Exosocial

Exosocial is the adjective for anything belonging to the outward movement, and it marks the opposite side of every distinction endosocial marks. Altruism is exosocial and charity is endosocial. Dignity is exosocial and honour is endosocial. Exosocial laughter shares euphoria outward and endosocial laughter reinforces the membranes containing a group's euphoria. In each pair the visible behaviour can be identical, and what differs is whether a boundary is being crossed or maintained. The word attaches to acts and interactions rather than to people, which is why Marsh can describe a mostly endosocial person performing an exosocial act without contradiction. Because expansion is the direction life moves in her framework, exosocial acts do not require encouragement so much as the removal of what obstructs them, and she catalogues the obstruction precisely. Social coercion against exosocial expansion comes in three forms: association of endogroup guilt with exosocial expansion, association of negative image status with exosocial expansion and restriction of opportunities. Alongside these she lists violations of autonomy and dignity that work to the same end, including the manufacture and enforcement of busywork, attacks on health, attacks on the shared environment and the creation of interpersonal conflict. What supports the movement is correspondingly ordinary. Societies where everyone thanks the bus driver, or where people bow to thank or apologize in passing, are healthier than societies permitting no gratitude or contrition at all, since teaching people to keep their own guilt on their own plate and to acknowledge the gifts of others is what exosocial expansion is made of.

The prefix pair has no established use in social science, where the nearest analogues are Putnam's bridging and bonding social capital and the anthropological distinction between exogamy and endogamy. Cosmopolitanism in political philosophy makes a normative case for obligation beyond one's own group, and parochial altruism in evolutionary research names generosity restricted to a group. Marsh's term is broader than any of these because it qualifies acts rather than networks, marriages or moral obligations, and it carries a directional claim the others do not, that outward movement is the default state of a living self and that anything preventing it requires an explanation.