Social psychologists have always been concerned with two-person interactions and the factors enabling one person to gain dominance. Although social psychology has devised a revolutionary set of techniques to investigate the phenomenon of power, hypotheses are too often ambiguously stated, research programs end in cul-de-sacs, and experiments take on the character of one-shot studies. In an attempt to stimulate new directions in research and to provide cumulative emphasis on the development of scientific theory in the area of power relations, Tedeschi has assembled original and path...

The nature of social power, the ability of individuals to affect the behavior and belief of others, is central to any understanding of the dynamics of change in our society. It is therefore surprising that social scientists, and especially social psychologists, have devoted relatively little attention to the subject and have accumulated relatively little knowledge about it. But this gap may be more apparent than real argues James T. Tedeschi; there has in fact been a great deal of research on many aspects of interpersonal influence. What is missing is the kind of consensus about an...

The technological revolution in the social sciences made available a set of research tools and data manipulation techniques that permit the study of complex social processes previously inaccessible or not amenable to our observational powers. One important set of tools took the generic title "experimental games," which were characterized by the interactive protagonists' pursuit of relatively well-defined goals whose achievement is dependent on the behavior of others. James T. Tedeschi, Barry R. Schlenker, and Thomas V. Bonoma, in this work, explicate these highly structured...