Relational mobility: A socioecological approach to personal relationships.

In this chapter, we discuss how the nature of our environment, and the social environment in particular, can impact relationship processes.We put a special emphasis on the effect of relational mobility, a socio-ecological factor reflecting the degree to which a particular society or group provides individuals with opportunities to choose relational partners based on their personal preferences.We will specifically focus on the impact of relational mobility on friendship, a type of relationship that appears to exist in almost all societies but still maintains a high degree of cross-societal variation.First, we will briefly review a meta-theoretical standpoint called the "socio-ecological approach," which analyzes the relationship between psychological processes and behaviors of individuals and the external social environment (e.g.Nisbett & Cohen, 1996;Oishi & Graham, 2010).Second, we will introduce the concept of relational mobility, and discuss how this concept might be useful to explain variation in friendship processes across societies.Third, we will review findings from empirical studies, including our own, that have examined the effect of relational mobility on friendship.The topics of these studies include how individuals conceptualize interpersonal relationships, what kind of attributes lead to success in relationships, the type of relationships that individuals form, and how individuals behave in interpersonal contexts.Finally, we will discuss the implications of the socio-ecological approach for the study of interpersonal relationships, and discuss how this approach can help to bridge various disciplines in the social and biological sciences which seek to understand relationships between individuals.