ABSTRACT
Social psychology often focuses too narrowly on perception and inference about persons. But persons are not merely important stimuli-they coordinate with each other, interacting with reference to jointly meaningful, mutually motivating relational models. That is, people form relationships. Social relationships are not products of individual brains alone; sociality is shaped by the interaction of evolutionary, developmental, neuroanatomical and neurophysiologial, psychological, societal, and cultural processes. To understand how people relate to each other, we need to understand how these interdependent processes jointly shape human sociality. Because these processes are highly interdependent, we cannot understand any of them in isolation from the others. Thus to understand social relations, we need to link social psychology to ethnography, ethnology, cognitive science, neuroscience, clinical psychology, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, economics and management science, and social theory.
