Much of the thinking about society is in terms of social relationships. One thinks of the relation between father and son, employer and employee, leader and follower, merchant and customer; or, of the relation between friends, between enemies, between children, etc. Such relationships are among the most obvious features of society and consequently it seems an elaboration of the obvious to inquire into their nature. Social relationship represents fundamental ways of organizing social data. In short, a society may be viewed, if one wishes, as a system of relationships.
In analyzing social relationships, one soon finds them more complicated than they first appear. They involve reciprocal obligations, reciprocal statuses, and reciprocal ends and means between two or more actors in mutual contact. They refer to form or pattern of interaction between individuals.
Any society contains hundreds and perhaps thousands of socially defined relationships. The immediate family alone may contain as many as fifteen. How many relationships a society utilizes is simply a matter of how many criteria it takes into account in defining behaviour between individuals? The fifteen relationships of the immediate family rest on three criteria — age, sex and generation. Outside the family, an infinite number of criteria may be used, so there is no limit to the number of possible relationships.
It follows that to catalogue all the meaningful relationships in which human beings are involved would be a never-ending task. Instead, they may be classified and dealt with as general types. Any classification, however, must have some point to it. In social sciences, as in all sciences, classification is worthless unless it seizes upon traits that are significant, traits that facilitate causal analysis. For this reason, social relationships have been classified and discussed in terms of the kind of interaction they manifest. The most important kinds of interaction singled out for consideration here are conflict, competition and cooperation. Each of these has several subtypes, but mention of the main ones alone is enough to demonstrate that a proper understanding of the forms of interaction is essential to the understanding of society.
Acc to Merrill, social interaction is the general process where by two or more persons are in meaningful contact and communication as a result of which their behavior is modified slightly. There are two kinds of social interaction. They are contact and communication.
Social interaction by definition involves contact, and contact necessarily requires a material or sensory medium. It need not of course require the impingement of one body directly upon another, but it does require the occurrence of direct or indirect sensory stimulation between the interacting parties. The material medium, however, is only a necessary, not a sufficient basis of contact. Individuals can be in material contact without being in social contact. For example, two tribes living on opposite sides of swamp and having nothing to do with each other may nevertheless be bitten by mosquitoes that continually carry malaria from one tribe to another. It is not merely physical contact that counts, but meaningful or symbolic contact. Good will may be expressed by either handshake or a spoken phrase, a letter or a smile. Added to the sensory stimulus is a meaningful stimulus. The social behaviour of human beings consists of acquired responses to the meaningful responses of others. Human interaction in other words, is communicative interaction. The social behaviour of human beings consists of acquired responses to the meaningful responses of others. Human interaction, in other words, is communicative interaction.
The essential feature of communication is that one person infers from the behaviour of another (whether speech, gesture or posture) what idea or feeling the other person is trying to convey. He then reacts not to the behaviour as such but to the inferred idea or feeling. The other person then reacts to his response in terms of the idea or feeling-the meaning behind it. When a girl receives flowers, she looks at them and smells them, but her main interest is in the person who sent them and why. Were they sent to end a quarrel, to mark an anniversary, to cement a promise, to say farewell, to brighten an illness? Unless she can answer such questions, she will feel a loss, not knowing what to do. It is the meanings behind the behaviour that are involved in the system of mutual expectations previously described as being present in the interacting situation.
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