History & Assumptions
The basic concept of social exchange theory is that human social relationships can be understood as revolving around this.
What is the exchange of resources valued by the participants?
All of the things in a person's physical, social, and psychological world that are experienced as pleasurable are considered these.
What are rewards?
Feelings of this arise with growing dependence. This is a long-term orientation toward a relationship, including feelings of psychological attachment and intentions to persist through both good and bad times.
What is commitment?
These are at the core of the cybernetics model. They are the self-correcting mechanisms which serve to govern families’ attempts to adjust or vary from customary patterns and maintain its organizational sameness (homeostasis).
What are feedback loops?
This refers to dynamic aspects that are changing within the system. Often, family therapists make the distinction between this (how something is said) and content (what is being said).
What is process?
Social exchange theory is built on the principles of these two fields of study.
What are behaviorism and economics?
These are three of the sixteen mentioned commodities capable of rewarding someone that are listed in the EXPLORING text.
What are personal attraction, social acceptance, social approval, instrumental services, respect/prestige, compliance/power, love, status, services, goods, information, money, autonomy, security, value and opinion agreement, and equality?
This is the extent to which a person needs or is reliant on a particular person for a desired outcome. According to Kelley and Thibaut, this grows when a partner experiences a high level of satisfaction in his or her relationship and when potential alternative relationships are undesirable.
What is dependence?
These are theoretical lines of demarcation in a family that define a system as an entity and separate the subsystems from one another and the system from its environment.
What are boundaries?
This is a unit bounded by a set of interrelated elements and which exhibits coherent behaviors.
What is a system?
These are two of the four assumptions of social exchange theory.
What are people are motivated by self-interest, individuals are constrained by their choices, humans are rational beings, and social relationships are also characterized by interdependence and reciprocity?
Any status, relationship, or feeling that the individual does not like and would like to avoid is considered this.
What is a cost?
This is the social expectation or rule that dictates that people should help those who have helped them and that they should not injure those who have helped them.
What is the norm of reciprocity?
This refers to the notion that different end states can occur from the same initial conditions. Similar events (e.g., natural disaster) can prime depression or trauma as well as growth or happiness.
What is equipotentiality?
This refers to reciprocal or circular causality. Rather than viewing an element in a vacuum devoid of interactions between its environment and its own system’s levels or subsystems, this speaks to the mutual interaction and influence that occurs between people, events, and their ecosystem.
What is recursiveness?
He summarized the concepts of the exchange model, calling it a choice and exchange theory.
Who is Ivan Nye?
This refers to the outcome in terms of rewards and costs. People strive to gain the most rewards with the fewest costs.
What is profit?
An individual will perceive his or her situation as fair--and this will exist--when personal investments in another are equivalent to the personal profits derived from the relationship.
What is distributive justice?
This is a volatile and intense way of disguising and distorting both affection and splits.
What is pseudohostility?
From Theodore Lidz, one parent dominates the family, and the other is dependent.
What is marital skew?
He is probably the most influential scholar in bringing social exchange theory to general sociology.
The evaluation of the profitability of our relationships against what we feel we deserve is this. This notion affects one's satisfaction in a relationship.
What is our comparison level?
Thibaut and Kelley also note that individuals will compare their outcomes in a particular relationship with alternative relationships that may be out there. This subjective assessment is known as this.
What is the comparison level for alternatives?
Individuals and the system at large will consciously or unconsciously use these which are meant to manage their boundaries and make sense of their individual and shared realities.
What are family models/maps?
From Theodore Lidz, the parents are overly focused on their own problems which harms the marriage, the individuals, and the children.
What is marital schism?