ABSTRACT
Until comparatively recently, little was known about the elements and processes of social behaviour, and even less about how these might fail. Research and diagnosis were conceptualised in global terms, of personality, styles and traits, and abnormal forms of these. In the last two decades, however, there have been extensive new developments. Social psychologists have carried out experiments on gaze, facial expression and other aspects of non-verbal communication, ‘taking the role’ of the other, and the sequence of social events. Sociologists have pointed to the importance of selfpresentation, the rules of social behaviour and the variation of behaviour from one situation to another. Linguists have examined the different functions of utterances as ‘speech acts’, the ways in which utterances form a conversation and the generative rules governing sentence construction. Anthropologists have shown how some aspects of social behaviour vary greatly between different cultures and subcultures, while other aspects are culturally universal. Philosophers have argued that the old, deterministic model of social behaviour was mistaken, and that people are to a large extent producing social acts which are intentional and consciously planned.
