ABSTRACT
The study of human social behavior is an extraordinarily complex area of research. Among the many reasons, two are dominant. First, human social behavior obviously is affected by an enormous number of variables. To determine the relationship between a par ticular environmental or social variable and an individual’s or a group’s response, other influences on the behavior must be either eliminated or controlled. A most challenging task, therefore, is the design of adequate experiments that have the sophisticated con trols necessary to increase the experimenter’s confidence that a relationship between a particular stimulus in a social environment and a particular social response actually exists.
