About

Alan Page Fiske is a psychological anthropologist at UCLA who studies how natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology, and culture jointly shape human sociality. His research aims to understand the mechanisms that enable humans to coordinate in complex, cooperative, and culturally varying systems of social relations. He investigates social and moral cognition, motives and emotion, relationship-constitutive actions, experiences, and communications, motivations for violence, interpretations of misfortune and death, and the links between psychopathology and social relationships. Currently, his research focuses on the emotion often called being moved or touched, studied through the Kama muta lab. Fiske employs a variety of methods including participant observation ethnography, broad ethnological and historical comparison, systematic sampling of behavior, and experimentation, while fundamentally approaching his work as a theorist exploring the ontology and epistemology of social phenomena through systematic ethnological and historical comparison. Fiske is the originator of relational models theory (RMT), an integrated and comprehensive theory of human sociality that connects evolved neurobiology and psychology of human social relationships to their culturally developed implementations. RMT has been extensively tested, applied, and developed by over 275 scholars across multiple disciplines including psychology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy, religious studies, and management science, and has been cited in about 6000 other works. His research network spans scholars in the US, Canada, Norway, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, and Australia. He is currently writing a book and collaborating on experimental and field studies of the emotion known as kama muta, which encompasses feelings of being moved, touched, stirred, or having tender feelings toward cuteness. Alan Page Fiske earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1985. His work integrates psychological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology, with research interests including social theory, social relationships, social and moral emotions, and methodology, with a regional focus on Africa.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Kama Muta: Conceptualizing and Measuring the Experience Often Labelled Being Moved Across 19 Nations and 15 Languages

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2024-05-20

  otherOpen access

  English-speakers sometimes say that they feel moved to tears, emotionally touched, stirred, or that something warmed their heart; other languages use similar passive contact metaphors to refer to an affective state. We propose and measure the concept of kama muta to understand experiences often given these and other labels. Do the same experiences evoke the same kama muta emotion across nations and languages? We conducted studies in 19 different countries, five continents, 15 languages, with a total of 3542 participants. We tested the construct while validating a comprehensive scale to measure the appraisals, valence, bodily sensations, motivation, and lexical labels posited to characterize kama muta. Our results are congruent with theory and previous findings showing that kama muta is a distinct positive social relational emotion that is evoked by experiencing or observing a sudden intensification of communal sharing. It is commonly accompanied by a warm feeling in the chest, moist eyes or tears, chills or piloerection, feeling choked up or having a lump in the throat, buoyancy and exhilaration. It motivates affective devotion and moral commitment to communal sharing. While we observed some variations across cultures, these five facets of kama muta are highly correlated in every sample, supporting the validity of the construct and the measure.

  Publisher

• Moving Through The Literature: What Is The Emotion Often Denoted Being Moved?

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2024-01-24

  otherSenior author

  When do people say that they are moved, and does this experience constitute a unique emotion? We review theory and empirical research on being moved across psychology and philosophy. We examine feeling labels, elicitors, valence, bodily sensations, and motivations. We find that the English lexeme being moved typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding, often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest, and is often described as pleasurable, though sometimes as a mixed emotion. While we conclude that there is a distinct emotion, we also recommend studying it in a more comprehensive emotion framework, instead of using the ambiguous vernacular term being moved as a scientific term.

  Publisher

• Seeking Communal Emotions in Social Practices That Culturally Evolved to Evoke Emotions: Worship, Kitten Videos, Memorials, Narratives of Love, and More

  Annual Review of Psychology · 2024-08-01 · 5 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In many instances, emotions do not simply happen to people by chance. Often, people actively seek out an emotion by engaging in practices that have culturally evolved to evoke that emotion. Such practices tend to be perpetuated and spread if people want to experience the emotion, like to recall it and tell others about it, want to give the emotion to others and experience it together, and/or regard the emotion as a sign of something wonderful. We illustrate this with a newly delineated emotion, kama muta. Many social practices around the world are structured to evoke kama muta. In those culturally evolved practices, and outside them, what typically evokes kama muta is a sudden intensification of communal sharing, or a sudden shift of attention to a communal sharing relationship. It seems probable that other social-relational emotions are also evoked by sudden changes in relationships or the sudden salience of a relationship. This change or saliencing may be incorporated in social practices that are perpetuated because they evoke the sought-after emotion. We suggest that such practices, as well as sudden changes in relationships that occur elsewhere, are especially promising places to discover social-relational emotions.

  PublisherDOI

• Seeking Moral Meaning in Misfortune

  2023-03-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Faced with illness, suffering, death, famine, or disaster, in most of the world through most of history, people have consulted spirit mediums, oracles, and diviners who reveal who is morally responsible and what can be done to rectify the wrong: appease the offended spirits, ancestors, or deities – and/or identify the witch. Contrary to modern Western explanations of these practices, what is revealed has nothing to do with the material ‘cause’ of the misfortune. What people seek to know, and what is revealed, is who transgressed what social relationship with whom. In these practices, the biological or physical causation is typically not at issue in any respect, and is quite often not even considered relevant to moral responsibility. A person can be found to be at fault without anyone making the attribution that they had anything at all to do with the material facts of the case, such as the disease or accident. The suffering person or community may be found to be at fault, or they may be entirely innocent victims of wrongdoing. If the sufferer(s) are at fault, they need not have intended the transgression or even been aware that they committed any transgression; their suffering or death is regarded as just, regardless. In these crucial respects and others, the explanations that people seek and find can be said to be ‘moral,’ in that they concern transgressions of social relationships. But the morality in which people find meaning does not correspond to the modern Western academic concept of morality. It is notable that finding these ‘moral’ meanings does not make people feel secure, nor does it make them feel that the world is comprehensible, far less controllable. I illustrate these points from my two years of fieldwork among the Moosé of Burkina Faso, including my own consultations with diviners, my three experiences of becoming a diviner myself, and my participation in several funerals where the dead testified who was to blame for their deaths.

  PublisherDOI

• An Emotion Niche for the Cultural Evolution of Social Practices

  2022-03-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Most of human sociality is organized in culturally evolved practices that have been selected as a function of how readily people invent, notice, remember, report, reproduce, and recruit others to them. Social practices are especially prone to persist and diffuse to the extent that they are inherently. In all of these ways, the kama muta emotion is a psychosocial niche selecting for cultural practices that evoke it. Hence in all sorts of cultures throughout history, we find myriad culturally central and salient kama muta-evoking practices in religion, politics, marketing, media, the arts, and everyday sociality. These practices vary greatly and have culturally and institutionally specific unique features. What they all have in common is the promotion and presentation of sudden intensification of communal sharing. That is, cultural practices are selected when they make immediately and dramatically salient some kind of love, fellowship, solidarity, support, belonging, unity, compassion, or kindness. This elicits kama muta that sustains and spreads the practice. Kama muta generates commitment and devotion to communal sharing. So when the communal sharing relationships that it reinforces enhance fitness at the biological level, then in turn, there is natural selection for the psychosocial disposition to experience kama muta.

  PublisherDOI

• Relational incentives theory.

  Psychological Review · 2021-10-28

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Our life is built around coordinating efforts with others. This usually involves incentivizing others to do things and sustaining our relationship with them. Using the wrong incentives backfires: it lowers effort and tarnishes our relationships. But what constitutes a "wrong" incentive? And can incentives be used to shape relationships in a desired manner? To address these and other questions, we introduce relational incentives theory, which distinguishes between two aspects of incentives: schemes (how the incentive is used) and means (what is used as an incentive). Prior research has focused on means (e.g., monetary vs. nonmonetary incentives). Our theory highlights the importance of schemes, with a focus on how they interact with social relationships. It posits that the efficacy of incentives depends largely on whether the scheme fits the relational structure of the persons involved in the activity: participation incentive schemes for communal sharing relations, hierarchy for authority ranking relations, balancing for equality matching relations, and proportional incentive schemes for market pricing relations. We show that these four schemes encompass some of the most prevalent variants of incentives. We then discuss the antecedents and consequences of the use of congruent and incongruent incentive schemes. We argue that congruent incentives can reinforce the relationship. Incongruent incentives disrupt relational motives, which undermines the coordinating relationship and reduces effort. But, importantly, incongruent incentives can also be used intentionally to shift to a new relational model. The theory thus contributes to research on relational models by showing how people constitute and modulate relationships. It adds to the incentives and contracting literatures by offering a framework for analyzing the structural congruence between incentives and relationships, yielding predictions about the effects of incentives across different organizational and individual-level contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ways of Knowing Emotion, and What You Don't Know about Your Own Emotions: The Case of Kama Muta

  Social research · 2020-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Ways of Knowing Emotion, and What You Don't Know about Your Own Emotions:The Case of Kama Muta Alan Page Fiske (bio) THIRTEEN WAYS OF KNOWING AN EMOTION We have emotions, but in what ways do we know or not know them? Emotions have many facets—I will characterize 13 of them—each of which a person may know or not know. These ways of knowing are dissociable—one may know an emotion in any of these ways without necessarily knowing the emotion in any other given manner. Indeed, it is rare to know even one's own emotion in all of these ways at once. And one never is certain of all these facets in another person's emotions. Five of these ways of knowing an emotion concern aspects of the emotion itself: (1). the interpreted perception that evokes the emotion (sometimes called the appraisal); (2). labels one uses to name it; (3). the sensations and signs of the emotion, including gestures and nonverbal utterances; (4). its valence (positivity and/or negativity of one kind or another); and [End Page 171] (5). the motives that the emotion gives rise to (which one may not be aware of or, if aware, not fully able to articulate). On any occasion, or in general, one may or may not be aware of any one of these aspects of even one's own emotion and in that respect know or not fully know the emotion. For example, if one has sensations or makes gestures, one may attend to and acknowledge them. Or one may not be aware of some or all of one's sensations and gestures, and hence in that particular respect not know the emotion. There is a temporal dimension to knowing these five aspects of an emotion. One may know or not know any of these aspects of the emotion in the moment as immediate current experiences; as memories; or subjunctively, as plans, hopes, imagined or fictionally represented occurrences. In important respects imagination, memory, and even perception are constructive processes, based on implicit and explicit culturally informed and experientially developed models. So when one's models of an emotion generate a nonveridical construction of an emotional moment, one's knowledge of it is distorted, confabulated, or incomplete. This leads us to the observation that living in the world can affect a person in six more ways that cognitive psychologists call memory systems. Each of these six memory systems is a way of knowing. Two of them are conscious and more or less articulable, hence they are called declarative or explicit memory systems. The first of the two is episodic mnemonic knowledge of an event or story, such as memory of the first time you kissed someone romantically. The other kind of declarative memory is knowledge of an idea, or having a belief; this is the seventh way of knowing an emotion, consisting of semantic conceptual knowledge, such as, for example, the concept of "falling in love." Four of the effects of living in the world are not readily accessible to consciousness and not directly or reliably articulable, so they are called nondeclarative or implicit memory systems. One (the eighth way [End Page 172] of knowing) is perceptual representation of the overall sensory structure or gestalt of something, such that, for example, you recognize an emotion by just one slight sensation. A second implicit kind of memory (the ninth way of knowing) is classical conditioning, such that, for example, hearing a song that you used to dance to with your first love evokes the emotion you felt then. You can also have the habit of doing something or the competence to do it; this (the tenth way of knowing) is procedural memory, also known as habitus, practice, or praktognosia. For example, you may be able to make people feel welcome and cozy—without knowing how you do it, and perhaps without even knowing that you habitually do so. The fourth kind of implicit memory (the eleventh way of knowing) is operant conditioning, which consists of skills or habits that have been shaped by patterns of rewards or punishments that you may not have consciously noticed. Again, you might not even...

  PublisherDOI

• Millennia of meanings of Christian tears

  2019-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The locus of kama muta in religion

  2019-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Universal narrative prototypes of reunion, culturally adapted to evoke kama muta

  2019-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH043857

  NIH · $1.3M · 2001

• NIH Grant R29MH043857

  NIH · $554k · 1994

Frequent coauthors

• Beate Seibt

  University of Oslo

  66 shared

• Thomas W. Schubert

  Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

  64 shared

• Janis Zickfeld

  48 shared

• Tage Shakti

  Northwestern University

  33 shared

• Michael F. Green

  University of California, Los Angeles

  24 shared

• Kimmy S. Kee

  California State University, Channel Islands

  24 shared

• Robert S. Kern

  Neurobehavioral Systems

  22 shared

• William P. Horan

  21 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1986

• M.A., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1981

• B.A., Anthropology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1978