Psychological Review 1974, Vol. 81, No. S, 392-425 STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR 1 LORNA SMITH BENJAMIN * Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute A brief review of the literature on structural analysis of interpersonal be- havior is followed by a proposal which draws heavily from prior models, especially those of Schaefer and of Leary. The proposed model goes be- yond previous ones in that it has a highly explicit structure which defines behavioral opposites, complements, and antidotes. Built on two axes named affiliation and interdependence, the model describes dyadic social inter- actions in terms of complementary proportions of those underlying dimen- sions. Opposite behaviors appear at 180° angles whereas complementary behaviors appear at topologically similar positions on two separate planes. Antidotes are defined as opposites of complements. Using the questionnaire method, the proposed structure has been tested by the responses of normal as well as psychiatric subjects. Analysis of these data by the techniques of autocorrelation, circumplex analysis, and factor analysis supports the model. The assumption that behavior is orderly and lawful is the basis of scientific psychol- ogy. If the assumption is valid, then it should be possible to develop a model for predicting which particular behaviors will tend to be associated with each other. Anal- ysis of the basic structure of social behavior is one possible approach which might be ex- pected to yield such predictions. The need for a structural model of social behavior has been emphasized by Foa and Turner (1970): . . . there has been some reluctance to recognize that specification of psychological components is likely to be as complex in construction and as revolutionary in consequence as the notion of struc- ture has been in nuclear physics and in genetics [p. 246]. Efforts to describe the structure of social behavior can be viewed in terms of two major categories: the multidimensional ap- proaches which include as many dimensions as are needed to meet a given mathematical criterion, and the approaches which confine the number of dimensions to two or three so that a model can be constructed in real space. The multidimensional approach is 1 Special thanks for encouragement and help with the development of this paper go to Marjorie H. Klein and James Greenley; the editors of Psy- chological Review also made helpful contributions to the final version. 2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Lorna S. Benjamin, Department of Psychiatry, University Hospitals, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. exemplified by Cattell's 16 Personality Fac- tor analysis of personality, and the real-space modeling approach is exemplified by Leary's (1957) interpersonal circle. In defense of the multidimensonal ap- proach, Cattell notes: The busy psychometrist may sometimes feel that sixteen sub-scores is a lot, but such is the real complexity of human nature, and if, as studies show, the majority of these personality character- istics are involved in most criterion predictions, a much better multiple correlation is to be obtained by respecting the complexity than by indulging in a fools paradise of over-simplification [Goldberg & Hase, 1967, p. 3]. In response to the charge of oversimplifica- tion, the modeling approach can name the advantages of parsimony and the manipula- tive possibilities following from having a pic- ture of the model in real space. This paper will be concerned with the second alterna- tive, namely models which are simple enough to be pictured in two or three di- mensions. The development of parsimonious struc- tural models has been pursued, sometimes independently, by theorists from psychiatry and sociology as well as from psychology. At times there has been remarkable overlap in conceptualization suggesting independent convergence on a common underlying struc- ture. Such overlap is illustrated by Chance (1966, p. 133) and Biermann (1969, p. 339) 392