The new paradigm for social development: realizing innately known relational models so they fit one’s community

Infants recognize and understand at least three relational models, but an infant cannot know how people in their particular community will use them (Fiske, Reference Fiske2000). Infants absolutely need to discover when, how, and among whom their particular culture implements each relational model. Which relational model do people use to organize which activities, and who participates in what relationships? When do people in the infant’s community use authority ranking to coordinate an activity, and when they do so, who has what rank, and how did they get that rank? When do people in the community use equality matching, and when they do, who has standing as an equal, and who is excluded? When people in the community use equality matching to allocate civic responsibilities, do they take turns in different offices, are they elected, or are they assigned by lottery, and in each case, how long does a person serve in a given office? Children need to learn that, and they can learn that without any instruction.

Participant observation in all sorts of traditional societies shows that toddlers and children observe intently, remember the episodes they observe, integrate them, and incessantly play-imitate the uses of relational models that they recall (Gaskins & Paradise, Reference Gaskins, Paradise, Lancy, Bock and Gaskins2010). That is how they discover the local implementations of each relational model and practice doing what they have observed. Gradually, they begin to engage in more complex social relationships with family members and others. Like their mastery of their language, children are perfectly capable of developing their social capacities on their own, without any instruction or guidance from anyone. In traditional societies, they transition from passive observation to peripheral participation in subsistence activities and, in small increments, gradually take on greater productive responsibilities as they improve their skills (Correa-Chávez, Mejía-Arauz & Rogoff, Reference Correa-Chávez, Mejía-Arauz and Rogoff2015). In most traditional societies, children receive no praise for any of this and are largely ignored until they begin to make real contributions – but still never praised or extrinsically rewarded.

Research in the new paradigm of Realizing the Relational Models should now explore children’s inherent capabilities and intrinsic motivations to be social, their social relational emotions and moral sentiments, and their attentive self-motivated observation and imitative relationship play. It should explore infants’ expectations, sentiments, and initiatives in their own relationships. Also, the new paradigm requires rethinking social systems, which evidently are built out of the four relational models.

Infant recognition, knowledge, and evaluation of at least three relational models, together with their expectation that others recognize, know, and evaluate the relational models, could only have evolved if, in fact, humans consistently used these relational models to coordinate most activities. Indeed, extensive ethnological investigation shows that the four relational models do organize social activities of all sorts in hundreds of disparate cultures and have done so for millennia (Fiske, Reference Fiske1991, Reference Fiske2025). We do not know how rapidly these relational model adaptations evolved, but the fact that they did evolve indicates that humans have been using the relational models for a long time and in most populations. That is an important insight into prehistoric social relations, about which little is otherwise known.

Coordination depends on all participants using the same relational model, which would be a huge, perhaps insurmountable hurdle if people did not recognize the distinctive modes of the constitutive representations of each relational model (Fiske, Reference Fiske2025). Without prior knowledge of the fact that people use just these four relational models to coordinate virtually everything, and without prior knowledge of their representation systems, it would be impossible for children to learn how to coordinate the myriad activities that humans coordinate.