Unit 8 Lecture Notes.docx

Unit 8 Lecture Notes Social Order and Structure In the last unit you learned about the socialization process, how all humans are cultivated into their society, how they acquire a sense of self and so forth. So, in this unit, we want to move on to talk about how humans interact with each other. Human...

Unit 8 Lecture Notes Social Order and Structure In the last unit you learned about the socialization process, how all humans are cultivated into their society, how they acquire a sense of self and so forth. So, in this unit, we want to move on to talk about how humans interact with each other. Human interaction or social interaction can be defined as the process by which people act and react in relation to others. Note the act and react, and we could add how we interact with people face to face. So, this is about every day, ordinary one on one face to face human interaction. What do sociologists have to say about that? What can they reveal to us about what would be called micro sociology? Remember the difference between micro, meso, and then micro sociology, also known as social psychology, because it comes closest to micro sociology, comes closest to psychology. Everyday life is comprised of hundreds of patterned, structured interactions. We act or we react because we are interacting with each other. Here are some African youths interacting with each other. Now, they probably don't do this every day. This was probably an arranged structured achievement, but it says something about them. It says something about their values. It says something about their unity, what they think of each other. And here are a bunch of North Americans in a subway or on a bus who are also interact then with each other. Now, it may look as if they're not interacting with each other, but they are. They're very, very conscious of each other the whole time and acting out their consciousness of each other. The youths are acting out the South African concept of Ubuntu. I am because we are. The slide of in the image of North Americans in the subway we have what has been called civil inattention, coined by Erving Goffman. These people are attending to each other. They are very careful not to touch each other, not even to look at each other, make eye contact with each other, certainly not talk to each other. Because why? Well, because the norm is the best way to be civil to each other is to not pay attention to each other in those kinds of settings. So that is just another form of interaction. Civil inattention is another form of interaction. So, there's a big variety. So how do sociologists talk about social order, social structure, social interaction? We call from the first class that we define sociology as the scientific study of the patterns of human behavior. Note As shaped by human interaction, there it is right up front in our definition of sociology. Recall also from our unit on sociological theory. Right at the end I said the central debate of sociology is whether people are free agents able to choose their actions and their interactions, or whether they are constrained by social structure and do not have free choice. The central debate is between free agents able to choose. Or are we actually or do we not have agency and we are constrained by social structure? Well, that's a formative question as we talk about human interaction now as well. People are both free agents who can choose to act, to create. But it's also true that they are constrained by the social norm of civil inattention. You walk onto a subway, and you are constrained by that norm. If you stare somebody in the eyes, people will get very uncomfortable if you rub up against them. You are constrained by the norms of the subway. That's the point. So here are a few concepts about social order and social structure. What kind of social order and social structure are all those people practicing? Well, they appear to be all looking in the same direction. Can you imagine what it would be like if one of those people turned around and suddenly was six inches away from the person standing behind them? That's a violation of personal space. That's a violation of norms. We'll talk about that. But they are all interacting. They are all interacting according to norms, according to the social structure of the situation. So, let's start with the definition of the situation. Here's the definition of the definition of the situation, the organization of perception in which people assemble objects meanings, and others and act toward them. There we start with action and then reaction. And then interaction and act toward them in a coherent way. Like all those people in the crowd, they were all acting in a coherent way because they had organized their perception of the crowd. They have assembled all the objects and meanings, and the other people present, and they're all acting toward each other and the situation in a very coherent way. You do the same thing every time you walk into a classroom, even when you walk into a brand-new classroom. Let's say you're a first-year university student and you walk into a classroom for the first time. You've never been there before, but you have organized your perception of what a classroom is, and you act in a coherent way. And 99 times out of 100, everybody else is doing the same thing. And so, you all get along perfectly well. It works. Social structure, social order works while it constrains all of us. But note that the definition of the situation is also an interpretation. It's a perception. The definition of the situation is how people are, how people interpret the situation. You don't. It's not a stimulus response. It's interpretation of the stimulus or the situation or the room. And then response your responses to your interpretation, not to the raw stimulus. We're not Pavlov's dogs. As we've already said, and we'll probably say 50 times in this course, that which is defined as real is real in its consequences. The perception, the interpretation, the definition of the situation, however, you define the situation, you might be wrong, but that's your definition of the situation and you will act accordingly. That's the consequence of your interpretation, of your definition, of your perception. Note that our definitions of the situation are usually selected from previous definitions, since they're not constructed brand new. When you walk into a classroom, you're not making up a brand-new perception or definition or interpretation that you've never had before. Know you've been in classrooms before, and you are selecting that definition of the situation and applying it to your new situation. And yes, 99 times out of 100. So, like everybody else, and we get along fine because of social order and social structure, there are many, many ready-made definitions of the situation out there. And we just pick one and hope that it's right and act accordingly. And yeah, it works almost all the time. Not all the time, because sometimes things change. Sometimes there's continuity and social order and sometimes there's change. So, what happens when it's continuous? What happens when it changes? What happens when your definition of the situation is wrong? Okay, well, that's a problem. Most of life is a routine. Okay, so social order is a product of the routinization of the definition of the situation. The routinization of walking into a new classroom done that. It's been there, done that 100 times. It’s that we don't even think twice, but we immediately start acting, reacting, and interacting in certain ways. When we walk into a classroom. Here's an example, literally from the street. When you're walking down a sidewalk and there's a pedestrian walking towards you, do you pass on the left or the right? Nine times out of ten, I'm saying we usually pass on the right. Why? What's the social order? What's the social structure? Well, when we drive a vehicle down the highway, we are always in the right lane, not in the left lane, at least here in Canada. So that's true for vehicle traffic is true for pedestrian traffic. Well, I don't know, but I mean, it's just easier to go with that assumption that why don't we do on the sidewalk what we do on the highway? It works better, it's smoother. It avoids having to decide every time you approach another pedestrian, it avoids collisions on sidewalks. Here’s something you might want to try. Next time you're walking down a sidewalk and there's a pedestrian walking towards you, why don't you walk straight at that person and then at the last second, veer to the left, and I'm betting nine times out of ten there'll be a collision because to avoid a collision, they're going to veer to the right because we're all supposed to veer to the right because that's the social structure of pedestrian traffic. And if you violate it, you're going to cause collisions and you're going to have chaos. Right? There you go. There's a sociology experiment for you to practice right on the street today. It's all completely opposite in the United Kingdom, where all traffic passes on the left, you drive in the left lane, you walk on the left lane, not on the right lane, but that's social order. That's the social structure that makes life easy. No decisions. You just do it automatically. Social order exists because people constantly construct it, and then once it's constructed, they're constrained by it. And because they're constrained by it, they perform it, they comply with it. And the more they perform it and comply with it, the more they reproduce it and the more entrenched it becomes in everyday life. That's what social order and structure is. But when it's not continuous, what happens? Well, you're going to have to negotiate something. You must negotiate something. Negotiating is bargaining or trying to coordinate your activity in some way. It ranges from the trivial to the super serious global political kinds of negotiation. We're talking about negotiation. Let's say you're walking down a hallway, and you turn a corner sharply. And as soon as you turn that corner sharply, there's another pedestrian walking down the hall and you almost bump into each other. And what do you do? you instead of bumping into it, you'll stop and then you'll sort of. Well, do I go left? Do I go right? The other person is saying, I don't know, you go left or right. And in that split second, you negotiate. Who's going to go? Are we going to go past each other on the left or are we going to pass each other on the right? We must negotiate it all the time. So, yeah, this hallway dance is a form of interactive negotiation. Thus, when it's not continuous, it must be negotiated. Here's a larger example of continuity and change. Glaser and Strauss back in the sixties, did a study of awareness context. What do we mean by awareness context? What each person knows about the identity of the other person and his or her own identity in the eyes of the other. So, you and me, we're in this context what I know about you and what I think you know about me is the awareness context of the conversation we're going to have. What do I know about you and what do I think you know about me is going to be highly influential, informative of the interaction that we have. That's the point. Now, Glaser and Strauss did their study in the context of the complex interaction between terminally ill patients in a hospital and the staff, the nurses and the doctors that attended to the terminally ill patient. Okay, so note the two different statuses here. A terminally ill, a patient who is dying and let's say a nurse and they observed what happened and the different kinds of awareness contexts. Here was the first one, open awareness context. Each person knows the other person's true identity, so the patient knows he's dying. The nurse knows he's dying. And so, their interaction is formed by that mutual open awareness as he's treated by the staff. So, what do they do? Well, they help finalize personal matters and help the terminally ill patient through that tragic situation. But a closed awareness context is where the staff, the nurse knows he's dying, but he does not know he's dying. So, what kind of conversations, what kind of interactions are they going to have where she knows he's dying, but he doesn't know he's dying? Lots of talk about tomorrow, even though the nurse knows there is no tomorrow. It's very different. Suspicion awareness context is where one party suspects the identity of the other or suspects the other's view of their identity or both. So, the patient may suspect that he's dying, but the staff, the nurse doesn't think he knows or even suspects that he's dying, but he does suspect. So, what kind of conversations are they going to have? What kind of interaction. Well, that's going to change again. And finally, pretence awareness context. She knows he's dying. He knows he's dying. However, they both pretend it's not true. So, what kind of conversations are they going to have? How are they going to interact? Completely different. Can you see how the awareness context of the situation will be informative of the interaction itself? Now, hospital staff don't do this anymore. This was back in the sixties. Hospital staff are much more upfront and honest with patients these days and, but this applies to many, many other situations. Can you think of other situations where awareness context will be highly formative of the interaction? How about in a marriage where one partner is cheating on the other? Okay, so before the cheating started, there was open awareness context. We're both being completely honest with each other. But once one partner starts cheating, there's a closed awareness part context. So how do they live together then? But then the other partners start to get suspicious. But they haven't talked about it. But there's suspicion. So, what kind of conversations do they have? And then the truth comes out both partners know the truth, but both pretend that it's not truth. And they carry it out in their marriage that way. Can you see how contexts will shape interaction? Or how about a student? The student′s doing fine. Open awareness context. But then the teacher realizes the student is failing, but the student doesn't realize they're failing. That's a closed awareness. But then the student starts to suspect that maybe I'm failing this course. And then they both know that, yeah, the student is failing, but they pretend that it's all okay. Or what about businesses? Where is the business failing? Do the employees suspect that the business is failing? But they don't talk about it? Or does everybody already know that the business is failing? But we're just not going to talk about it. There you go. Very formative of interaction. One more thing: sometimes interaction is conflictual. Obviously, sometimes there are problems to be solved in interaction. Sometimes it's because of confusion or misunderstanding. That's a problem to be solved with communication. Sometimes it's a conflict due to opposite interests. The two parties, the two people have a conflict of interest. Well, that's going to shape how they interact with each other. Who's going to win? The parent or the kid? What's a conflict of interest? Does the parent get her way or does the kid get her way? Here in Canada, there's a tradition of street hockey kids playing hockey on the street and sociologists have observed that, you know, they spend more time arguing with each other than they do playing, haggling about all the structure of the situation. So, they argue about, you know, what are the rules for today? You know, like, do we let the little kids play or not? Does it count if you shoot when the goalie isn't ready or not? Do you lose your place on your team? If you must go to the bathroom and then you come back and somebody else is replaced, you know, like what are the rules? What are the rules here? And then kids like to create identities, you know? Okay, we're the Jets. You're the Leafs. Okay, I'm McDavid. You're Matthews. You know, collective identities, group identities, individual identities. And they're arguing about who's going to be who and who's going to be what, you know, And it’s not a problem. It's a good thing. This is the way kids learn the fundamentals of social interaction, which is far more important than their street hockey game. Social Roles and Identities 1 Now we want to talk about social roles and identities, The role that we have in any given situation will provide normative expectations for both how we behave and how everybody else in the room behaves. Recall that norms are shared rules of conduct, right? The do's and don'ts of society. That's what rules are as we defined it in the unit on culture. The smooth transition or transaction of society depends on all of us playing our roles properly, because otherwise there's chaos on the highways, on the sidewalks, there's chaos in the classroom between the teacher and the student. If the student isn't being the teacher and if the teacher isn't being the teacher and the students are being the students, we've all got to adhere to our social roles and identities if we're going to have a smoothly functioning situation. So, I'm going to talk through a macro structural approach. And then in the next video, we'll talk through a micro structural approach to social roles and identities. So, here's the macro structural approach. It defines two terms: status and role status. What is status now? The conventional definition of status is that it's your place on the ladder, right? That it's about hierarchy, who's on top and who's on the bottom. That's what, you know, the ranking of prestige or identity. That's what status is, you know, high status, low status, that sort of thing. But sociologically, it's neutral. It's not about hierarchy. It's just a socially defined position in a group or a society, that's all. It's not how high or how low. It's just what is your position in society? So, you might have the status of a friend, or you might have the status of an unemployed person, or you might have the status of a Muslim. Those are positions that you occupy, and status is really the basic building block of society, of social structure, status is who you are. It's not what you do, it's who you are. A role is what you do. That's the difference. Okay, so let me back up and talk about status. When we're talking about when sociologists study status, they try to identify all the different statuses that are available, or they try to identify the distribution of them. How many of them, where are they? Where are they not? Or do they study the consequences of holding a status or not holding a status? You know, you can be a white male doctor. Those are three different statuses, right? So those are all positions. But when we talk about role, what does each one of those status statuses require the holder to do? And there's the definition of role: a cluster of duties, rights and obligations associated with a particular status, a social position. So, a role is the way you act out your status. If you were a friend, what do you do? What do friends do while they care for the other person? They show care. If you're an unemployed person, if that's your status, what should you do? Well, you should get out there and look for a job or get yourself educated or do something right. What's the role of the unemployed person? Or if you're a Muslim, what do you do? Well, you go to the mosque, right? I mean, that's what Muslims do. That's here's the best way of putting it. You hold a status; you perform a role. Status is who you are. A role is what you do. A role has both scripts and claims. What's the difference? A script is what you should do. Okay. What one's own behavior follows. You follow your script of friend or unemployed or Muslim or whatever. Okay, So if you're a member of a family, what's the script for you? If you have a part time job, what’s your script? What's your job description? If you're a student, what do you do? That's your script. A claim is what you are entitled to expect from other people. So, think of a parent and a child. Okay, so what is the script for a parent? What do parents do? They provide food, shelter, clothing, guidance, belonging, learning. They provide all that. That's the script of a parent. What is the claim of a parent? Respect and compliance. If you're my kid, that's what I know. That's what I expect from you. So, you see that every status and every role have a script and a claim. Note that some roles are ascribed, and some are achieved. But we're not always free to choose our status and role. Sometimes it's given to us, sometimes we earn it. So, an ascribed status is that which is imposed involuntarily. You didn't choose it; you didn't earn it. You may not even want it, but I'm sorry you were born that way. You were born male or female or intersex. But sometimes a status and a role are given by biology. Your race, your sex. Sometimes it's given by society. You were born into white, middle class, upper class, lower class, whatever. Or you were born into a Muslim family. Okay, so you were born into that. You didn't choose it. You were born into it compared to an achieved status in a role, one that is gained voluntarily through ability and or effort. So, what's your occupation? What's your career? Well, you achieved that. What's your marital status? Well, you achieved that. Do you have a friend? Well, you achieved that voluntarily through ability and effort. Classic distinction is the prince is the ascribed status. The plumber is the achieved status. So, ascribed versus achieved: daughter, sister, female, 17 years old, African American. She didn't choose any of that. Those are all statuses that have been ascribed to her. She was born into that achieved well. She became a friend, she became a worker, she became a student, a team member, a classmate. Yeah, all those things she achieved that we have more than one status and every status has more than one role. So, we talk about status set and roles set. A status set is the multiple statuses held simultaneously so, a person can be a doctor, a mother, a dancer, or a political activist. And all those things have nothing to do with each other. Those are completely different statuses positions she holds in society. But each one of those positions that she holds in society has its own role set, a variety of expectations attached to that status. So, if she's a doctor, she's expected to give care, to give treatment, a diagnosis, maybe surgery, be a researcher, be an administrator. I mean, just think of all the different things that doctors do or look at this example. So, this woman has a standard set of, she's a professor, a mother, a researcher, and a wife, but what do professors do? Well, that's the role. What do mothers do? What do researchers do? What do wives do? Well, that's both her status set and her role set. Master status is the status that cuts across all others held by the individual. So, you could say it's their primary identity. It's what people think of first whenever they see that person. There goes that super rich guy, super beautiful girl, that person with a disability. The president, that gay person. I mean, historically, unfortunately, sexuality has become a master status, right? You never heard people say, there goes that heterosexual. But they would say, there goes that homosexual sexuality became a master status for some in the past. And it can be positive or negative, it can be prestigious, it can be stigmatized. Master status, it can be ascribed or achieved, it can be fixed or fluid. Role strain is when role performance becomes stressful, problematic. Why? What are some ways in which roles become stressful? Well, when you're not performing up to your role, role performance does not match the expectation. What? You're an honor student, you're here on the scholarship and yet you fail the first exam. What's wrong? Okay, you're on academic probation and you're an honor student. You're not living up to or sometimes there are just too many expectations in other roles. So, you're a teacher in in the early years of a public school, you should pay individual attention to each one of the students in your grade one class. But you also need to cover the curriculum. And what if you can't pay attention to every individual student and still cover the curriculum and you've got a problem, you've got real strain. Or maybe the evaluation criteria for your role are very unclear. We talked about parents before. How do you know when you're being a good parent and when you're not being a good parent? It's not always clear and that can be stressful. Straining role conflicts is the incompatibility of demands built into two or more statuses that the person occupies. We all have more than one status. Each status has multiple roles. But what if one status conflicts with the role of a different status? That's a conflict of interest. That's the parent of a child who is sick. Do you stay home with your sick child, or do you go to work or school or whatever your other role is? That's the Catholic priest who's hearing a confession and he's hearing the confession of a of a crime. Does he fulfill the role of a priest and keep it a secret and extend forgiveness, or does he report that person to the police? Yeah, that's role conflict. Here's a difference between a role strain and role conflict. Okay, let's say you're a team member on an athletic team. And what's your role? Well, to be the best you can be, but at the same time, you don't want to show up to your teammates. So maybe you maybe you back off a little bit, so you don't embarrass or stand out too much because you want to be a team. This can cause role strain. What if you're also not just a team member, but you're also a student and you're also a daughter? And what do team members do? Well, they should go to practice tonight. What should a student do. She should complete her homework tonight but she's also a daughter. She should do the chores tonight. So, what are you going to do? Well, that's role conflict. Overall, role strain is aspects of a role that can conflict with one another, and role conflict is strain between multiple roles. Here's the final one: role exit. Sociologists are also interested in how people exit or terminate their status in a role becoming an X. That's what exit means. X means previous exits. Yeah, I'm out of here. So, what's the process of becoming an ex-employee or an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend? What does that look like? Because you're terminating a status, you’re terminating a role. So, there are some macro structural approaches to social roles and identity. Social Roles and Identities 2 In the previous video, we talked about macro structural approaches to roles and identities. Now we want to talk about micro structural approaches to social roles and identity. Macro refers to the structural function analyst perspective in sociology. Whereas micro structural approach is employed by this symbolic interaction is aspect of theoretical perspective of sociology. So, there's a difference. And this perspective emphasizes agency instead of structure. Remember that basic question of sociology. This perspective argues that, no, we don't just blindly follow what we're told to do. We create it. We make it up ourselves, right? We construct our own reality. We negotiate our roles. We don't just accept them. So, rules are negotiated or constructed in each situation. The definition of the situation means that my perception, my interpretation, I'm going to structure it according to what I think is going on. I might be wrong, you know. But that's the micro approach, the agentic approach. And it enables us to understand how people grasp situations a little bit better. So, here's a good metaphor or analogy about the difference between the macro approaches we talked about in the last video and the micro approaches in this one. The macro approach is passive, like there's no agency. I just accept whatever I'm told to do. Macros Passive. Top-down approach. It's like following a brute, a blueprint. There's a blueprint for every status. Every status is a blueprint of a bunch of roles. And we just passively accept that. You follow a blueprint, which is a top-down approach. We learn what's expected of us in our status as in in our roles, and then we just do it right. And to the extent that we do, it produces a very stable, orderly society. But the micro approach is all the opposite. It's an active bottom-up approach. And the metaphor here is that it’s a toolkit, not a blueprint. You follow a blueprint, but you use a toolkit. You use it to create something, to create your status, your role, and to coordinate your roles. So, macro emphasizes structure, micro emphasizes, agency. Social interaction is at least two people engaging in mutual and reciprocal exchange. Remember, we talked about acts and react and interacts, and the social interaction of our concern here is from a micro structural approach. Think of young people hanging out on a yard. How would you start analyzing their interaction? Well, you listen to it. You would hear the words they're saying, the content, the cognitive content. But you also look at how they're dressing. You would note that they are all white people. Okay. You would note their behavior, how they gesture, how they sit, how they present themselves. That's all part of interaction. You would observe their manners, their moods, attitudes, feelings if they're observable. So, all those things are the constituent parts of social interaction, which symbolic interactionists analyze, look at carefully. So here are some of the concepts under the micro structural approach, role taking defined here as imaginatively occupying the position of the other person. So, you're trying to put yourself, if I'm going to interact with you, I'm going to imagine who you are. I'm going to try to put myself in your head, in your place, in your shoes. So that I know who I'm talking to. So, I know how to talk to you, what to talk about. Right. So, I'm trying to perceive this conversation from your perspective because that will help me engage in it better. If instead of just ignoring you completely and blasting away with whatever I want to see. So, role taking is empathetic, perhaps more cognitive than effectual. It's not necessarily emotional, but at least I'm trying to put myself in your head. We imagine what the other person is thinking. Maybe imagine what the other person is feeling to take that into account as well. And all this is done very unconsciously in every conversation, every interaction that we have. We never consciously say, I must think about this situation. No, we do that automatically when we're wrong. We have got a problem. We're going to have to negotiate. And all those things we talked about in the previous video. Alter Casting is the very opposite of role taking. So, casting the alter, casting the other into a particular role. So instead of me trying to imagine who you are and taking your role, I will alter, cast you and start talking to you and acting towards you as if you are somebody. I might be right, I might be wrong, but I have alter cast you. When one person constrains what the other person can do. And sometimes you can force people to act and think in a certain way. If I treat you in a certain way, eventually you might become that way. We call that sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you will. So, think about a parent talking to his kid, saying, come on, I know you're better than that. You can do better than that. I'm calling you out. I'm alt to casting you. You're not like that. I know you think teachers say that to students. Parents say that to their kids. It's a form of alter casting. But sometimes we just simply construct our own activity in the situation. So, this isn't alt casting, this is role making. I'm going to be who or what I want to be in this situation. Well, that's agency. That's the ultimate form of agency. And I'll try to align my actions with everybody else. But I'm going to say who I am going to be here. So, every time you enter a conversation, you can make your own role with a conversation, with a group of people. So, who are you going to be in this conversation? Are you going to be the listener? Are you going to be the source of information? Are you going to be the clown or are you going to be the devil's advocate? Are you going to be the peacemaker? Who are you going to be in this situation? Will you make your own role? You do have agency. You can be somebody different in every group or in every conversation. If you want. So, who are you? Who is the self? What is your identity? I mean, that was discussed in the previous unit under socialization, right? At the very least, the self is a social product. The self is an outgrowth of interaction with other people. And to the extent that we interact with different kinds of people, maybe we have multiple selves. Maybe you're not the same person wherever you go in whatever interaction you have. William James, a psychologist at the turn of the 20th century, famously said the individual has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of people about whose opinion he cares. If I care about what you think about me, well, I might be somebody completely different with my friends than I am with my parents or my coworkers. And of course, on social media. You can be whoever you want on social media, right? Are you as wonderful a person as you are on social media? Probably not. So, is there a core real self, a stable core real self? Or are we a different person in every social situation? It's a good question. Interaction and Communication 1 Communication is part of all interaction, and communication. So, let's focus on the communicative aspect of human interaction. Here are a few basic concepts. The first is impression management, defined as people's effort to present themselves to others in ways that are most favorable to their own interests or image. We all do this. We want other people to think well of us. So, we put our best foot forward as one way of saying it. Impression management has been analyzed extensively by one school of thought within sociology known as dramaturgical analysis. Dramaturgical drama Theater. Life as theater. You know, it's more than an analogy. It's almost an allegory that all our lives are theatrical acting out of who we want to be in every situation. That's what impression management is. And so, speaking of theater and plays, William Shakespeare famously, and As You Like It. Act two, Scene Act three, Scene seven. All the world's a stage. And all the men and women, merrily players, they have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts. He his acts being seven ages. So maybe Shakespeare was an early sociologist because he was doing the same kind of observation and analysis that sociologists have done since then. So, life as theater, impression management, there's a distinction between the impressions that we give intentionally and the impressions that we give off. So, impressions given are those that are controlled, intentional, done deliberately. Conscious. I am trying to get you to have this impression of me. I'm very aware of that. I'm doing this. Those are impressions given compared to impressions given off. This is what I failed to control about my impression. The impression you're forming of me I can control. I will try to control as much of it as possible, but I can never control all of it. Some of it will be just given off and not just given, done unwittingly and usually unwittingly, unconsciously, unintentionally. Usually, the impressions given off betray who I really am compared to the controlled impression that I'm trying to give you. Two other terms from dramaturgical analysis are that we all have what's called a front stage and a backstage to our lives. We know when we're on stage and we have an audience in front of us, but we also think there are times when we are backstage, when we're behind the scenes where nobody that we care about can see us. So, Goffman used the example of what a waiter shows the customer. So, when the waiter goes out and meets and greets and ask, the order is as pleasant, wonderful, and as helpful as possible because you want as big a tip as possible, and then you get the order, and you go back into the kitchen, and you start shouting and screaming and you're a completely different person back there. The way you treat the kitchen staff compared to the way you treat the customers at the table, that's front stage and backstage. In other situations, we can observe that it's not about the physical space itself. The physical space itself could be both front stage, well, either front stage or backstage and say, you're going out on a date and you're driving your vehicle. And while you're together in the vehicle, it’s in front of the stage. But after you drop her off and you're driving home by yourself, it's backstage. So, the same car, the same space can be either front stage or backstage is not determined by the physicality of itself. And maybe one more observation about the front stage and backstage. It's not so obvious in routine situations, but it's more obvious in dramatic situations, in crisis situations. Here's another concept about interaction and communication. Disclaimers: defined here as verbal devices, words, spoken words, verbal devices used to ward off negative implications of something I'm about to do or be. So, a disclaimer is, before I say or do something, I'm going to say something that will try to prevent you from having a negative impression of me. I don't want you to have a negative impression of me, but I'm going to say this anyway, or do this anyway. So, I know this sounds crazy, but then you go ahead, and you say something that sounds crazy. Note the disclaimer. You're trying to manage your impressions by at least being conscious that what you're about to say sounds crazy, but you can't resist saying it anyway. Or you say, no offense, but and then you say something offensive, or I'm not prejudiced, but and then you say something that's really prejudiced. You've prefaced it by saying something that shows you're aware of the potential negative judgment, but you don't want to be judged negatively, but you can't resist saying or doing it anyway. That's what disclaimers are. Okay, I'm not willing to modify my behavior, so, I'm going to try to give you some plead at the beginning of it to give me permission to do it per se. Accounts are the same thing, but they come after the fact. Okay, so disclaimers happen before you say or do something. Accounts are given after you say or do something. But in both cases what you're trying to do is ward off negative impressions that the other might form of you. So, accounts disclaimers are prospective about what I'm about to do, and accounts are retrospective about what I have just done or said. Here are two basic subcategories of accounts, like when you've done something wrong, when you violated a social norm, you can give an excuse, or you can give a justification for it. An excuse is acknowledging that what you've done is wrong but denying that you had any control or that you weren't responsible. For example, if you miss a class, right? Students are supposed to go to class, but you miss the class so you can give an excuse such as, well, I was sick, or my alarm didn't go off or there is a carpool breakdown, or I had to work overtime at my job. In other words. Yeah, I know I should have been in class, but I wasn't. But it's not my fault. That's an excuse. A justification is to acknowledge that you did it. But it's not wrong. It was the right decision. It was right. It was the right action. So, continuing the example of missing class, if you're a parent with a sick kid at home and you chose to stay home, well, that justifies missing class, work or whatever. So now there are many, many kinds of excuses, many, many kinds of justifications. But this is just an introduction. Mode of talk provides or explains the link between what people say and what people do. The motive talk imputes motive to the actor without necessarily identifying the motivation. And so, here's the difference between motivation and motive. Motivation is the stimulus that causes you to say or do something. The motive is your explanation for it after the fact. So, motivation=stimulus, motive=explanation, and the two may not line up. What stimulated you to say or do that may have nothing to do with your explanation for why you said or did that. You can give any kind of motive to make yourself look good. Impression management again, there it is. Whenever we're gossiping about people, we’re always trying to imagine. So why did they do that? You know, what was their motive? You know, and we can theorize about all sorts of things, and we might be right or wrong, but what the actual motivation for it was, we'll never know. But we impute all kinds of motives to it. And that's impression formation. That's how we form our impressions of each other and protect those of ourselves. And we have what C. Wright Mills called entire vocabulary of motive, you know, certain preachers, politicians, they have entire vocabularies of motives that they use, you know, politicians. I just want to serve the public interest, really? Is that what motivated you to do that? Was that the actual stimulus, or is that just your justification or your excuse or your explanation or whatever? Teamwork. When people interact, when they're talking with each other, they support each other like the norm is to simply support each other in your own performance and not embarrass or call out the other person, because then it all goes haywire and then you've got problems and chaos. So, for the most part, we support each other in our own performances, and I mean right down to trivial stuff, you know? So, you're talking to a stranger, and they have some green food stuck in their teeth. Well, you tell them, you have some foods that. No, you wouldn't say that, would you say that to a friend. Well, you probably would if you're going to meet some other people. You don't want your friend to be embarrassed. So that's what you mean by teamwork. And speaking of the face or the mouth, all the way to facial expression and emotion, there's lots of research on this. Facial expression is one type of nonverbal communication, which we'll talk more about later. It's a form of body language. What's really interesting is that the sum of research has identified six basic emotions that are expressed through the face: sadness, anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, and fear. Do you recognize those expressions? Would you have interpreted those emotions based if you didn't have the description there? And what's even more interesting is that the weight of cultural evidence is that the emotional expression, facial emotional expression is the same cross-culturally. So, all people in all cultures express sadness and anger and happiness and discuss and surprise and fear this way. Well, apparently. And what's even more suggestive that it's natural, it's not cultural is that people who have been blind from birth, in other words, who have never seen another facial expression, they themselves use these same physical expressions of their emotions. So maybe it is natural and not cultural. Sometimes we can control it, sometimes we can't. Sometimes we want to communicate, sometimes we want to hide it. Sometimes we use facial expressions to disguise our real feelings. So, the phrase is masking your feelings. Well, that literally means putting something like a mask over your face so people cannot read your face. They must listen to your words, your vocalization, masking your feelings or saving face. The British would say I'm keeping a stiff upper lip because I don't want you to know how afraid I am or angry or whatever. And then again, just like their always impressions given compared to impressions given off, there's always some leakage. So, there's something about your face that tells me that you're feeling different than what you are claiming to feel. It's leaking out. And in polite conversation in teamwork, we would ignore the leakage and just pretend we didn't see that because we're playing like a team here in this conversation. We support each other's presented identity, not the one that leaked out, but therapists look for leakage. Customs officers at the border are looking for a leak. Are you lying to me or are you not? You know, actors are, you know, the best actors. You know, Hollywood movie actors who can convey one thing with their facial expression, but also convey a second thing. They can deliberately leak a second emotion or a third emotion. You know, those are really good actors who can convey more than one emotion with their face at the same time. And speaking of emotion, work of emotion. Hochschild was the first to talk about this, and she differentiated between feeling rules. Well, first, we need to understand feeling rules. What are the socially appropriate emotions for situations? What are the socially appropriate emotions for weddings or funerals? How are you supposed to feel on those occasions in those places? Okay, so your younger sibling is getting married before you are and you're supposed to be happy, but you’re jealous. And but no, you're supposed to be happy. This is not a time for you to be thinking about yourself. You're supposed to be feeling happy for your sibling, right? Or let's say your friend is sharing some deep anxiety or problem with you. Think it's ridiculous? You know, you think it's stupid, but he's your friend. No, it wouldn't be right for you to show that. There are rules for talking with a friend deeply about problems and laughter is not an acceptable emotion. Okay, so those are feeling rules and there are phrases that communicate that there are rules. You know when somebody says, well, you shouldn't feel so. So, there are rules about how we feel. Or somebody says, well, you have every right to feel. We often have feeling work to do; what is required, when how we feel doesn't match the actual situation. So, if your if how you're feeling at that wedding or at that funeral does not match how you should be or what the rules are about weddings and funerals, well then, you've got work to do. You’d better do something about that. And there are two ways of doing something about that. One is a very superficial impression management displaying one emotion when we really feel the other, you know, feeling very low, showing yourself to be very happy when you’re angry or resentful or jealous or whatever. Yeah, we can deceive people that way. Some of us are better at that than others. Some of our jobs demand that we perform feeling work all the time. Think of people in the service industry, in fast food or in any kind of hardware or retail sales outlet. All the people on the floor are supposed to be happy and friendly all the time. Your job is to be happy and friendly, and I don't care what you feel, but it is your job. And maybe you can perform well enough at the counter of McDonald's, you know, so that you don't get called out. The other way of doing it is to change your authentic feelings. Deep manipulation of our own feelings, to eliminate the discrepancy. That's the deepest kind of work. And sometimes people do that, and sometimes you walk into a wedding or a funeral one way, but then you realize that you are authentically moved, and you become aligned with the feeling rules. Okay, so those are seven points about interaction and communication. Interaction and Communication 2 In the last video we've been talking about the communicative aspect of interaction. So, are there interactions that are not communicative? Here is an eighth aspect of interaction, territoriality. The control of space in human interaction. This again is another form of nonverbal communication. We've already had some of that with facial expression. Like other forms, it's sometimes hard to define territoriality to identify what the rules are or what they're not. It's one of those situations where I can't describe it, but I know it when I feel it, when it's been violated or something, right? Hard to define, but we know it when we feel it. So just by way of introduction, there are different types of territories. There are public territories which are open to all in the community. So, streets, parks. Yeah, sure. Anybody is welcome to go there. Interactional territories. This is where you go to gather with people specifically for that purpose. So, bars, malls, arenas, or churches are interactional territories. Home territories are places where regular participants have relative freedom to act in ways that they would not act in public or interactional territories, relative freedom of behavior. Because there is familiarity, there is intimacy in home territory. You have control over your surroundings. So, yes, not just your own house or apartment, but private clubs where everybody knows each other. And then fourthly, body territories. There are social rules about how bodies are displayed, how they are used, how they are touched, how you touch someone else's body, how you touch your own body. There are rules about this. It's part of territoriality. Even though now it has been reduced to your own body. What itch can you scratch? Where and when? Good question. There are certain categories of people that apparently have permission to grab their crotch in public. Baseball players, rock stars. But if a professor would do that in front of a class, it'd be kind of awkward. So why is it awkward in some situations? But not in others body territories? Think also just about public displays of affection. You know, a couple making out in the lounge. Or medical examinations where doctors get to touch their patients in ways that nobody else gets to touch them because of their rules, situation. What about just picking your nose in a restaurant? No, you shouldn't do that. That's a violation of the rules of body territories, personal space. Okay, so 12 feet in, out is public. Four feet is social. A foot and a half are personal. And then actual body contact is intimate. So, yeah, there are different rules about all this. Remember COVID? Physical distancing. Dating. How do we manage our personal space? Well, that first depends on how we define personal space=that space surrounding our body where people are not welcome to intrude. Depending on how intimate we are with them. Obviously here in North America, personal space is basically, you know, six inches on either side of your shoulders. If you're standing in a line all facing one direction, you're comfortable with people. Six inches shoulder to shoulder. But in front of you, you want at least three feet in front of you. Right. Six inches in front of you is not okay. Even though when you're standing in a line all facing the same direction, if somebody is standing within a foot of you, behind you, that's okay. And if you turn around. Whoa, back off. Okay. Because three feet in front, six inches behind. Big difference there. They're standing in line or what about elevators? Lots of studies about elevators. You're the first one in the elevator. Or maybe you're the 10th one in the elevator. Everybody shifts a little bit a step this way. Is that so that there's equal space between everybody? Everybody's facing the same way. my goodness. We started this, you know, talking about civil inattention. Elevators are another place where we're being civil with each other by not attending and certainly not touching and having an equal distance between all of us. As the elevator gets crowded. And even with intimate space, you know what defines intimate space. Who is allowed inside your intimate space? Well, they better be intimate people. Family, maybe. Friends, lovers, certainly. Isn't it interesting that we still close our eyes when we kiss? Why do we do that? I mean, the other person's face is right up against your face where we close our eyes. Why? I mean, you don't kiss with your eyes wide open, do you? I mean, that would be kind of weird, because the other has entered your personal space and maybe you just want to eliminate the visual to enjoy the tactile or. I don't know how you would explain, but use of space. And, of course, personal space varies with culture. As I mentioned before. You know, Latin Americans are very comfortable standing within face to face, within 18 inches of each other. But we North Americans want three feet occupying personal space. Who gets to occupy space? Will dominant people get more space? Dominant people have you know, the boss has a bigger office. The professor at the front of the class has more space than all of you scrunched there in your seats because the professor is more powerful, the dominant one. So, there is social inequality. And in defining personal space, gender differences, we talked about man spreading. You know, men get to sprawl and spread out as much as they like where women are supposed to fold themselves up into tidy, neat little packages as much as possible. So, the genders occupy a space differently. Controlling personal space. So how do you control it? How do you claim your spot on the beach or your spot on the bench? Or your spot on the table in the library? Where do you put your stuff? Like, are you welcoming other people on to your table or are you trying to keep people away from your table by spreading your stuff out as much as possible? We do all that sort of thing, right? And then there are many kinds of encroachments. Let me just say quickly, the violation, invasion, contamination, how we violate someone else's space with our eyes when just staring at somebody is a form of invasion. It's a violation. You haven't touched them. You haven't approached them. But it's still a form of encroachment or your voice just dominating the room with your voice, or your music is a violation. So, an invasion attempt to take over another's territory completely. You know when your partner sets up a gym in your study space. No, this is my study space. This isn't a workout space. You know. Why are you taking over my space. Rape? Rape is the ultimate violation invasion of personal space, called contamination. So, our intensity, the intensity of our reaction to encroachment varies with all kinds of variables. Like whom did it? Why did they do it? How long will it go on? Will it happen again? Lots of variables in how we respond to encroachment. And finally, non-verbal communication. We've had several different examples. Previous points have been nonverbal, but let's just end by saying that nonverbal communication is the way we communicate without words with our body or our movements, sounds or whatnot, communicating without words. It even includes para language, like you can vocalize without verbalizing, right? You can grunt, you can groan, you can whine, and you can cry, and you can communicate all kinds of things without saying a word. But you're vocalizing or you're just moving. Obviously, these two guys are saying something to each other, they are sitting, and she is certainly saying something without words. She maybe it looks like she's vocalizing. Okay, so we can conclude by saying there are many different types of nonverbal communication. We've talked about some of them, but just, you know, look around the circle there. We haven't talked about all these smells, gesturing, pitch, voice.