Our goal in writing this Atlas was to provide behavioral scientists with a tool for analyzing and understanding the influence of interpersonal situations on social interaction. We believe that there are important insights about human social behavior to be gained from systematic investigation of the properties of situations. To be sure, “the situation” has long been the object of considerable attention in several of the behavioral sciences, notably social psychology (the discipline that we six authors all call home). Nonetheless, our impression is that this scrutiny has been more intuitive than theoretical, more haphazard than systematic. Furthermore, existing research has tended to emphasize the relatively impersonal aspects of situations even though interpersonal factors are often likely to dominate the individual's attention and behavior. We maintain that a more comprehensive theoretical approach to the description and analysis of situations, and especially to their interpersonal properties, will do much to advance our understanding of social interaction.

Interdependence theory forms the conceptual skeleton for our analysis. First proposed by Thibaut and Kelley (1959) and later extended by Kelley and Thibaut (1978), interdependence theory provides a systematic account of certain key interpersonal properties of situations, as well as the individual's response to those properties, as the causal determinants of social interaction. The term “interdependence” refers to the manner in which two individuals influence each other's outcomes in the course of their interaction.