ABSTRACT
The widedivergence among the classifications of the social environment has severely hindered efforts to develop a model of interactional processes (Endler & Magnusson, 1976;Magnusson & Endler, 1977). Category schemes range from those that lump social phenomena on the basis of the most inclusive principles to those that divide them on the basis of the narrowest difference. Category schemes also originate from the most diverse methods such as free-response descriptions, checklist observational judgments, and factor analytic examinations of many types of responses , Our approach is simpler. We derive the elements of our classification system from the major features of the situation that have been shown to be important in decades of intense experimental work in social psychology. For example, social psychologists have often found it necessary to isolate a similar variable, such as task complexity or social status, to explain the nature of their results in areas as diverse as information processing, persuasion, prosocial behavior, conflict resolution, or group productivity. This approach to deriving a category system for the social situation has the added advantage of allowing us to know in advance that the elements included indeed have serious social consequences.
