Alan Page Fiske

Alan Page Fiske, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. He is a psychological anthropologist who worked in Africa for eight years. His primary research goal is to understand how human social relationships are shaped by the coordination of psychology, culture, ontogeny, evolution, neuroanatomy and neurochemistry. He is best known for his relational models theory and research showing that there are only four fundamental, universal forms of intrinsically motivated social coordination. He has also proposed a theory of metarelational models that govern the combinatorial ‘syntax’ with which people put different relationships together. He is currently using ethnographic, historical, archeological, linguistic, and psychological sources to advance a general theory of the distinctive ways that people cognize, constitute, and communicate the four basic forms of social relations.