ABSTRACT
Use of equations of the form B = f(P, S) supposes that situations can be analyzed in terms of dimensions. A currently popular way of finding such dimensions of situations is by means of multidimensional scaling, in which subjects indicate how similar a number of situations are to each other, so that the underlying dimensions which they are using can be extracted statistically. Wish and Kaplan (1977) used this method for finding the dimensionality of eight different kinds of social events and eight role relations. He obtained the following dimensions: (1) friendly-hostile; (2) cooperative-competitive; (3) intense-superficial, (4) equal-unequal, (5) informal-formal, and (6) task-oriented-not task-oriented. They were not all independent; the first two are correlated, for example.
