Introduction

The new approach to research on social behaviour takes an account of the biological and cultural basis of social interaction. This new approach is being used by a rapidly growing number of research workers in social psychology and a number of other subjects, including ethology, anthropology and linguistics. The two key ideas are: to study the detailed processes of social interaction at the level of the elements of interaction, and to relate social behaviour to its biological basis and cultural setting. The dominant approach to social psychology in recent years has been to test rather abstract hypotheses about social behaviour, in 'stripped down' laboratory experiments of an artificial kind. Recent research on social interaction has taken a different approach to theory and explanation from that now fashionable in social psychology. Research on social interaction has been mainly conducted on the simplest social situations - dyadic encounters.