Comparisons Among Multidimensional Structures Of Interpersonal Relations

Abstract

Eighty-seven subjects made three kinds of judgments about each of 25 kinds of interpersonal relations (for example, "between supervisor and employee"): (1) direct ratings of similarity between pairs of relations; (2) repeated selections of subsets of relations having some characteristic in common; and (3) ratings of the relations on numerous bipolar scales, "INDSCAL" analyses of data from each of the judgmental tasks indicated that the conceptual space for the interpersonal relations is four-dimensional. The unrotated dimensions were interpreted as "cooperative and friendly vs. competitive and hostile," "equal vs. unequal," "socioemotional and informal vs. task-oriented and formal," and "intense vs. superficial." Different subgroups varied in terms of the weights they implicitly gave to these four dimensions.