CATEGORIES OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP

The study of social relationships lies at the heart of the social sciences, but our understanding of the cognitive structures that support them has received little attention. This paper develops an account of the form and content of these structures, arguing that social relationships are represented by a small number of categories, rather than by dimensions as proposed by others. Taxometric analyses demonstrated that categories proposed by Fiske (1991) are truly discrete, controverting dimensional representation and one possible form of prototype structure. The categories appear to combine in the specification of actually existing social relationships, and are more informative, or ''basic'', then colloquial relationship categories.