Relational Models Theory: Business and friendship, and love oh my! | everyday psychology

Relational Models Theory: Business and friendship, and love oh my! everyday psychology

Relational Models Theory: Business and friendship, and love oh my! *
By: Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D.**December 27, 2009 *
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It’s after Christmas dinner at your brother’s house. The fire is crackling in the fireplace. Kids are running around. You’re drinking egg nog, feeling warm all over. *

Your brother stands up and says “Folks, I’m hoping you had a good time tonight. I’ll have your bills by the door, please pay before you leave. We take cash or Visa.” *
There’s a nervous laugh or two and then you notice, he’s not kidding. There’s a stack of invoices and a card swiping machine on the foyer table. *

What’s wrong with this picture? Social psychology’s Relational Models Theory suggests that we interact with each other following two* distinct sets of social rules. One is business mode in which you keep track of who owes what. The other is friendship mode in which you don’t keep track. In business, it’s fees for service, straight up. In friendship it’s “No no, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get the check this time. After all, who’s counting?” If you get a chance, listen to this chapter of Dan Ariel’s wonderful new book “Predictably Irrational” which describes Relational Models Theory research. *

Sliding back and forth between the two modes makes us uncomfortable. Your brother’s invoice, for example. Likewise if you went to coffee with a friend and spent most of the time talking about concerns you have about your children, getting billed the next day for an hours consultation would be enough to end the friendship. Conversely if your boss reneged on a promised pay raise because “we’re all friends here” it would raise your red flags sky high. *

Still we can’t help but sliding back and forth between business and friendship modes, or else how would strangers ever become friends? With new acquaintances we start out cautious, more business-like. Gradually we build rapport. Sometimes rapport stops short of friendship making only for loyal business associates. But sometimes it converts into friendship and we discontinue keeping track of who owes what. *

I’ve noticed some interesting patterns and parallels related to this business/friendship dualism. I’ll share them here with links to relevant articles: *

1. Proprietary vs. Commodity goods: Generic drugs and bushels of wheat are commodity goods. They’re purchased solely on price. We don’t care who makes them because we don’t perceive a quality difference between different brands. It’s nothing personal. There’s no brand loyalty. In contrast, iphones and Porsches are proprietary goods. They are sold on their unique qualities which are proprietary to certain brands. Proprietary goods have loyal brand followings. People accept no substitutes, so the companies that make them have a kind of monopoly. We’re more generous in what we are willing to pay for these products. Apple products, for example are never discounted. *
Commodities are like business relationships. Proprietary goods are like friendships. In business, as with commodities, if you can get a better deal from someone else, go for it. In friendship as with proprietary goods, loyalty matters. *

2. Commodification and the pretend friend trend: These days a company like Apple, with its highly proprietary goods is an exception. The general trend is toward rapid erosion of proprietary status. Do you care who made the hard drive in your computer or the blender in your kitchen? Do you even know who made them? Brands are increasingly irrelevant. Even where you buy a good matters less than it used to. Search engines like Pricegrabber make it possible to buy anywhere the price is lowest. *
It’s a buyer’s market and businesses scramble to preserve, restore and build whatever proprietary status they can by pretending to be our friends. They try to convince us that they are like our family, congregation or tribe. They romance their products, hoping their customers will become BFFs (best friends forever). *

3. Underemployment and the pretend friend trend: Between commodification, outsourcing, automation, the maturation of the tech boom, and the current economic downturn, employers are tightening back on what they offer to employees. To soften this hardening, and make employees want to contribute more for less, corporations lean into the rhetoric of friendship: “Our company is a family,” “It’s all for one and one for all around here.” “There’s no I in team,” “You are the company,” “We want to empower you.” Some of this rhetoric grew out of an earnest effort during the boom decades to make corporate life more user-friendly. But these days it has become increasingly disingenuous. When the going gets tough, the tough get smarmy. *

4. Romantic love as the ultimate proprietary good: Corporations romance their products, and romantics do too. To fall in love is to form an exclusive brand-loyal proprietary relationship with another person. We dream of a BFF, someone with whom to say mutually “I won’t shop around. You’re it for me. I’d accept no substitutes. You’re so special I’d pay and do anything to be with you.” The pretend friend trend plays out here too. A “player” is someone who romances because talk is cheap. He says friend-like things while undertaking the business of grabbing the fun and leaving, because it’s nothing personal. *

5. Commodification of all social life: Modernity, technology and our general commitment to practicality seems to promote a decline in loyalty overall to church, state, land, family, tribe, community, partner and friends. Business looks increasingly like the sadder but wiser default mode. Lily Tomlin said “No matter how cynical you get, you just can’t keep up.” Is Match.com the romantic equivalent of Pricegrabber? The science spirit debate, modernism vs. romanticism, even the fundamentalist “moral backlash” play out as a war over this trend, whether our business or practical inclinations are saving or ruining us. *

6. Being in it vs. being outside observing it: Business vs. friendship dualism is a product of the ins and outs of logic. Logic is largely about making distinctions, deciding what belongs within or outside of which relationships, categories, or sets. We experience this personally as deciding whether we are in a particular relationship or not. Sometimes it’s just obvious. We’re in. Sometimes we step back to wonder, should I be in this relationship? *

Being all the way in parallels friendship mode. Wondering if you should be in parallels business mode. In friendship mode, you don’t need to keep track of who owes what because you identify with the the relationship itself. But if a friendship starts to feel unbalanced, you may take a perspective outside the relationship asking “is this fair?” At that point you’ve been triggered into business mode, observing the relationship from the outside, keeping track in order to answer that question. *

7. Rewarding for performance or effort: Who do you reward, the person who performs best or the person who works hardest? Imagine you’re the owner of a small struggling business. You have two sales people and have to lay one off. One works very hard but doesn’t bring in as much business as the other, who makes less effort but delivers a lot more business. So who goes, the hardworking under-performer or slouchy super-performer? In business you’d fire the hardworking under-performer. *

Now imagine you have two children. One is a natural. Without even trying he’s good at everything. He has been offered placement in a summer school for gifted children that costs $3000. Your other child works very hard and yet underperforms on all fronts. The school counselor suggests a remedial program for him that costs $3000. You can’t afford both the summer school and the remedial program, so who do you invest in? Even the word “invest” is repugnant when you’re talking about your children. You spend the $3000 on the remedial program because family is family, and performance isn’t everything. *

In other words in business you reward or measure merit primarily on performance. In friendship (and family is very intimate friendship) you don’t measure merit exclusively on performance, but on effort, or context in general. *

In politics, the Right and Left wing split on rewarding for performance vs. effort. The right argues that only performance should be rewarded. The left says, effort counts. At least in their political theory, the right wants more interactions to be run in business mode and the left wants more interactions to be run in friendship mode. *

8. Friendship, family, love: In an unfair world, we can only afford to make things fair with a select few. We create concentric circles or spheres of fairness. The closest fairness relationship we choose is with a spouse or partner. In the bargain come our children and inversely we come with our parent’s partnership. Out from that come our broader family and friends, and out from that our business associates. *

9. Update rates: How often do you step outside of a relationship to update your assessment of its value? With partners and family, perhaps very rarely. You’re all the way in it. With casual friends, you may reassess a little more frequently. In business you update in real-time. You leave the meter running. Love can be defined as a slow update rate. Unconditional love is no update rate–no matter how disadvantageous a relationship gets, you don’t notice because you never re-assess. And at the other end of the continuum, business is a continual update rate. It’s still a relationship, but because of the running tab, either party can presumably exit anytime and still end up with a square deal. By keeping track and equalizing as you go, you maintain both freedom to end it and safety in knowing that it will end fairly. *

10. Is love it’s own category? Sex changes everything. Here’s another great chapter from Dan Ariel’s book “Predictably Irrational” about studies showing that we’re terrible at predicting how we’d think and act under the influence of sexual arousal. This chapter comes right after the chapter cited above on the difference between business and friendship mode, so it does make you wonder if maybe there’s a third category. There might be but I have another theory: *

11. Dating is the tension between business and friendship taken to the extreme: Who would you want to let deep into your inner fairness circle where, in unconditional love, you can forget all about keeping track? Whoever it is, you had better vet this person carefully before you let them in, or your heart and wallet will be torn to shreds. Because romantic love is the most intense form of friendship, it has to start out as the most intense form of business. If you don’t keep track up front, you won’t be safe merging. In this it’s the ultimate ambigamist paradox: Dating is the very serious and careful business of transcending business altogether. It’s shopping for a person with whom you can relax and stop shopping. *

*The theory has grown more complex than this with various sub-modes of relationship enumerated, but this is nonetheless a common first approximation. *

See Original Post: http://everydaypsychology.co.cc/?p=20750

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.