Beyond homo strategus:A comment on Kelley's 'Analysis of social orientations'

This comment addresses Kelley's tar get article that provides a model aimed at providing a broad theoretical model for all of our ongoing interpersonal life. We underline Kelley's assertion to use abstract minimal representations for assessment purposes, but observe that similar principles should hold for theoretical models. Kelley's theoretical model defies falsification because there are many possible problems for confounding. In addition the model is heavily influenced by the dominant game theoretical protocol in that it focuses on strategic behaviour to be found in control-type relationships, thereby ignoring the affiliative type of interpersonal behaviour. Finally it is observed that although sequential-temporal aspects of behaviour are integrated in the model, the model neglects the embeddedness of the dyad in other groups and organizations, thereby ignoring the long-term effect of the externalities on the collective level