoni, Surian, & Baillargeon Reference Margoni and Thomsen2024). Nine-month-old American infants presumably have never seen a person prostrate themself in deference, and have never encountered a situation where, on a narrow path, one person had to step aside to let the other pass first. But already they have expectations about such interactions. Consider what happens when infants watch animations of two blocks with simple faces. When the larger block prostrates itself in front of the smaller block, and then moves out of the way, ceding precedence to the smaller one, infants continue to look at the scene for a while. They look at this scene longer than when the smaller block prostrates itself and moves out of the way to let the larger one go first (Thomsen et al. Reference Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith and Carey2011).

This shows that infants who have never seen interactions of this sort expect that bigger, above, and temporally preceding should go together in social interactions. Why would they expect that? We can presume that the infants in this study had never seen anyone bow to someone, and few (if any) of them had seen two persons attempt and fail to pass each other on any sort of path. The only explanation that makes sense of their evident expectations is that these infants perceive all three of these dimensions as representations of social rank. That is, American infants understand how to show respect for social rank in the ways that deference is performed in West Africa – and, with variations, performed everywhere else. Infants don’t start with a blank slate for enacting social hierarchy; they don’t have to learn from scratch, by observation, reward, or punishment. They are born with core knowledge of these fundamental modes of showing deference and authority that all cultures use (Thomsen & Carey Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Susan2013).Footnote ¹

Of course, this is not to say that any culture uses only dimensions to represent social hierarchy. Prostrate in front of a Moosé chief, the complete kudi kantɩɩse postural-gestural greeting includes repeatedly raising and lowering one’s forearms. The verbal greeting to a chief, whether one is prostrate or not, is Y ziig be neere, “May your place be beautiful.” Most Moosé live in round houses; only the chief may build a rectangular house, and only the chief may place ostrich eggs at the corners of his roof. These are culture-specific representations of a chief’s status that have nothing to do with dimensions or magnitudes (so far as I know). Every culture has its own particular ancillary means to represent hierarchy; infants and ethnographers must learn those ancillary codes by building on the innate, core, universal representations of rank as relative positions on physical dimensions.

This book is devoted to exploring the representations of social relations evident in ethnographies, historical accounts and religious texts, art history, archeology, and linguistic typology of lexemes. It begins with a fairly condensed account of the systems of representation of social relationships in the lives of the Moosé villagers with whom I lived for two years. Then we proceed to ethnological comparison across hundreds of cultures, where we will see that each of the four fundamental types of social relations consistently operates in its own specific mode of representation. We will see these patterns in Sumerian epics, the archeology of complex societies, art history, the etymologies of Chinese characters, modern English, Proto-Indo-European lexical roots, contemporary and past architecture, and many other domains of social life. We will consider some corresponding patterns of representation in animal behavior, suggesting phylogenetic roots for the modes of representation of at least two of the fundamental types of social relations.

The Fundamental Forms of Social Relationships

The core thesis of this book is that people use a distinctive mode of representation for each of the four fundamental forms of social relationships. So, the first thing to do is to explain what the fundamental types of social relationships are. I use the term “relationship” in a broad but conceptually precise sense to mean coordination in which each person’s actions complement the others’ actions; by “action” here I mean to include emotions, motivation, commitment, and moral sentiments. In a social relationship the actions of each participant do not “make sense” in isolation, but fit together to compose a dynamically emergent structure. This definition of “relationship” is meant to encompass not only personal and enduring interactions, but also anonymous and one-time interactions, as well as structured interactions between people who do not feel “close” to each other.

What kinds of social relationships does one find in every culture? What are the basic building blocks with which people construct a society? My research and my relational models theory, which built on that research, followed by the work of hundreds of other scholars, has established that people use four fundamental relational models for nearly all social coordination. The relational models are communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing.

The first relational model, communal sharing, is a relation in which two or more people feel that they are the same – equivalent – in some essential respect. They may share property, share responsibility, share a common task or goal; they may pool their labor or seek to make a decision on the basis of consensus. Communal sharing relationships motivate kindness and compassion based on mutual identification. The second model, authority ranking, is a hierarchical relation of inequality. Superiors are entitled to deference, respect, and sometimes obedience from their subordinates, and, by virtue of their superior rank, are responsible for providing leadership, wisdom, guidance, and protection. Authority ranking is not interaction based on pure power or force; rather, participants perceive the relationship as natural, legitimate, and morally necessary. The third model, equality matching, is a relation of being separate and distinct, but equal. Equal, but not equivalent: each person is distinct and their portions are distinct, but their portions correspond one-to-one with each other person’s portions. Likewise, when equality matching governs responsibilities, each person’s responsibilities are distinct, and are connected to that specific person, but their responsibilities match the other person’s responsibilities: they are even, one-to-one. For example, participants may receive even shares, or make evenly balanced contributions, or reciprocate in kind, tit-for-tat. Turn-taking is equality matching when turns are evenly balanced so they truly match, or the difference incurs a debt or credit. Merely alternating, as in speaking in a conversation, is not equality matching. In the dynamics of equality matching the participants may not always be even, but the imbalances are supposed to be temporary: they know whose turn it is or who needs to make a matching return gift to even things out. The fourth relational model is market pricing, in which participants coordinate with reference to socially meaningful proportions, ratios, or rates, such as prices, wages, rents, interest rates, cost–benefit analyses, points in a course-grading scheme, or moral standards of rewards and penalties justly proportional to what each person does. Another example of market pricing is a university granting faculty a year’s sabbatical after every seven years of teaching. None of the four models inherently involves selfishness, utility maximizing, competitiveness, or individualistic orientation. That is important to keep in mind; market pricing need not involve selfishness, utility maximizing, competitiveness, or interactions among individuals. Market pricing is decidedly different from interaction among the “rational actors” posited by economics.

Every domain of sociality can be organized by one relational model or a series of them in sequence. People build complex practices and institutions by assembling multiple relational models to coordinate the myriad aspects of that social system. People use them singly or in combination to coordinate work, consumption, material transactions, the use of land and objects (on all of these, see Fiske Reference Fiske1991), violence (Fiske & Rai Reference Fiske and Shakti Rai2014), and morality (Rai & Fiske Reference Fiske2011). Each relational model can generate social identities and be the basis for the formation of groups. Those are the four fundamental structures through which people generate, understand, motivate, and morally evaluate most social relations.

I posit that relational models are innate (Fiske Reference Fiske1991: 199, 400–407; Reference Fiske2000, 2004a). Reviewing the literature, Lotte Thomsen and Susan Carey (Reference Thomsen, Carey, Banaji and Susan2013) and Ashley Thomas (Reference Thomas2024) show that preverbal infants have core knowledge of communal sharing, authority ranking, and equality matching. (Researchers have not yet designed studies to find out whether preverbal infants know market pricing.) Infants recognize, understand, and respond to the social interactions they observe.

Hundreds of experiments, scores of interpretive analyses, and a number of theoretical advances have established the plausibility and explanatory power of relational models theory (Haslam Reference Haslam, Page Fiske and Haslam2004). Furthermore, it is pretty much the only recent comprehensive theory of human sociality, and certainly the only one that fully integrates innate, developmental, cultural, cognitive, emotional, motivational, and moral aspects of social relations, as well as explaining most punishment and most violence.

What was not yet established before the present book is the mode of representation distinctive to each model: the mode in which it is encoded in the mind, communicated, and by which it constitutes emotion-imbued, motivated, and morally evaluated social relationships. That’s what this book is about. I show that each relational model has a distinctive mode of representation that is universally intuitive and especially evocative of the emotions, motives, and moral sentiments supporting that specific type of relationship. Moreover, I argue that social relationships are not just products of these mode-specific, directive representations. Social relationships exist only by virtue of their affect-imbued representations – that is, by virtue of their “conformations,” a concept I introduce in a few pages.

Consider the example we began with. Imagine that I am prostrate in the dirt in front of the chief because I’m observing an intriguing small beetle. In this hypothetical event, I’m not flat on the ground in order to be below the chief; although in purely spatial coordinates, I am lower than the chief. But my intention in lying there is not guided by any mental representation of him as above me. In such a case, lying there is not a social relational act because it is not meant to modulate any relationship between us. Conversely, even when I intend to affirm my subordination by prostrating, if the chief knows that I’m enthralled by beetles and interprets my position on the ground as intended to enable me to closely observe a beetle, then from his perspective, too, my position is not constitutive or communicative of a social relationship between us. For the chief to perceive my position as a social relational act, he has to infer that I have taken my position as a vertical spatial representation and affirmation of our authority ranking relationship. If he infers that I am acting with reference to such a representation, thereby showing deferential respect to him, he perceives us to be engaged in a social relationship. And only in that case.

Likewise, suppose that the chief, not expecting any visitors, is seated on his hassock purely in order to rest his sore knee, which hurts when he sits cross-legged on the ground. Since he has not adopted his seat to accord with a representation of his social rank, he is not engaged in an intentionally social relational act. A social relationship exists only when a person acts with reference to a representation of a social relationship. So, if I recognize that the chief is seated up there purely to rest his knee, I do not perceive him to be asserting, by being above me, his “superior” position in an authority ranking relationship with me. (It would be wise, nevertheless, for me to act as if the chief were asserting his rank, in case I am wrong about his intention, and to demonstrate my deference even when it is not strictly necessary for me to do so.)

When interacting, people act with reference to a representation of the social relationship, and are motivated by that representation, but typically without noticing that they are doing so. For the most part, people use implicit representations of their social relationships without reflective awareness of the underlying cognitive or affective processes. That obliviousness is analogous to the fact that when people are speaking they rarely (if ever) stop to note that they are using the present perfect progressive aspect. Indeed, few speakers have an explicit representation of the present perfect progressive aspect; their implicit procedural representation of it can only be inferred from their speech. More or less the same thing is true of many representations of social relations.

When a set of persons’ actions and thoughts about their actions, along with their motives, emotions, and moral sentiments, are organized by a representation of their relationship, that social relationship exists for them, whether or not they consciously reflect on the matter. In the absence of such a representation with its affective aspects, there is no social relationship.

Coordination with Generativity Requires a Shared Template, and Common Knowledge of Participants’ Commitment to that Template

Scholars have extensively studied “cooperation,” greatly illuminating what was once a major puzzle of evolution and a mystery for economic theory. The formal analyses of cooperation in economic games have elegantly demonstrated the conditions under which cooperation can be adaptive-rational for a selfish actor aiming to maximize fitness or some other utility. That is a huge (and ongoing) scientific advance. This book considers a new explanation of cooperation, while focusing on another aspect of human sociality: coordination.

Humans coordinate innumerable activities, in innumerable ways. Among nonhuman animals there is far, far less frequent coordination; coordination of far, far fewer activities; and relatively little coordination among nonkin. Furthermore, human coordination is extraordinarily generative. Encountering or inventing a promising new possibility, humans quickly come up with ways to coordinate effectively. Like everyone else, we scientists are so used to social coordination, so engaged and embedded in coordination, we take it for granted. But how do we do it?

Coordination does not just arise automatically whenever animals or artificial agents encounter a situation where their respective actions affect each other. Anarchy is the default – and, indeed, the only – possibility for most animals: they do not coordinate much beyond obeying the laws of physics so as not to occupy the same space at the same time. For the most part, nonhuman animals coordinate with conspecifics about as much, and in about the same ways, as they “coordinate” with rocks and trees.

Imagine a set of humans – say, six of them. Suppose that they all have some vague, inchoate idea that there are tasks they can accomplish better together than they could separately, as well as tasks that they can only accomplish by acting in concert. But they do not have any definite idea of what “acting in concert” would mean. What they implicitly imagine is that acting in concert would consist of “coordination,” such that all of their actions would somehow “fit together,” enabling something to be done, or done better (in some sense or another) than if each person acted without regard for what each other person did, and without regard to what each other person was intending to do next. And they know there are some worthwhile tasks that no person can do alone, such as carry a heavy canoe, but that a larger set of people can readily do, if they coordinate appropriately.

Without language, it would seem that the six have no hope at all of devising a coordination scheme; so, let us suppose they do have a human language. Even with language, though, it seems that their problem of coming up with a coordination scheme is insuperable. First, because there are an infinitude of possible coordination schemes, they cannot possibly consider them all. It is also insuperable because they have to find ways of specifying what counts as an “action” of each relevant kind, for the purpose of coordinating. And they have to specify how each person’s actions are congruent with, and contingent on, other persons’ actions. Can they come to any agreement on the coordination scheme they will use, and, if so, how much time and energy will go into the joint decision process? Will there be any time or energy left over to actually do the task? After discussing options, will they all feel well disposed to cooperate, and, indeed, committed to doing so? Or, in the discussion, will they have offended or threatened each other, creating anger, ill-disposition, and distrust toward one other? Once they start to try to coordinate, a scheme that seemed good in prospect may not feel acceptable to all in practice. Moreover, whatever coordination scheme they come up with, surely it will soon fail, breaking down into confusion and anarchic chaos, because all six of them will not have quite the same understandings of the scheme. To coordinate effectively, efficiently, reliably, amicably, and to everyone’s satisfaction, the six persons have to have precise common knowledge of the coordination scheme. They must all have the same understanding of the scheme. How could they possibly achieve that?

Getting everyone on the same page, with common knowledge that they are all on the same page, is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Beyond the difficulty of aligning participants’ dispassionate cognitive representations, there is the difficulty of aligning their affective engagement. To amicably sustain a coordination scheme, to fully engage participants for the duration of the activity, and for the coordinated activity to be satisfying and meaningful, the respective participants’ emotions, motives, and moral sentiments must be congruent with the affects of the other participants: either isomorphic, or suitably complementary. That is to say, coordination depends on affective commitment, with common knowledge of everyone’s commitment, together with common sentiment that everyone ought to be committed, and ought to judge that others ought to be committed. Of the infinite number of conceivable coordination schemes, how many have intrinsic commitment “glue” to bind them?

There are four. Four coordination schemes have that necessary intrinsic affective glue, such that participants make trustworthy commitments. Those four coordination schemes are evolved adaptations whose specific functions are to afford smooth, reliable coordination. They are intuitively known to all neurotypical humans, and humans have common knowledge of them. They are the four fundamental relational models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Everyone knows all four, and, with the exception of highly psychopathic persons and a few others, everyone has the requisite emotions, motives, and moral sentiments that support each of the four. For a moment, let’s call having the requisite emotions, motives, and moral sentiments “feeling the relational model.” Everyone knows and feels the four relational models. Everyone₁ knows that everyone₂ knows and feels them, and feels that it is natural, right, and necessary that everyone₂ know and feel them. And everyone₁ knows and feels that everyone₂ knows and feels that everyone₃ knows and feels the four relational models, and feels that it is natural, right, and necessary that everyone₃ know and feel them and feel that it is natural, right, and necessary that everyone₄ know and feel that it is natural, right, and necessary that everyone₅ know and feel all four relational models and that everyone feel that it is natural, right, and necessary that everyone₅ know and feel them … More concisely, there is common knowledge of all four relational models, along with common feeling of the relational models. For example, I would be horrified to discover someone who did not feel that everyone should feel that everyone should feel that that it is morally wrong to kidnap and torture people for amusement. In other words, I feel that it is wrong to be tolerant of people who are tolerant of people who are tolerant of others’ kidnapping and torturing for amusement. Surely everyone agrees about that.

In sum the four fundamental relational models make social coordination possible – in any domain of human activity. To do something jointly, people do not have to devise and agree upon a coordination scheme, ad hoc. Simply “choosing” any one of the four, people can readily coordinate any aspect of any interaction – they are exceptionally good ways of coordinating. The four relational models have the same respective structures as the four fundamental types of measurement, and the qualities that make these structures uniquely suited to measurement also make them uniquely suited to social coordination (Fiske Reference Fiske1991: 229–230). They provide the structure essential to social coordination, with just the right degree of flexibility. There are no other coordination structures as good as these four. Which is surely why the capacities to use them evolved: capacities to use them generatively to create culturally informed, task-specific cooperation schemas anywhere they are beneficial.

Going beyond the Concept of “Representation”: Introducing Conformation Systems

As sampled in the epigraphs, the concept of “representation” – or, rather, the set of intersecting, theoretically evolving constructs sharing that name – has been central to the social and cognitive sciences, as well as to the philosophy of mind. The prototypical concept of “representation” designates something that refers: something in the mind, or presented to the senses, to “stand for” some pre-existing entity. The typical usage of the term takes for granted that whatever is represented exists prior to its representation and regardless of whether or not it is represented. Of course, scholars acknowledge that a person can mentally or tangibly represent a hypothetical, or even represent the idea of something that could not exist. But in those cases, too, “representation” connotes something passive and inert with respect to the represented entity. This book is about “representations” that do not merely refer to social relations that exist apart from their representation, but representations that generate, inform, and guide social relations, while motivating them and serving as moral standards.

That is, the “representations” of social relations that concern us are ontologically crucial to the social relations. To reiterate: a “relationship” exists only when the parties to a social relationship are acting, understanding each other, judging, having emotions, being committed, and being motivated by their shared “representation” of and for their social relationship. That is, an essential function of these “representations” is to catalyze the coordination of action, affect, and judgment.

So, notwithstanding all the aggravations entailed by coining a term, I must do so. I regret having to impose on you, the reader, the burden of learning a novel lexeme, but as you read on, it will free you of the various confusing preconceptions you would invariably have if I were to continue to use the term “representation.” A new scientific construct needs a new name. So here we have it: this book concerns conformation systems. My collaborators and I published earlier versions of conformation systems theory in several works, especially Fiske Reference Fiske1991, Fiske and Haslam 1998, Fiske Reference Fiske and Haslam2004, and Fiske and Schubert Reference Alley2012. This book further develops the theory, and more rigorously specifies it. Here you will also find quite a number of prevalent phenomena that the theory encompasses, but had not previously been recognized. And here you will find more than a thousand new descriptions of conformation practices, around the world and deep into history. Consideration of these practices fills out the theory, and in some cases reshapes it a bit.

A conformation system of a relational model has at least seven tightly integrated facets:

• The conformation system of a relational model is the primary modeFootnote ² of constructing social relationships, including their creation, modulation, resistance, transformation, and termination. “Primary” mode means the mode that is most culturally and historically widespread, and that is most emotionally, motivationally, and morally efficacious. A crucial aspect of this is that the conformation system of a social relationship is the standard for what the relationship should be: it is the template that guides the joint generation of the relationship, and its ongoing evaluation. So, it is the basis for morally judging social relationships. It also functions as a potential goal: a person or set of persons may aim to form a relationship corresponding to the conformation system.

  • For example, the Moosé lower themselves below the chief on ceremonial occasions, visitors to the village come to pay their respects to him before anyone else, and so forth. Observing proper precedence is obligatory – it is what one should do. Paying respects to someone else before paying respects to the chief is an offense, an insult, a challenge to the chief’s authority, and potentially an act of resistance to and rejection of that authority.

• Inseparable from the first facet, the conformation system of a relational model is the mode of affirming and committing to that type of relationship. A conformation is an unmistakable declaration of engagement in the relationship, an acknowledgment of the moral responsibilities the relationship entails. In the medium of language, it can be a promise, a pledge, a vow. One symbolic example in the modern world is signing articles of incorporation, bringing into effect a charter that forms the constitution of an organization.

• The conformation system of a relational model is the preponderant mode of communication about that type of social relationship. This includes the social relationship’s depiction in “art” (in the broadest sense); architecture, furniture, fabrics, accoutrements, and other artifacts; speech; gesture, action, and other sorts of nonverbal communication; myth and all sorts of narrative; puppetry and animation; and other signal systems such as, for example, lighting, sounds, spatial arrangements of persons. The conformation system of a type of social relationship is the mode of communication or display that is most readily produced, most readily understood and remembered, most proper, and most impactful.

  • To illustrate: A Moosé person says that the chief “exceeds” him, and addresses the chief and refers to him with plural pronouns. They say of an elder, he “precedes me, came first.”

  • These first two facets of conformation systems, their function in constituting and communicating the relational model, are the two facets that are most patently manifest to observers, so they are the facets that this book most often considers.

• Additionally, I posit that the conformation system of a relational model is the predominant mode of mental models of perceived, remembered, desired, aversive, planned, and imagined social relationships, including types of social relationship that a person or person judges to be bad and wishes to avoid or suppress. “Predominant” means operating early in life and throughout ontogeny, and most frequently used within and across persons, cultures, and contexts. If people in a great many cultures and across millennia, including contemporary preverbal infants in the West, intuitively understand and commonly use a particular mode of representation for constructing and communicating a relational model, the most plausible explanation is that they are using that mode of mentally representing it.

  • For example, the thesis is that Moosé think of their relationship to a chief as relative positions on physical magnitudes and dimensions such as above versus below, preceding versus following, in front versus behind, stronger force versus weaker force, and so on.

• Given the first four facets, a fifth emerges: The conformation system of a relational model is the mode through which infants and children discover their community’s implementations of the relational model and, simultaneously, that conformation system is infants’ and children’s “blueprint” for initiating social relationships they want to form. Likewise, the conformation system is the principal bridge for adult immigrants, anthropological participant observers, and other newcomers to join the social relations of communities they come to. It is how we recognize what is going on in a culture we are not yet familiar with.

  • The infant and toddler, the spouse marrying in, and the ethnographer all intuitively and clearly recognize the authority ranking relations in the village by attending to villagers making themselves low and small when they greet the chief, by attending to statements that the chief “exceeds” the speaker, by the use of plural pronouns to address and refer to the chief, and so on. These signs of the relationship are intuitively clear to newcomers because they too mentally and communicatively represent authority ranking, and constitute and commit to authority ranking, by relative positions on dimensions.

• By the same token, I posit that the conformation system of a relational model is the proximate mode of cultural reproduction of, diffusion of, transformation of, or resistance to the community’s present implementations of the relational model. This follows from the conformation system being the mode for children’s discovery of how the relational model is implemented in their community.

  • Authority ranking structures are sustained in the village by children’s and in-marrying spouses’ recognition and imitative reproduction of villagers’ use of physical dimensions to construct and communicate village hierarchies. For example, observing his mother bringing food to the lineage head before she eats, then observing the lineage head toss a bit of food on the ground for the ancestors before he starts to eat, the toddler sees who ranks “above” whom. Then, in play and in his initial, minimal participation in social relations, the toddler enacts her own social relations with reference to the dimensions that she has observed.

• Conformations are emotionally evocative and motivating, at least to some degree. Moreover, people judge their own and others’ actions by comparing them with the relevant conformations; this comparison produces “positive” or “negative” moral sentiments and judgments. The emotions, motives, and moral sentiments that conformations evoke are essential to sustaining and regulating social relationships. Dispassionate cognition is not enough (Fiske Reference Fiske2002, Reference Fiske, Mates, Mikesell and Smith2010).

  • A person hoping to be named chief of the village is motivated, in part, by his desire to be the one whom visitors greet before they greet anyone else. And when a visitor comes first to the chief and prostrates before the chief, the chief feels “pride” in the honor he is being accorded. Furthermore, observing proper precedence is obligatory – it is what one should do. Paying respects to someone else before paying respects to the chief is an offense, an insult, a challenge to the chief’s authority, and potentially an act of resistance to and rejection of that authority.

In all, the conformation system of a relational model is the predominant, intuitive mode of creating, affirming, and modulating that relational model. Furthermore, the conformation system of a relational model is the means through which even preverbal infants recognize the relational model that people are engaged in and committed to.

To illustrate what a conformation system is, consider the proposition that people around the world cognize social ranks as relative positions on the vertical dimension – that is, as being above versus below. Concordantly, people use postures, architecture, and depictions of above versus below to construct hierarchical relations: for example, by prostrating themselves in front of a chief, or by constructing organizational diagrams that place high-ranking persons higher on the page than their subordinates. Visitors to the headquarters of an organization find that personnel have offices on different floors, indicative of their ranks. Infants and toddlers discover people’s social ranks by observing their postures and positions: for example, in Myanmar, by seeing school children crouch as they pass by their teacher. And when children and immigrants observe, learn from, and imitate these practices, they thereby reproduce the existing social hierarchies. Or they could resist the hierarchy by refusing to crouch as they pass in front of their teachers.

Keep in mind that conformations concern social relations, not traits of persons. In a given context person B may be below A, but inferiority is not thereby a property of individual B, who, though below A, may be above C (Fiske & Haslam Reference Fiske and Haslam1996). Indeed, B may be below A in certain contexts, but above A on other occasions where they relate according to distinct authority ranking hierarchies. For example, an undergraduate who is a terrific soccer player may be the coach of a team whose players include graduate students and postdocs.

The conformation system of a relational model is the mode of constituting, communicating, and mentally encoding that relational model. For example, physical dimensions are the conformation system of authority ranking. A conformation is a specific instance of a conformation system. My prostrating myself in front of the chief was a conformation. Another conformation was the chief tossing a bit of food on the ground for his ancestors, before beginning to eat a meal. Another conformation, I presume, was the villagers’ thinking of the chief as temporally preceding them.

Concomitant with this usage, I adopt “conform” as the verb denoting what a conformation does. So I would say that my prostrating in front of the chief conforms his rank relative to mine: it communicates this ranking, it meets my moral obligation to respect him, and it commits me to deference, while more or less motivating deference and tending to evoke relationship-sustaining emotions such as “awe.” By virtue of all that, my prostration to the chief on his hassock partially constitutes our authority ranking relationship.

In conjunction with mental models and communications as such, many kinds of material things conform social relationships. A gigantic statue of the Buddha displays, resonates with, reifies, and reinforces the mental and communicative conformation of “superiority” as “great size” and “above.” Currency is an integral component of the symbolic conformation of the most prominent implementation of market pricing. Cardboard ballots used in voting reify and therefore conform equality matching in that practice. When taken seriously as kin, totems and mascots are material conformations of communal sharing.

To sum up, a “conformation” is a mental model together with corresponding substantial realizations: it is both internal-mental and out there objectively in the perceptible world. It may be materially realized in artifacts, architecture, places, or landforms. It guides the construction of social relationships, and is the primary mode of communicating about those relationships. Conformations are motivating, evoke emotions, and are the essential standards from which moral sentiments arise. Conformation systems are innate, and they are understood and used by all infants, children, and adults. Conformation systems are the mode-specific means – the necessary means – for infants to recognize how relational models are implemented in their community. Concomitantly, conformations mediate the reproduction and diffusion of the social systems of any community, as well as the transformation of social systems or resistance to them. Each system consists of a distinctive mode of interpreting actions and representing existing social relations, of guiding coordinated construction of new or imagined relations, and of motivating and evaluating relations. There are four conformation systems; each of the four fundamental forms of sociality relies primarily on a distinctive conformation system, operating in a particular mode, that is specific to that one relational model.

Psychologically, a conformation consists of a mode of representation of and for the social relationship, together with the enabling and more or less constraining emotions, motives, moral sentiments, and commitment to the relationship. In addition, a conformation often also comprises all sorts of bodily and material things that complement these psychological aspects. Operating as a conformation system, representations, emotions, motives, moral sentiments, and commitments are not functionally separable.

Having said that, I need to issue a humdinger of a caveat: I do not know what a “motive” is, despite considerable pondering about that. Again, I have been studying “emotions” for more than twenty-five years, and have published several articles on emotions, as well as a book on one. But I still cannot figure out what an emotion is. And I wonder all the time whether “emotion” is a useful scientific category, or just a vernacular English word. After studying moral psychology for fifty years, I have some provisional, heuristic, incomplete conceptions of what moral psychology might be, and have published those ideas in a couple of books and several articles. But I cannot adequately delineate what, if anything, is special about the moral “domain,” if there is one. I am intrigued by the idea of social relational commitment (which “solves” difficult social coordination challenges, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma). But I have no intellectual commitment to any definite conceptualization of “commitment.” I have no confidence that “motivation” exists as a distinct biopsychological or functional entity, and I distrust the scientific validity of the concepts of “morality” and “moral psychology.” One sufficient reason for all of those doubts is that each of these concepts fallaciously takes for granted that vernacular lexemes in one language – English – fortuitously identify real and definite psychological entities (Fiske Reference Fiske2020a). I also have lots of other, quite sufficient reasons for being dubious about the scientific usefulness of each of those concepts. But I use them in this book because I have to use them, in order to say what I (sort of) mean. I am trying to communicate with you, dear reader, who doubtless perceives persons as having emotions, motives, moral sentiments, and social commitments – as I do, too, when I remove my scholar’s hat. I’ll keep using these words because they get us “in the right ballpark,” or at least in the same neighborhood.

The Respective Conformation Systems of the Four Relational Models

Precisely what are the four conformation systems? For authority ranking relationships, people use magnitudes or dimensions, treating some people as above, greater than, having more force than, temporally preceding others, etcetera. This use of dimensions and magnitudes is iconic, in the Peircean sense. Iconicity of dimensions and magnitudes to constitute authority ranking is the conformation system specific to authority ranking. For equality matching relationships, people perform concrete actions of one-to-one correspondence that operationally define being even: one-person, one-vote ballots; shares that match one-to-one; taking turns; flipping a coin; or assuring that the distribution of work is even. The concrete one-to-one correspondence operations create the emotions, motives, and moral commitments that sustain and modulate, resist or transform the equality matching relationship. In other words, equality matching’s conformation system is concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence. Imagine that your platoon is isolated in a battle, and one person needs to scout an escape route, but whoever scouts it stands a good chance of being killed. The platoon draws straws to decide who will reconnoiter, and you draw the short straw. You are now morally committed to scouting the escape route, and motivated to do so in a way that you were not before drawing straws. Needless to say, you feel some strong social relational and other emotions as a result.

For communal sharing relationships, people use relations between their bodies to indexically conform relations among their social selves: caressing; snuggling; affectionate sex; nursing the baby; commensally drinking from the same vessel; moving in rhythmic synchrony in dance, ritual, or military drill; circumcising or otherwise modifying their bodies in a common distinctive manner. These all connect participants’ bodies and thereby connect them socially. Because people create or recognize communal sharing by the equivalence or contiguity of their bodies, especially the body substances that make them who they are, this conformation system is called consubstantial assimilation. The sign system is: equivalence or continuity of bodies means equivalence of social selves. The conformation system is indexical in the sense that that the use of bodies to represent social persons is based on the typical and salient co-occurrence of body and social person. In the modern era, this co-occurrence has been vastly attenuated with writing and printing; visual, audio, and video recording; telephonic and digital communication. But the link between body and person remains evocatively salient. When a woman suckles a child, when one person cooks for or feeds another, when people eat from the same dish and drink from the same vessel, or smoke marijuana from the same joint, or share another drug, the equivalence of the ingested substance makes the social persons in some respects socially equivalent. There are many kinds of indexicality; conformations of communal sharing rely on the contiguity, co-occurrence, and causal connections between bodies and social persons.

For market pricing relationships, people use things such as money, PIN codes, stock ticker codes, and numeric bids and prices. Grades are market pricing in the valuation of student performance. For currency, some regions of the world have used cowrie shells during certain periods of history, other regions have used iron rings, others printed certificates of deposit, and others have used digits in the cloud. In this system, signing a check or presenting a credit card and entering the PIN are legal commitments. If someone writes and signs a check without the funds to pay it, people get angry because, in this system, one’s signature on a check constitutes an obligation to pay. These are all arbitrary symbols whose meaning and value entirely depend on the community’s use of them and people’s expectation that the community will continue to use them as such. The arbitrary conventional symbols that are market pricing’s conformation system are most salient in the numerals (८, 捌, 八, И, VIII, 8) and currency signs (֏, ௹, ﷼, ₪, £) used to indicate prices, payments, contract terms, and so forth, as well as in the coins, bills, checks, pin codes, and digital representations of money. In digital, internet-linked systems, the string of 0s and 1s that indicate a payment from a particular agent to another agent have value only because people use them to denote the given values, and actually do accept them in payment. There are an unlimited number of possible symbols, but conformations of market pricing rely especially on symbols that indicate proportions.

The symbols conforming market pricing may indicate proportions directly, as in a retail sign indicating X units of currency per unit of Y. Often, however, the signs conforming market pricing indicate rates, ratios, or proportions indirectly, often by declaring a price without explicit mention of the denominator, which, in the situation, is common knowledge by conventional usage: X dollars (for this one house), or “$1.50” (per pineapple). In their text and in the signatures that make them binding, contracts use symbolism to conform market pricing. Peirce noted that in ancient Greek the verb συμβάλλιν, “symbolize,” was used “very frequently to signify the making of a contract or convention,” while the noun σύμβολον, “symbol“ was “early and often used to mean a convention or contract” (Peirce 1903, V. 2, chapter 2, paragraph 297). So the conformation system of market pricing is symbolism, in the strict, specific, Peircean sense that a symbol has meaning only by virtue of its conventional use in a community of symbol users – and, I would add, common knowledge of its conventional use and moral entailments.

To posit, for example, that (all or most) conformations of authority ranking are iconic uses of dimensions obviously does not imply the converse – that all iconic uses of dimensions are conformations of authority ranking – let alone that that all iconicity, or all uses of dimensions, are conformations of anything. A person who builds a scale model airplane, an icon of the real airplane, relies on dimensions, but does not thereby conform a social relationship. Similarly, hung over a door, a signboard with a depiction of a mug full of a light brown liquid is iconic (the depiction represents by virtue of resembling a mug of beer) and indexical (the placement of the signboard indicates where such drinks can be had). That signboard facilitates the market pricing relationship of selling of beer, but it does not conform that relationship, or any other relationship. Merely observing the sign does not constitute a social relationship. Humans have many social relational uses for indexes, icons, concrete operations, and arbitrary symbols. Conformation of social relationships is just one of the relational uses of each of these four kinds of signs. If one person says to another “Come here, please,” the meaning of that request is indexical: “here” is wherever the speaker is, and the target of the request is the person to whom the utterance is directed, discernable by the location and gaze of the speaker. Likewise, the midwife weighing and measuring a newborn is using magnitudes and dimensions, but not thereby iconically conforming an authority ranking relationship with the newborn, or with anyone else.

Consider some examples of the four conformation systems. Imagine that five people raise their hands to vote on the game they will play, and then draw cards to see who deals. The dealer shuffles the cards, another player cuts the deck, and the dealer deals one card in turn to each player. They take turns betting. Then there are more rounds of betting after each player gets another card, until one player wins the pot. On successive hands, they take turns dealing the cards. These procedures make the game “fair,” in the specific sense that each person is treated equally. All of these actions are operational definitions of equality, because they operationally put the players’ turns, their cards (their “hands”), or their chances in one-to-one correspondence with the others’ turns, cards, or chances. Participants and anyone else watching can see that the operation has evenly matched the participants.

Now think of a person who comes into a grocery store. On each product she sees tags that indicate a ratio of currency to quantity, where the currency and quantity are communicated with arbitrary symbols (e.g., “$6.50/pound”). She chooses several items and goes up to the front, where the proprietor uses a machine to multiply quantities times prices and add them up (calculations based on the distributive law), showing a total indicated again by numerals (e.g., $48.20). The shopper pays with currency, or with a check that she writes out and signs, or with a numbered card and PIN. The funds in the shopper’s account and the account of the proprietor, as well as the funds that are transferred in payment, have no material existence and no definite location; they consist of digitally encoded numeric symbols in a database “in the cloud.” Consider also the numerals used to communicate prices and that commit the proprietor to sell at those prices. Those numerals are uninterpretable to anyone outside the particular linguistic community, and all of the means of payment have value only so long as people use them to make payments and keep accounts, and expect this to continue. There is no way to know what a string of symbols means without knowing how the symbols are actually used in the community. This symbolic mode is distinctive of market pricing relationships.

Now imagine that a man removes his hat, and is given permission to enter an enormous, high-ceilinged chamber. He crosses the room and bows in front of a woman seated on a dais. She wears a crown and is dressed in glittering robes, wearing sparkling jewels; he is dressed in plain dark cloth that does not reflect the light. The woman gets up and proceeds to another room; the man follows her, with others coming behind. The woman sits, then the man and the others sit; the woman is served a drink, then the man is served, then the others. She addresses him in the singular, he addresses her in the plural and calls her by a title such as your majesty, derived from a word meaning “huge,” and your highness. What all these actions have in common is that they use relative positions on physical dimensions to represent and constitute authority ranking. Higher rank versus lower rank is constituted by the presence or absence of stature-augmenting headgear (tall versus short), occupying a large chamber (great volume), elevating oneself to go above or lowering oneself to go below, clothing and accoutrements that are reflectively bright versus dim), going ahead or coming after, positioning in front versus behind, the temporal precedence of receiving something earlier or later, being addressed as many or one (numerical magnitude), as great or not (large magnitude), and as high or not.

Now imagine a fourth example. Two people meet; they hug and kiss, and walk to a restaurant holding hands. They dance, then at dinner they drink out of each other’s glasses and feed each other tidbits of food, including morsels they have already eaten part of. Then they go home, caress, kiss, have affectionate sex, cuddle, and sleep snuggled up against each other. What all these actions have in common is that people use the contiguity and sharing of substances between their bodies to represent their social selves: by connecting their bodies they indexically “connect” socially, affirming their communal sharing relationship.

Conformation Systems Enable Humans to Jointly Use and Rely on the Relational Models

In the second section of this chapter, we considered the essentially insuperable obstacles to social coordination relying on ad hoc schemas. Coordination looks more feasible when people have their pick of four prespecified relational models that are common knowledge, and commonly felt. However, to coordinate, everyone must be using the same relational model, implemented in the same way – especially as regards who is engaged, and in what role. For secure coordination that participants can count on, participants also must be disposed to the necessary emotions, motives, and moral sentiments. An aspect of this is that participants must commit to the relationship, be confident that the other(s) are committed, and be confident that the other(s) are confident that all of the others are confident in everyone’s commitment. That is, there must be common knowledge of mutual commitment. Participants’ and observers’ common knowledge of mutual commitments and the legitimacy-validity of those commitments is especially important because that tends to dissuade participants from defecting, brings knowers’ persuasive pressure to bear on participants who are on the cusp of defection, and helps to assure that third-person knowers will punish defection.

Those commitments involve belief in the importance and legitimacy of the relationship, along with emotions of devotion to it, motivational dedication to engage, and moral sentiments of responsibility to uphold it or punish those who defect. Dispassionate knowledge of the relational model is not sufficient to sustain it (Fiske Reference Fiske2002, Reference Fiske, Mates, Mikesell and Smith2010).

What creates common knowledge of the relational model that participants are engaged with, in association with common knowledge of how participants are implementing the relational model in this instance? What evokes the emotions, motives, and moral sentiments that support the particular relational model, as implemented in this instance? What assures common knowledge of those affects, along with metamoral sentiments that everyone ought to have those affects and ought to feel that everyone else feels the same? Conformations do all that. Not perfectly, but adequately, and indeed often beautifully.

The conformation systems of the respective relational models are universal, but in each context in each culture at each point in history people implement each conformation system in ways that are more or less particular. That is, cultural evolution results in more or less unique ways of implementing each conformation system in each context in each culture in a given era. To mark relative rank, a person may incline their head, bow, courtesy, kneel with their head to the ground, prostrate himself, wait for the other to begin speaking at a meeting, and so on. Faculty may be seated at high table above the students, be served first, and have the privilege of leaving the room in order of academic precedence before any of the students may leave. All of these are variant uses of dimensions such that relative positions or amounts map social ranks iconically. At any point in history, each culture “selects” among those and other iconic dimensions, conforming authority ranking more or less uniquely within this mode.

Similarly, while people everywhere connect in solidarity and love by assimilating each other’s bodies, kissing is limited to some cultures, while mixing one’s blood with another’s and drinking the combined substance is limited to cultures that practice blood brotherhood. Classical Athenian democracy consisted of allocating people to juries by lottery; they also chose most officials by lottery, taking turns at each office for a year at a time. To choose the treasurer and the generals in the Athenian democracy, adult male citizens cast ballots into an urn. Modern democracies vote by marking cards or pressing buttons or touch screens. The specific concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence used for equality matching vary across time and place, but they all constitute social relationships as egalitarian, by putting persons in one-to-one correspondence.

Grounded, Situated, Extended, Embodied, and Enactive Cognition

Conformation systems theory is more or less consistent with, and intersects with, several of the theories of grounded, situated, extended, embodied, and enactive cognition, especially the versions of those theories that encompass socially shared cognition, and versions that encompass cognition about social relations (for an overview of this field of theories, see Robbins & Aydede Reference Robbins and Aydede2008). In the broadest sense, all conformation systems can be construed as situated cognition, I suppose. I think it probably makes sense to treat consubstantial assimilation, iconic dimensions and magnitudes, and probably concrete operations of one-to-one matching as perceptual symbol systems, more or less. Consubstantial assimilation is surely embodied cognition – and a whole lot more. Concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence can be conceptualized as extended and enactive cognition – but they also go way beyond the sorts of cognition that are usually considered under those rubrics, so far as I know. The conventional symbols conforming market pricing are instantiated in currency, academic grades, and other entities and systems, including digital records, computations, and transfers; all of that qualifies as extended cognition, I believe. But it is crucial to conformation systems theory that such symbolism creates, coordinates, and modulates market pricing relationships, not cognition regarding individuals. Iconic dimension and magnitude conformations include meaningful bodily actions, hence embodiment. Iconic dimension and magnitude conformations of authority ranking prominently include artifacts, architecture, and topographical elevation, so they certainly can be construed as extended cognition, involving situated cognition. But theorizing these conformations as “embodied,” “extended,” or “situated” cognition ignores their function: aligning the cognitive representations of participants in a relationship, while evoking emotions, motives, and moral sentiment that inform the relationship.

There is another, rather crucial difference between conformation systems theory and many of these “outside the brain” theories. Conformation systems theory posits that external conformational acts and artifacts do not substitute for neurocognitive conformations, but coexist with them, resonating and strengthening each other. External conformations are effective because, and to the extent that, they are products of and “awaken” their internal counterparts, with which they are isomorphic.

Likewise, people invent new external conformations by externalizing their internal conformations. External conformations are realizations of internal ones. Conversely, people implicitly and explicitly learn from each encounter with an external conformation, discovering and internalizing the specific local cultural complements that realize specific conformations in specific roles and contexts. By observing and participating in these specific implementations of each conformation system, children and newcomers learn with whom they should relate according to which of the four relational models. So do other people who are transitioning between social relationships or, for any other reason, are uncertain what type of relationship they should have with whom. Furthermore, from seeing and engaging in conformations, everyone learns or is reminded of everyone’s relationships with everyone else, and learns that those relationships are common knowledge. Also, it is possible that observation and engagement in conformations somehow consolidates innate a priori knowledge of the conformation systems and the relational models. However, if people’s innate a priori knowledge of the conformation systems and the relational models is solid and well formed in the first place, I wonder to what extent and in what respects learning could further consolidate that knowledge.

In important respects, conformation systems theory goes far beyond the theories of grounded, embodied, extended, situated, and enactive cognition. Like other forms of grounded, situated, extended, and embodied cognition, the four conformation systems are, among other things, ways for individuals to offload cognitive functions and thereby transcend what individual minds can do. But conformation systems are much, much more than that. Conformations support attentive awareness, memory, personal knowledge, and common knowledge of social relationships. Conformation systems enable interacting persons to announce and affirm what they are up to, while recognizing and acknowledging what the other persons are up to. Conformation systems also enable third parties to see what the interactants are up to. By engaging in a conformation, people commit themselves to one of the four fundamental kinds of social relationships (as implemented in a particular way, with particular persons) while demonstrating to everyone their commitment. The resultant common knowledge of the participants’ social relationship, along with common knowledge of the participants’ commitment to that relationship, makes that commitment all the more binding, and makes defection all the more costly. All of these processes align participants’ mental social relational conformations. That alignment function is the key to conformation systems, but, so far as I know, is ignored by theories of embodied, extended, and situated cognition.

Unfortunately, I formulated conformation systems theory long before I knew anything about theories of grounded, embodied, extended, or situated cognition. I hope that theorists of these sorts of cognition will formulate ideas about how to integrate these theories with conformation systems theory. It seems that a promising first step may be to incorporate into those theories the proposition that a frequent function of these forms of cognition that extend beyond individual minds is aligning the cognition of participants in a social relationship. Without proper alignment, there really is no social relationship, in the technical sense of participants’ coordination by means of their each/all being guided, motivated, and morally directed by the same conformation, through which they each generate their own actions and make sense of each other’s actions (Fiske Reference Fiske and Haslam2004, Haslam, Reichert, & Fiske Reference Fiske2002). So, we need to further investigate when and how participants externalize conformations of social relationships beyond their individual minds. And then, how do externalized conformations become common knowledge, common motives, common emotions, and common moral sentiments?

Complementarity Theory

The foundation of each of the four conformation systems is an evolved psychosocial adaptation that predisposes a person to recognize and affectively respond to conformations that operate in one specific mode. One of these psychosocial adaptations is prepared for and attentive to indexical consubstantial assimilation; it responds by creating or solidifying a mental representation of being “one” with the other participant(s), while generating the emotions, motives, and moral sentiments that, informed by the representation, constitute a communal sharing relationship. But that psychosocial adaptation does not – cannot – know what specific realizations of consubstantial assimilation people in the community use (see Fiske Reference Fiske2000). Kissing? Coloring bodies blue? Forming a circle holding hands and dancing certain steps to a certain rhythm? The psychosocial adaptation is set up to represent and devote themselves to sets of persons who are socially equivalent to each other. But the adaptation cannot foresee what equivalence groups it will find, cannot foresee who will belong to which equivalence groups, nor, most crucially, cannot innately know which groups the person herself will belong to. The psychosocial adaptation includes the motivation to discover these groups, and will find them, because it is attuned to consubstantial assimilation. As a function, the adaptation takes as input the consubstantial assimilation conformations the person encounters or engages in; its output is specific communal sharing dyads and groups, including the communal sharing dyads and groups to which the person herself belongs.

The indeterminacy of these psychosocial adaptations is what makes them flexible, so they can, and do, coordinate any activity, and allows them to be adapted to coordinate newly invented activities, as well as new constraints and opportunities (Fiske Reference Fiske2000). When the worldwide web was invented, people quickly applied the four relational models to organize social activities on the web. Using them for coordination on the worldwide web provided definite common knowledge structures with moral legitimacy, simultaneously requiring the adoption of many cultural practices to complete each relational model so that it functioned to coordinate well in this part of the new electronic medium.

In short, the infant’s innate psychosocial adaptation that is evolutionarily prepared for consubstantial assimilation, and hence responsive to it, cannot function to coordinate social relations until it encounters the particular consubstantial assimilation conformations of the community into which the infant is born. The adaptation needs those particulars; it is “lost” without them. Conversely, the particular consubstantial assimilation conformations of any community would never have arisen, would never have been culturally reproduced, and would have no effects without the psychosocial adaptation. Communal sharing relationships are formed by the conjunction of the evolved system with particular cultural conformation practices. Under the rubric of “complementarity theory,” I have theorized this sort of system, composed of mutually presupposing innate and cultural components, neither of which can be realized without the other (Fiske Reference Fiske2000). The innate and the cultural complement each other; neither would exist without the other. The innate component is the “mod,” the cultural complements are “preos.” Mods and preos depend on each other; each has no function without the other.

In this framework, the evolved psychosocial disposition to create and reaffirm authority ranking relations by engaging in iconic dimensional and magnitudinal conformations is a mod; the cultural practice of building giant, gilded statues of the gods is a preo, and the cultural practice of women curtseying to show respect is another preo.

Another mod is the evolved psychosocial disposition to create and affirm equality matching relations by engaging in conformations consisting of concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence. Complementing that adaptation, one cultural preo is the pan balance; another, in classical Athenian trials, is the water clock used to allot equal time to the accuser’s speech and the defendant’s rebuttal. In the absence of the concrete operations mod, neither pan balances nor water clocks would have any effect on social relationships. In the absence of any preos such as pan balances and water clocks, the concrete operations mod could not be realized; it would not function.

A fourth mod is the evolved psychosocial disposition to create and affirm market pricing relations with symbolic conformations. One cultural preo complementing that disposition is a course-grading system composed of point values of assignments and tests, assessments to assign points, and then computation of final grades. Another preo consists of laws specifying prison sentences according to the lawmakers’ sense of the proportionality of offenses.

In complementarity theory (Fiske Reference Fiske2000), the complementarity of preos to their mods, along with the mutual presupposition of mods and their preos, is theorized atemporally, without regard to dynamics: the theory says nothing about how preos come into existence, nor anything about how people adopt, reproduce, transform, or reject preos. In Chapter 3 and thereafter, we will consider a theory that extends complementarity theory to illuminate those processes: the theory that a mod, such as these four adaptations, provides a fertile niche for the cultural evolution of congruent social practices, along with the artifacts and architecture that people use in those practices.

Metaphorically, we can say that a conformation system is like a restaurant menu; it provides the options. In most cases, one cannot go into a restaurant and simply eat dinner. One has to choose what dinner, and select among the available side-dishes (French fries or salad? Honey vinaigrette salad dressing, or oil and vinegar?). When one wants to conform an authority ranking relationship, one cannot just do iconic dimensions in general. One must choose one or more specific dimension(s). And one must then select ways to realize that dimension. There are at least ten iconic dimensions that cultural evolution somehow “chooses” among, for each type of authority ranking in that culture, and there are innumerable ways of using each dimension. The king chooses above–below, implemented by his sitting on a high throne, while others bow to him, and their authority ranking relationship is also implemented by placing his palace at the top of the hill, looking down on his subjects in the valley.

This generativity gives each of the four relational models, with their respective conformation systems, the amazing potential to coordinate anything that humans need to coordinate, and gives humans innumerable ways of coordinating each aspect of any coordinated activity. Suppose nations get together to send a thirty-seven-person team to Mars, and say the mission, from launch to return, will take four years. How should the team organize their responsibilities and decisions, so as to survive and return, while also collecting a satisfactory amount of good scientific data? The options known to coordinate well are communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. That’s the core repertoire. For each aspect of each thing to coordinate, pick a relational model or two – or more. Now, how should the selected relational model(s) be implemented to govern each aspect of each coordinated task? If need be, we can invent entirely new implementations especially suited to this mission.

I do not have any theory of how persons and societies make those “choices.” Choosing may sometimes consist, in part, of conscious, reflective, explicit thinking. But I believe that choosing often occurs mostly through other cognitive modes. And often no conscious or actual choice is involved. Whatever the mental processes involved, society-level processes are usually the main determinants of choices from the menu of each conformation system. If all known kings conform their rulership by wearing crowns, among other conformations, and especially if a king’s predecessors wore crowns, the new king has little choice if he is to foster the representations, emotions, motives, and moral sentiments necessary for sustaining his kingship. We will return to consider this issue in regard to each conformation system as a niche in which conformation practices culturally evolve. The gist of the idea is that a conformation practice thrives to the extent that the practice is isomorphic with the niche in which it functions: indexical, iconic, concrete operational, or symbolic.

What this all comes down to is that a social relationship is constituted, modulated, transformed, morally assessed, resisted or rejected through its conformations. If I think of you as, communicate about you as, or position myself such that you are above me, greater than me, ahead of me, and more powerful than me, then I am relating to you as my “superior,” my “leader” in an authority ranking relationship. Indeed, the power dimension and the above–below, vertical dimension are so fundamental to human conformation of authority ranking that even social scientists constantly write about “power,” and the “vertical dimension of social relations” as if, well, social hierarchy literally consisted of relative altitude and force.

But, on the other hand, suppose I think of you and I as having an essential essence such as genes in common; then, I am relating to you as socially equivalent in a communal sharing relationship. Likewise, if I communicate that we have the same bodily substance such as “blood,” if I make my body contiguous with yours as we cuddle, or constitute us as a single being by marching or dancing in rhythmic synchrony, then we have a communal sharing with each other.

Alternatively, if you or I perform concrete operations that ostensively make you and me evenly balanced, matching each other in one-to-one correspondence, then I am relating to you as my peer in an equality matching relationship. Likewise, when I think of us as distinct but evenly matched and seek to make us even, evaluating our relationship according to whether we are striving to be even with each other, then again we are conducting equality matching.

Fourthly, if we conceptualize and conduct our relationship according to a rate, ratio, or proportion, then I am relating to you in a market pricing relationship. For example, suppose that eight completed homework assignments together with a 20/20 on the final combine to be worth a course grade of A. Likewise, if I am motivated by the prospect of publishing many papers, each cited many times, and we construe our respective academic worth as proportional to such a metric, we are structuring our relationship as market pricing. This is implemented in some universities that score their faculty’s publications according to a system that awards points based on the impact factors of the journals in which articles are published.

In each case, a relationship exists by virtue of being generated and coordinated by a conformation in the sign mode specific to the relational model. The social relational actions, emotions, motives, and most moral evaluations that we engage in are manifestations of the mode of coordination, so we interpret each other’s actions in term of the conformation system of the relationship we are engaging in.

Conformation systems theory was pretty well developed (Fiske Reference Adler, Barrows and Room1991, Reference Fiske1992, Reference Fiske and Haslam2004) before I encountered conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson Reference Fiske1980, Lakoff 1993, Fauconnier & Turner Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002, Kövecses Reference Kövecses2010). The theories share a number of the most general features, though conformation systems theory does not focus on concepts, as such, and does fully incorporate relationship-sustaining emotions, motives, and moral sentiments. The basic difference between conceptual metaphor theory and conformation systems theory is that conformations are not metaphors for a truer, more literal, more basic, more accurate, or more detailed level of cognition. Conformations are the fundamental cognitions of the four relational models. There is nothing beneath them; they are the foundations.

Likewise, in its essentials, conformation systems theory was also solidly formulated (Fiske Reference Fiske1991, Reference Fiske1992, Reference Fiske and Haslam2004) before I encountered and became intrigued by commitment theory (Hirshleifer Reference Hirshleifer and Dupré1987, Schelling Reference Schelling2006, Frank Reference Frank1988, Nesse Reference Nesse2001). Since then, commitment theory has helped to guide the further development of conformation systems theory.

Overview of the Book

Chapter 2 dives into a West African culture to describe how one traditional community constitutes and conducts everyday social relations. I worked in Burkina Faso for two years as Peace Corps Country Director, then did two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a very small village, along with my wife and baby daughter. You will see that the ways that the Moosé construct their social relationships are at once fascinating, strange, and intuitively familiar.

Chapter 3 explores the phylogenetic roots of consubstantial assimilation, the conformation system of communal sharing. I describe how nonhuman animals suckle their young and the few mammals that bring food to close kin and initiate food sharing; we will look in particular detail at primates. Then I discuss licking, grooming, and affiliative touch among primates and other mammals. Chapter 4 describes how humans use nursing, feeding, and sharing food, drink, and drugs to create and reinforce communal sharing relationships. Humans also use spit and blood to form bonds, and they perceive the closest relationships to be based on shared physical substance. Conversely, observing taboos against eating a specific type of food, or against eating with or having sexual relations with a specific type of person, is also constitutive of important communal sharing relationships.

Chapter 5 assesses how people use the surface of the body to connect and separate themselves. Skin color and applied pigmentation, hair type and coiffure, scarification, distinctive piercings and genital operations define people as belonging to distinctive groups. Synchronous rhythmic movement of the body, often to percussive music, also bonds people, whether in military drill, ritual dance, or even raves. These are all ways of making bodies alike and different, thereby marking persons as socially alike or different.

At this point, the reader will have had an ethnographic close-up of all four conformation systems in one tiny West African community, then conceptual expositions of each of the four formation systems, followed by a broad survey of consubstantial assimilation across a wide range of contexts and cultures. At that point, it will be fruitful to search even more broadly, and to dig even more deeply into another conformation system: the iconic dimension and magnitude conformation of authority ranking. That exceptionally detailed investigation will enable us to figure out whether conformations – at least this one – truly are the fundamental conformations of their respective relational models, or whether, for example, they are conceptual metaphors for “deeper,” more fundamental conformations. The extensive investigation will also enable us to see whether there are any basic differences between iconic dimension and magnitude conformations in radically different societies, in very different contexts, or across millennia. By investigating a great many iconic dimension and magnitude conformations, we can see whether different subtypes conform different kinds of social relationships, or all conform the same relational model: authority ranking.

Part III does all that.

Chapter 6 looks at the “Your Highness” phenomenon of above–below conformations: that is, depicting rulers and elites as taller, or thinking of them as taller, or their wearing high headdresses that make them appear taller. That’s the “up” side; there are also “down” positions: In a great many societies, subordinates conform authority ranking by prostrating, stooping, bowing, or, at a minimum, tilting their head down to superiors, who may be raised on a dais or throne.

In Chapter 7, we look at palaces and temples, mounds, monoliths, and monuments that iconically conform authority ranking with a number of dimensions and magnitudes, especially surface area, greater mass–lesser mass, and greater volume–lesser volume. Watching the construction of such grand edifices, or looking at the great blocks of stone that compose them, and thinking about how such constructions must have been built, conforms through force–strength, and/or number of workers. Animal dominance hierarchies are commonly mediated by the postures and displays of the animals: subordinates lower themselves and make themselves appear small, while animals asserting dominance make themselves tall and large. After reviewing this animal behavior literature, Chapter 8 looks at the myriad ways that humans use physical dimensions to assert status and to defer. The rise of institutionally stratified “complex” societies is closely associated with the construction of imposing mounds, tombs, pyramids, and palaces that rise above the approaching viewer and whose mass is awe inspiring. Elites have always tended to build residences and temples on high ground, with inferiors occupying topographically lower grounds. Wearing robes and crowns that make them majestic, elites occupy large dwellings and hold audiences in grand halls. The immensity of their halls and reception rooms make subjects feel small, and high-ranking persons control large personal spaces that their inferiors may only access with permission. Linguistically, superiors are often treated as many, while subordinates are singular. In short, social status is displayed and in part created by the “greatness” of persons and the objects and spaces associated with them.

Chapter 8 discusses two more dimensions ubiquitously used to conform authority ranking: in front–behind and temporally preceding–following. “High” rank is also conceived and communicated by vertical differentiation. Chapter 9 shows that subordinates bow or prostrate themselves to superiors, who may be raised on a dais or throne. Along with elevation goes the horizontal differentiation of being in front: “Leaders” stand before their “followers” or “backers” behind them; no one may turn their back on the monarch, which would be to place the monarch behind them. Status is also marked in temporal precedence when people receive greetings and gifts or are served in order of rank, process in rank order, and begin to eat or speak according to their rank. Conversely, seniority often confers status: people are temporally ordered according to when they entered the role, position, or rank.

Chapter 9 also presents evidence supporting a conclusion that I drew some years ago about the neurocognitive system that humans and other mammals are known to use to make nonsocial assessments of the dimensions and magnitudes discussed in Chapters 6–8. That system is called the analog magnitude system (or, sometimes, the approximate magnitude system). Its focal neural substrate is in the intraparietal sulcus. This neurocognitive system also processes stimulus intensity, such as brighter – dimmer luminosity (lumens), and louder – quieter sound (decibels). At the point when I realized that, I had not looked for the use of either of these dimensions to conform authority ranking, and indeed could not think of any conformational uses of luminosity or sound levels. But when I went into the various literatures I had been exploring for the other conformational dimensions, I immediately discovered that the use of brighter – dimmer and louder – quieter is, indeed, ubiquitous. So, Chapter 9 presents many instances of the iconic conformation of authority ranking by means of luminance and sound.

Chapter 10 summarizes this use of the dimensions of physics to constitute, communicate, and mentally represent authority ranking: above, in front, greater in magnitude (size or number), preceding in time. We even use force: we think of some leaders as having “power” or being “strong.” These physical conformations of authority ranking are iconic: real or putative or imagined relations on physical dimensions are congruent with social relations. That is, when we think about authority ranking we map social “position” onto space, magnitude, and time. Conversely, to communicatively represent authority ranking, and to evoke the emotions, motives, and moral sentiments that authority ranking depends on, we marshal space, magnitude, and time. This iconic physics is so pervasive in English and other languages that the majority of words for authority ranking are terms whose basic sense concerns the physical relations among objects.

We construct and conduct equality matching relations using concrete operations such as taking a turn or aligning objects or actions in one-to-one correspondence. Chapter 11 shows that these procedures function as operational definitions of equality matching: they are ostensive demonstrations of even balance. Thus, flipping a coin or lining up on the starting line, taking off simultaneously, and running to the finish line constitute equally matched opportunities for victory. If the procedures are followed, the race is demonstrably fair. Throughout all of history most of the rules of most games and sports, together with most procedures of gambling, consist of concrete operations that define and demonstrate equality of opportunity. Cognitive experiments with adults provide another kind of evidence for iconic conformations of authority ranking, as do cognitive experiments with preverbal infants. Chapter 12 reviews those adult and infant cognition experiments. Then, Chapter 13 describes the approximate magnitude system (also called the analog magnitude system) in humans and nonhuman animals. The functions and features of this neurocognitive system strongly suggest that humans rely on it for iconically representing and computing authority ranking. Brain-imaging studies confirm that.

Chapter 14 peruses the multitude of concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence that people use to conform equality matching. Infant studies are consistent with the hypothesis that infants expect concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence among peers. These experiments further suggest that infants prefer concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence among peers, and perhaps even judge that it is “good” in some proto-moral sense.

The history of the development of large-scale social coordination is the subject of Chapter 15. Coordination in cities and states requires calendars, weights and measures, and bookkeeping, all of which are systems of abstract symbols for ratio-based calculations. “Symbolism,” meaning representation based purely on conventional use, is absolutely essential to making the calculations for coordinating time and quantities and transactions of goods and labor. Combining calendars with metrology, arithmetic planning, and bookkeeping permits the regulation of labor and tax collection for large-scale enterprises. Money, an extremely abstract symbol system, developed as an offshoot of weights and measures. Writing initially developed as a refinement of bookkeeping and a mode of coordinating transactions across removes of time and space. In short, the use of market pricing to coordinate many interactions involving many entities among a large number of people required a specific psychocultural development: the invention and use of symbolic systems.

Finally, Chapter 16 draws attention to some features apparently shared by all four conformation systems, and then addresses the generative potentials unique to symbolism. It concludes by explicating some final issues to consider about conformation systems.

In the aggregate, this book presents the thesis that each conformation system consists of a mode of cognition; a mode of communication; a mode of getting everyone “on the same page” concerning which relational model they are to use and how it is to be implemented; a mode of constituting and committing to relationships; a mode of coordination; a mode of morally evaluating relationships; a mode of emotion, motivation, and other social relational affects; and a mode of reification and communication in art, artifacts, architecture, locations, clothing and accoutrements, sounds, narratives, and so forth. Above all, in conjunction with their corresponding relational models, conformations make social relationships possible. Without relational models and their respective conformation systems, there would be no social relationships, and, hence, hardly any social coordination of consequence.

Is that conceivable? What does it even mean? Read on.

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Building on the orientation the first chapter provides, let us take a close look at the operation of the conformation systems in everyday life in a tiny West African village in 1980–1982. Looking closely at the conformation systems in one community at one point in time allows us to compare the four conformation systems, while holding nearly everything else constant. The observations and experiences I describe in Chapter 2 were the inspiration for the ideas that developed into conformation systems theory, motivating me to write this book. Let’s see if you see what I saw and experienced among the Moosé.