The Relational Grammar of Social Life

Humans are an ultra-social species. All children must learn and everybody must track which people are friends or foes, peers, leaders or subordinates; and what kinds of likely and normative actions this signifies: When to share (or not), take turns (or no t), take directions and follow orders (or not). These social rules are rarely discussed explicitly in, or before engaging in, everyday social interactions. Yet we usually apply them seamlessly, even when generating new social relationships. How do we know how, when and where to use which rules for relating to others? The present research program investigated whether we co-ordinate social life using a relational grammar that consists of Universal, core kinds of relations (communion, hierarchy, and equality). We have shown that these relationships are recognized by the same abstract cues across several cultures. 2) Innate or very early-developing attention to / understanding of these fundamental kinds of social relations and their cues. The research program also investigated 3) the biological correlates of core relational concepts and motives. We have shown that motives for dominance and justice are heritable with distinct genetics underpinnings that dissociate from standard personality traits and share genetics underpinnings with political attitudes. 4) how core relational motives underpin and respond to the social and political ecology. For instance, we demonstrated that social dominance motives track macrostructural inequality across nations and result in greater support for violent persecution of other groups. 5) how relational motives underpin motivated, or biased, reasoning about abstract moral principles such as freedom of speech

This project significantly advances our understanding of core, early-developing relational representations and motives, the biological, heritable grounding of these relational motives, and their effects on political ideology and moral reasoning. It also played a key role in my securing of an ERC grant to continue this general research program.

Humans are an ultra-social species. All children must learn and everybody must track which people are friends or foes, peers, leaders or subordinates; and what kinds of likely and normative actions this signifies: When to share (or not), take turns (or no t), take directions and follow orders (or not). These social rules are rarely discussed explicitly in, and before, everyday social interactions. Yet we usually apply them seamlessly, even when generating new social relationships. How do we know how, when and where to relate to others? The present research program investigates whether we co-ordinate social life using a relational grammar that consists of 1) universal, core kinds of relations (communion, hierarchy, and equality, represented image-schema tically as overlap, pyramidal, and level structures); 2) innate or very early-developing attention to / understanding of these kinds of relations and their cues; 3) a proto-syntax for interpreting their (recursive) combinatorics (e.g. the difference betw een communal hierarchy and hierarchical communion). The research program will also investigate 4) the neural implementation in the brain of these relational core concepts and motives. Finally, 5) a 3-wave, fully-funded panel (N=2000) will test how basic relational motives and perceptions relate to social and political attitudes across 4 years, including democratic challenges such as xenophobia and support for terror, as well as how psychological and physiological health relates to elementary relat ional perceptions and motives, matching this data to very high-quality, Danish registry records. Crucially, I present a novel, iconic measure of basic kinds of relations, validated in fieldwork and survey experiments among Inuit, Amazon Shuar, Scandinav ians, Americans, Indians, Arabs, Afghans and Chinese; and employ and extend it across the research program from experiments with infants, interviews with young children, fMRI scans, to representative panel surveys.