Interaction Models

The radical interdependence between humans who live together makes virtually all human behavior conditional. The behavior of individuals is conditional upon the expectations of those around them and those expectations are conditional upon the rules (institutions) and norms (culture) constructed to monitor reward and punish different behaviors. As a result nearly all hypotheses about humans are conditional conditional upon the resources they possess the institutions they inhabit or the cultural practices that tell them how to behave. Interaction Models provides a stand-alone accessible overview of how interaction models which are frequently used across the social and natural sciences capture the intuition behind conditional claims and context dependence. It also addresses the simple specification and interpretation errors that are unfortunately commonplace. By providing a comprehensive and unified introduction to the use and critical evaluation of interaction models this book shows how they can be used to test theoretically-derived claims of conditionality.