Patterns of Human Behavior \11 



deliberately imagined to be far from the beginning and from the 

 end of the total interchange. It will be observed that B's item 26 

 is a response in the trigram 25-26-27, but it is also a reinforce- 

 ment in the trigram 24-25-26 and a stimulus in the trigram 

 26-27-28. The formal truth, however, may not represent the 

 natural history of the relationship as it is perceived by the par- 

 ticipants. They are busy putting their labels, imposing their 

 Gestalten, on the items and on the trigrams. It is perfectly possible, 

 for example, for A to punctuate this interchange in such a way 

 that he will see only the trigrams 23-24-25 and 27-28-29 and 

 ignore or brush off B's items 22 and 26, creating a picture in which 

 A always provides the stimuli and reinforcements while B provides 

 only the responses. If A succeeds in maintaining this system and 

 in making B see the relationship in the same way, we may say 

 that A is, in this particular sense, the dominant participant in 

 the relationship. On the other hand, B, by pulling his punches 

 on items 22 and 26, may succeed in forcing A to think that he 

 (A) has the initiative. It may then be difficult to decide who is 

 "dominant." 



At this point it is not appropriate to go into all the possible 

 details of the punctuation of such sequences. However, a part of 

 this matter has been explored in earlier publications (2) in which 

 the formal resemblances and differences between dominance, 

 dependency, and spectatorship were discussed. It was pointed out 

 that these themes of relationship could be reduced to paradigms 

 of learning and that various types of "end-linkage"' could occur. 

 For example. A, in his relationsliip to B, could take the dominant 

 end of a dominance-submission relationship and the succoring end 

 of a succoring-dependence one. These patterns could also be 

 reversed, in which case A would combine dominance with de- 

 pendency. Very basic differences between cultures, e.g., between 

 the cultures of England and America, might be expressed as 

 contrasts of end-linkage in parent-child relationships. 



But, if it is true of human natural history that people punctuate 

 their interchanges into sequences which are, in fact, contexts of 

 learning, it follows that in interpersonal interchange we must also 

 face at least the three levels of learning which have already been 

 defined in the learning experiments. That is, each person is 



