The Components of Social Control and Dependence

Abstract

One of the central theses of this book is that, with the possible exception of some collective action dilemma situations to be discussed later, cooperation contexts depend on the correlation of preferences in interaction situations: The more strongly the participants’ initial preferences are correlated the more possibilities of cooperation (and cooperative helping activities) there are. Furthermore, cooperation typically requires that the participants share a cooperative attitude disposing them to make their relevant preferences (and actions) mesh with others’ preferences (and actions). Cooperative preferences can be shown to be decomposable into various underlying, mainly situational components of social dependence (or control). In this chapter I will present a technical account of the components of social dependence (or rather the inverse relation of control) which I developed and published several years ago (Tuomela, 1984, 1985a). This theory of the components of social control or dependence is a generalization and technical refinement of the theory developed by Kelley and Thibaut (1978). In the next chapter we will see how to connect this account to the theory of cooperation developed earlier in this book. While the material in the present chapter is needed for a precise understanding for some later developments in this book, a reader not interested in technical discussion may read the chapter only cursorily.