ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some methods which were used to study dominance and affiliation in military parades, nightclub security personnel, artistic rehearsals, courts, meetings, and general bureaucracy. Ethologists often become engrossed in one or two species and devote themselves to their study. Animals are enchanting but it is behaviours, their similarities and differences, that are the preoccupying objects of ethological study. In childhood many great scientists have been collectors of such things as beetles, shells, or stamps. Ethology is firmly in the positivist scientific tradition. This is evident in a mistrust of unobservable concepts such as subjective states and a preference for analysis at the level of physiological mechanisms. Human ethologists interview their subjects but it is observational data that are most trusted. Social interaction, no matter how complex, is composed of behaviour elements. The scientific task is to discover and explain regularities among them, reducing those regularities to basic principles.
