ABSTRACT
A good deal of legitimate criticism of the uses to which behavioural studies are often put relates to the indiscriminate employment of experimental findings. The virtue of the behavioural sciences is that they force us to make our assumptions more explicit. They also compel us to realise that any model is always a partial representation of reality and that the test of any model is its adequacy for a given purpose. A related error is to denigrate a particular model in oversweeping terms as when the power-politics approach is consigned to oblivion by the use of pejorative terms such as the "billiard ball" model. At a world level the argument is that the "billiard ball" model promotes the status of authorities at the price of inhibiting political and social change by means of restrictive intervention through a threat system. Most provocative and interesting developments in recent work has been an emphasis on controlled communication as a technique of conflict resolution.
