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How humans across cultures and historical periods conceptualize relationships

Credit: Yin Wang.

Throughout the course of their lives, humans are known to establish and navigate an intricate web of social relationships, ranging from friendships to family bonds, romances, acquaintances, professional relationships and, today, online interactions. Over the past decades, some behavioral scientists have been trying to better understand how people make sense of these different types of relationships.

The overall organization and effects on the well-being of different kinds of social relationships has been widely investigated. However, how people conceptualize them (i.e., mentally make sense of different types of bonds) is not yet fully understood.

Researchers at Beijing Normal University carried out a study aimed at better understanding how humans across time and from different cultural backgrounds make sense of their relationships.

Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, offers new interesting insights into human relationships, which were gathered using a combination of online surveys, laboratory experiments and computational tools.

"We collected online survey data from 19 regions worldwide, collected in-person interview data from the matrilineal society Mosuo tribe in China, and retrieved data from literature of different historical timepoints," Yin Wang, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org.

"We then used dimension reduction and clustering methods on these data to find the basic organization of human relationships." 

Animation summarizing the FAVEE-HPP model. Credit: Yin Wang.

Wang and his colleagues gathered responses to an online survey from people living in 19 regions across five continents and summarized the results of laboratory experiments, ultimately analyzing information about the relationships between 20,427 people worldwide using computational models.

Notably, they also analyzed documents containing information about the relationships of people during different historical periods, spanning across 3,000 years.

Building on the results of their analyses, the researchers created a framework that outlines the universal structure of relationships across cultures and historical periods. This framework was dubbed the FAVEE (Formality, Activeness, Valence, Exchange, Equality)- HPP (hostile, private and public) model.

"Our study reveals this fundamental framework called the FAVEE-HPP model," explained Wang.

"It shows that humans use the five dimensions, which are formality, activeness, valence, exchange, and equality, and the three categories, which are hostile, private, and public, to represent their social relationships. We've also proven that this framework is consensual across different cultures, societies, and historical timepoints."

Perhaps the most interesting achievement of the recent study by Wang and his colleagues is that it provides a computational framework that can be used to represent human relationships in a quantifiable and organized way.

Credit: Cheng et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025).

A five-dimensional model of human relationships (FAVEE model). Credit: Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02122-8

This model could soon be used to study the links between different dimensions of relationships and real-world phenomena, such as divorce, perceived social supports, well-being and even life expectancy.

"In future follow-up studies, we are interested in exploring how relationship representations are constructed during human development and how we form idiosyncratic impressions on relationships," added Wang. "In addition, we plan to probe individual differences and context differences in representing relationships."

Wang and his colleagues published the data they collected on GitHub, thus it could soon also be used by other research groups to further explore the complex underpinnings of human relationships.

In the future, they hope that the new universal model of relationships outlined in their paper will contribute to the understanding of human social networks and the patterns shaping their evolution across generations or in different geographical regions. 

by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org

Source: How humans across cultures and historical periods conceptualize relationships