AIM Framework glossary
Relatedness
Canonical definition
Relatedness is the Thinker's signed reading of how another Individual's gain bears on the Individual's own, committed to the Belief Register as a Belief: positive where the other's gain counts with the Individual's own, negative where the other's gain is the Individual's loss. Relatedness is one of the two axes on which the Agent-Type Vector lies, the other being Salience, the Observer's signed reading of the other's presentation. Collaborator-weight is the positive side of Relatedness and Rival-weight the negative side, and a relationship is placed by its position on the plane the two readings span. Relatedness is held for as long as the Belief is held. The Belief starts from a prior the Belief Register already holds, a genealogy, a shared membership or the template for Individuals of the other's presentation, and moves on the conduct the Thinker observes across encounters; neither co-presence nor kinship is required to keep the Belief, absence supplies no Evidence, and only Evidence revises the Belief. What absence lowers is Salience: the Observer's reading of the other relaxes when the other presents nothing, so the feeling Salience carries toward an absent other falls toward indifference while the Belief stands, and returns when the other is next in the field. For a stranger Relatedness is low but not zero. Exchange places the other at a moderate level for as long as the exchange runs, and at the high end the Belief is that the other's gain counts as the Individual's own, so the other's Well-Being enters the Individual's valuation as a good of the Individual's own. An in-group and an out-group are regions of the Relatedness axis, not categories. The lowercase term is vernacular, and includes relatedness in Self-Determination Theory, the need for connection with others that the Framework classifies under Intrinsic Motivation.
Explanation
How related you are to someone, in AIM's sense, is how their gains register against your own. If their good counts toward yours, Relatedness is positive; if their gain is your loss, as with a rival for the same prize, it is negative. It is something your mind comes to believe about a person, and it lasts as long as the belief does. You can go years without seeing an old friend and still count their good as your own. What fades in the meantime is how much they register with you, which is why the feeling seems to have gone and comes back the moment you meet again. You can also hold it toward someone you have never met, because you share a family or a cause. It changes when something gives you reason to change it, such as being used or betrayed, not because time has passed. Your mind also takes a second, faster reading of every person it notices, Salience: whether they are someone to approach or to avoid. Put the two readings together and any relationship has a place: the stranger near the middle, the rival on the negative side of Relatedness, the threat on the negative side of Salience, the person you love where both are high. Who counts as "us" and who as "them" is a matter of how far along the Relatedness scale someone sits, not of which box they are in. The everyday word, and the "relatedness" psychologists list among the basic needs, mean something looser: the felt need to connect.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct. Derived from Axiom 9, the two-limb computation of the Agent-Type Vector (Chapter 4, Section 4.4.7) and the Belief Register (Chapter 4, Section 4.4.8).