Relational mobility refers to the degree of opportunities people have to meet and choose the people they interact with in their local society (Schug et al., 2010; Thomson et al., 2018). Societies with high relational mobility offer individuals numerous opportunities to choose and change partners, fostering relationships based on choice rather than external circumstances or constraints. Conversely, societies with low relational mobility see individuals deeply integrated into their existing social networks. These societies limit opportunities to meet and choose new partners, resulting in resilient and stable relationships.

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Relational mobility has been proposed to impact the types of social behaviors (adaptive tasks) that are most beneficial (Yuki & Schug, 2020). In societies with higher relational mobility, adaptive tasks center on attracting and retaining desirable partners. This requires individuals to actively signal their value to others and to demonstrate their commitment. Because others can easily exit from existing relationships, maintaining one’s relationships requires continuous effort to prevent being replaced. In contrast, societies with low relational mobility are marked by stable, often lifelong relationships embedded in fixed social structures such as family, community, or workplace networks. Here, the adaptive tasks shift toward maintaining harmony, managing reputation, and avoiding relational conflict, since replacing a partner or forming new ties is difficult. In these settings, people are incentivized to behave cautiously, adhere to social norms, and preserve group cohesion. 

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Relational mobility was first used as a theoretical construct to help explain personal relationships in Japan and North America, including similarity between friendship partners (Schug et al., 2009) and self-disclosure in relationships (Schug et al., 2010). This focus was subsequently extended to explain cultural variation across a wide range of societies around the world. In general, perceptions of societal relational mobility tend to be lowest in East and Southeast Asia, while perceptions of relational mobility were highest in Latin and South America, followed by North American and Western European countries (Thomson et al., 2018).

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Measurement

The Relational Mobility Scale

The relational mobility scale is a 12-item scale that assesses a person’s perception of the relational mobility of their local environment, including subfactors representing the ease of meeting new people and choice in relationships (i.e., the degree to which one can exit from relationships if desired, and the degree to which people can choose whom they interact with) (Thomson et al., 2018). Importantly, the relational mobility scale is not intended to measure an individual’s perceptions of their own unique opportunities to form and choose relationships. Rather, the scale is intended to capture perceptions of opportunities shared by others in their local environment. The relational mobility scale typically uses a 6-point rating scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Sample items include, ‘They (people around them) have many chances to get to know other people’ and ‘If they did not like their current groups, they would leave for better ones’. The relational mobility scale was originally developed simultaneously in English and Japanese and was later translated into additional languages and administered to users of a large social networking site, from which country-level scores were obtained from 39 countries and regions around the world (Thomson et al., 2018). Country-level scores and translations can be found at: https://osf.io/qfbjc/

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The relational mobility scale is envisioned as a socio-ecological variable, rather than a traditional individual difference variable (such as extraversion) or an attribute (such as popularity or attractiveness) (Yuki et al., 2007). Variation in responses to the relational mobility scale is intended to capture variation in the micro-societies that surround each individual, and individuals’ perceptions thereof. This variation in relational mobility shapes the adaptive strategies that are useful in the context of each person’s social environment.

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Scale Modifications

The relational mobility scale items ask participants to rate the relational mobility for others in their local environment (e.g., “They (people in my local environment) have many opportunities to meet other people”). This phrasing allows the scale to be modified for a particular environment or setting, for instance “People at my school” or “people I work with.” For instance, previous studies have measured relational mobility of specific environments, such as by asking participants to rate the relational mobility of “people around them in Canada” (Zhang & Li, 2014), as well as people at their university (Falk et al., 2009).

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As described above, the relational mobility scale assesses people’s perceptions of relational mobility shared by people in their immediate society, rather than their unique relational mobility. This focus on the surrounding environment rather than the individual is intended to address several issues: First, relational mobility is envisioned as a socio-ecological variable, rather than a traditional individual difference variable such as extraversion or popularity. Measuring perceptions of one’s society thus more directly taps into the social ecologies in which people are embedded. Additionally, asking participants to rate their intersubjective perceptions (Chiu et al., 2010) of the relational mobility of others in their society rather than themselves personally can help to avoid confounding relational mobility with cultural differences in self-enhancement. Previous research has suggested that self-enhancement effects are more pronounced in North America than in East Asia (Kitayama et al., 1997). In North America, people tend to emphasize (and exaggerate) their positive traits, while East Asians tend to (perhaps strategically) emphasize modesty and self-effacement (Yamagishi et al., 2012). Asking East Asians and North Americans to rate the degree to which they personally are able to form new relationships may thus represent appraisals of their own worth to others and their popularity, which may be prone to self-enhancement effects (Falk et al., 2009). Asking participants to make judgments about others in the society they live in, rather than themselves personally, reduces the possibility that differences in relational mobility result from self-enhancement effects.

 

Nevertheless, there may be some situations in which researchers seek to measure individual differences in relational opportunities by asking participants to rate their personal relational mobility, rather than their perceptions of their society. In such situations, researchers may benefit from including additional individual difference variables such as extraversion, self-esteem, popularity, and narcissism, which may reflect people’s perceptions of their own relational opportunities.

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Manipulating Relational Mobility 

In addition to measuring relational mobility using the self-report relational mobility scale, several studies have experimentally manipulated perceptions of relational mobility. One method developed by Li and colleagues (Li et al., 2015) manipulates perceptions of relational mobility by asking participants to imagine being offered a job in workplaces that are characterized by high or low levels of relational mobility, and spend ten minutes to imagine what it would be like to work in the company and write about their expected relationships with their coworkers. Variations of this manipulation have been used in several studies and show that experimentally-manipulated relational mobility impacts cautious intimacy and attention to enemies (Li et al., 2018; Li & Masuda, 2016), as well as more internal/dispositional (vs. external/situational) attributions for behavior (San Martin et al., 2019). Other studies have used relationship-based recall tasks to activate (or “prime”) psychological tendencies associated with relational mobility, such as by asking participants to recall interactions with strangers versus family members (Yuki et al., 2013). Because family relationships are typically less voluntary and harder to replace, thinking about relationships with family (vs. friends or family) may evoke psychological tendencies similar to those found in low-mobility environments.

 

Related Concepts

The concept of relational mobility is closely tied to Toshio Yamagishi’s large body of work on the “Emancipation theory of trust” (for a review, see Yamagishi, 2011). Yamagishi proposed that differences in social environments help explain cultural variation in generalized trust. Historically, Americans have been found to be more trusting of strangers than Japanese (Yamagishi, 2011). This is an unexpected finding, given Japan’s lower crime rates and stricter social norms. To resolve this apparent paradox, Yamagishi argued that trusting strangers requires social intelligence: the ability to detect who is trustworthy (Yamagishi et al., 1999). In “open” societies like the United States, people regularly interact with new individuals, allowing them to develop these skills through experience. With sufficient social intelligence, trusting others becomes less risky because untrustworthy individuals can be identified and avoided.

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In contrast, Japan represents a more “closed” society, where opportunities to meet new people are limited. Instead of relying on personal discernment, trustworthy behavior is enforced through rigid systems of monitoring and sanctioning (Yamagishi, 1988). Because people are not routinely exposed to unfamiliar others, they have fewer opportunities to develop the skills needed to assess trustworthiness or make attributions about people’s internal motives. As a result, extending trust beyond established networks is much riskier. Over time, these differing environments foster distinct relational norms: Americans are incentivized to forge new relationships, while Japanese are incentivized to maintain existing ties (Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994). The theory of relational mobility emerged from this framework to capture how the structure of social opportunities in “open” versus “closed” societies shapes individual behavior and cultural patterns of trust.

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The theoretical framework of relational mobility also relates to other types of mobility, such as residential mobility (Choi & Oishi, 2020) and occupational mobility (Chen et al., 2009; Moscarini & Thomsson, 2007). Regions that observe higher residential mobility will likely maintain larger populations of people looking to form new relationships (Oishi et al., 2013), leading to greater regional opportunities to meet new people. At the same time, if people live in regions where people routinely move away, they may have fewer opportunities to choose their own relationships. Thus, although potentially related on an ecological level and sharing conceptual similarities, residential and relational mobility are distinct concepts (see Oishi et al., 2015). 

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With respect to occupational mobility, a large body of literature on turnover behavior and intention has highlighted the role that alternative job opportunities (and employees’ perceptions thereof) impact employees’ decision to stay in their job (see Price, 2001). Just as relational mobility may impact whether people stay in existing relationships, whether or not people leave jobs that they are dissatisfied with depends on their perception of available alternative opportunities in the job market (Gerhart, 1990). Furthermore, just as people living in societies with higher levels of relational mobility benefit from demonstrating commitment to their partners (such as via self-disclosure or gift-giving, e.g., Komiya et al., 2019; Schug et al., 2010) in order to retain their relationships, organizations may also need to show their commitment to their employees in order to retain valuable personnel when alternative job opportunities are abundant (Albalawi et al., 2019). Thus, companies and industries where people tend to move between jobs and organizations frequently will need to invest more effort and energy in recruiting and retaining talented workers.

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Finally, the concept of relational mobility shares many parallels with work by Glenn Adams and colleagues on the cultural grounding of personal relationships. This perspective argues that cultural ecologies influence how relationships are grounded, i.e., whether relationships are rooted in personal choice (common in Western, individualistic contexts) or in ascribed roles and obligations (common in non-Western, interdependent contexts). Most of this work originated in work on West Africa (Adams, 2005; Adams & Plaut, 2003), which demonstrated that West African personal relationships are embedded within the communal structure, which differs from the individual-centered relational models in Western societies. The findings from these studies seem to suggest that relational mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa may be shaped by socio-ecological factors like one's obligation to their kin, neighbors and community, which may act as a constraint to voluntary relationship choice.

 

Limitations and Future Directions

Although relational mobility has proven to be a useful construct in the understanding of cross-cultural differences in interpersonal behavior; this approach is still subject to many limitations. First, much of the existing research on relational mobility has focused on comparisons between East Asian and Western (primarily North American) cultures. The focus on these cultures has provided valuable insights; however, it has left other regions unexplored. Notably, with some exceptions (San Martin et al., 2019) sub-Saharan Africa remains relatively absent from large-scale empirical works on relational mobility, despite similarities between relational mobility and the grounding personal relationship. There is a need to expand the scope of relational mobility research to include other regions (such as sub-Saharan Africa) and other contexts (job turnover) to explore predictions across regions and contexts.

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Other research should seek alternative methods to measure and construe relational mobility. Importantly, relational mobility as a theoretical construct should not be confused with the measurement of relational mobility (i.e., the relational mobility scale). Indeed, much prior research has noted the limitations of using self-report scales to measure cultural variation (see, for instance, Heine et al., 2002; Lackó et al., 2022). Given that relational mobility is a relatively new construct in cross-cultural research, future research should seek alternative methods to measure and manipulate relational mobility in order to test and refine its theoretical predictions. Other studies may seek to refine the theory of relational mobility using modeling and simulation approaches (Li et al., 2023), which can lead to more complex theoretical frameworks that can simultaneously model individual and societal level phenomena.

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In summary, relational mobility is a socio-ecological framework that helps to understand how the structure of social environments shapes behavior and psychology across cultures and social environments. By highlighting the role of relationship opportunities in shaping adaptive social strategies, the concept bridges individual psychology with broader ecological and cultural contexts. As research continues to expand across diverse regions and domains, research on relational mobility and related socio-ecological (Oishi, 2014) approaches can help to deepen our understanding of human social behavior within and across human societies.

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Author(s) and Reviewer(s): Prepared by Joanna Schug, PhD., and Richard Homenya. Reviewed by Liman Li, PhD., and Kosuke Takemura, PhD. Please direct suggestions and feedback to Dr. Schug (jschug@wm.edu).

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Version date: March 2026.

 

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