Although a great deal is now known about how people mentally represent individuals and groups, less attention has been paid to the question of how interpersonal relationships are represented in memory. Drawing on principles of categorization, this paper reports an investigation into how we mentally represent the relationships of others. In three experiments, evidence for assimilation effects following social exclusion (and subsequent categorization) is found. Experiment 1 uses a judgment paradigm to demonstrate that social exclusion influences the perception of interpersonal closeness. Experiments 2 and 3 employ a memory confusion paradigm to establish that representations of relationship partners are assimilated following the exclusion of a third party.
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Human nature is inherently social, but it is not indiscriminately so. As people navigate through their social lives, they embrace some relationships and forego others. As social perceivers, we are aware of this selectivity. We know that, to the extent that they are able to do so, people pick and choose the individuals with whom they develop relationships. Because few people have an infinite capacity for investing time and energy in new social relations, being selective in building one’s social network is a necessity for most humans.
One by-product of being socially selective is that people must, at times, reject potential relationships and exclude prospective relationship partners. How do we, as social perceivers, interpret and represent the social relations that result from the inclusion of some people and exclusion of others? A long tradition of research has examined how we mentally represent individuals and groups (Hamilton and Sherman, 1996 and Srull and Wyer, 1989). Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little research into the question of how we process information about the social relationships of others.
From the perspective of social perceivers, the ability to identify the nature of others’ social relationships is critical. Knowledge regarding others’ social relations allows perceivers to more accurately predict the consequences of their behavior. If Jeff knows that Jill has a relationship with Jack, but mistakenly perceives it as a platonic friendship, he may erroneously conclude that Jill is receptive to his romantic overtures. Similarly, if Keith is angry with Karl, but knows that Karl’s good friend is Kevin, a 200-pound body-builder, he may sensibly decline to confront Karl.
The way in which we understand others’ relationships was recognized, in earlier years, as an important issue within social perception. Heider (1946) suggested that people are inclined to perceive balance in social relations. Given a triad of persons (Anna, Barbara, and Caroline) if Anna has positive relationships with both Barbara and Caroline, people tend to assume a positive relationship between Barbara and Caroline as well. However, if Anna is positively associated with Barbara but negatively associated with Caroline, people assume a negative relationship between Barbara and Caroline. Thus, Heider’s balance theory suggests that people are motivated to perceive social relationships as consistent with each other. Although this important observation is now widely accepted (Abelson, 1983), little has been done to further our understanding of how we mentally represent the social relationships of others.
One important exception to this rule is a model proposed by Sedikides, Olsen, and Reis (1993) in which they conceptualized relationships as natural categories. This conceptualization implies that social perceivers may use relationships to organize information in memory, just as they do for group-related information. In building the case for relationships as categories, Sedikides et al. (1993) reported a series of experiments which demonstrated that participants’ recall of information they had learned about a number of individuals was organized around relationships—items associated with two people were more likely to be retrieved in sequence if the individuals were identified as members of a married couple than if they were identified as acquaintances, fans of the same football team, or randomly paired individuals. Moreover, participants were more likely mistakenly attribute information about one member of a couple to the other member than they were to make similar errors about individuals who were not identified as belonging to the same couple.
The results reported by Sedikides et al. (1993) suggest that information about close or interdependent relationships may be processed in a similar manner as information about other types of categories. In their studies, the perceived closeness of relationships was manipulated by identifying some individuals as married couples. However, as noted by the authors, other cues may be equally important in determining whether members of a relationship are viewed in categorical terms: ‘the interesting question here is not which characteristics define a close relationship, but rather which qualities lead observers to spontaneously connect relationship partners in memory’ (p. 81). In other words, what leads social perceivers to treat some relationships (but not others) as categories?
In sum, social exclusion provides important information about others’—and perhaps our own—relationships. Exclusion exerts a strong influence on how relationships are mentally represented. These representations may subsequently influence judgments of closeness along with other relationship characteristics, which may in turn have important consequences for how we as perceivers judge and behave towards members of those relationships.
