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understanding the essential concept of Market Pricing. During the Cold War, many North
Americans viewed the Soviet Union as a naɪve attempt to overextend the Communal Sharing
model, an attempt perhaps involving extreme hypocrisy; but those same North Americans could
still understand why someone might want to try extending Communal Sharing to the economy of
an entire nation. On Fiske’s view, since the four models are biologically innate, they are
universal. This does not mean that everyone applies them, but that everyone has the capacity to
apply them and can understand the motivation for applying any one of them. This is
incompatible with relativism. The relativist claims that people sometimes fail to see anything
compelling in each other’s values. There is nothing they can say to each other by means of
persuasion, rational or emotional. One can accept the fact that there are differences, use threats
or rewards to try to get the other to change, or try to find some causal explanation of the
difference. But each sees no persuasive force in the other’s values.
Relational models theory implies a conception of morality very near to Berlin’s pluralism,
what I have been calling “mere pluralism”: “We are free to criticize the values of other cultures,
to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply
as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our
own, which do not speak to us at all” (1990: 11). If relational models theory is correct, not only
are social structures and social ideals explicable in terms of recognizable models, but the
principles of composition and recursion whereby a complex structure or ideal is created are also
universally familiar by virtue of being innate.
In order to test relational models theory, Fiske and his colleagues performed a number of
studies some of which examined involuntarily calling or referring to someone by the wrong name
(Fiske, Haslam, and S. T. Fiske, 1991). Fiske et al. were concerned to show that the relational
models are a better predictor of such mistakes than are other ways of categorizing one’s