Chapter 4 – Social Interaction and Everyday Life

Impression Management

• Impression management is what we do when we prepare for the presentation of our social role. 
• American sociologist, Erving Goffman, came up with this concept to explain how individuals try to present a version of themselves, their “self”, in a different situations. 
• We play many different roles throughout our daily lives. 
• You play a role that fits your gender, your age, and many other statuses such as that of student, worker, boyfriend, wife, etc. 
• With these roles and statuses come expectations of our behavior.  As individuals, we try to fulfill those expectations. 
• When a person wears men’s clothing, that person in fulfilling the expected behaviors of his role as a man.  When a student sits attentively listening to the teacher, that student is fulfilling her expected behaviors as a student. 
• However, impression management is about more than just fulfilling other people’s expectations of us. 
• It is also about controlling how people see us.  Everybody cares about what others think of them to varying degrees. 
• We want to give people the impression that we are smart, competent, strong, beautiful, responsible, and other positive impressions.  In that sense, we try to control the impression we give to people. 
• That is, we try to manage the impression we give to people.  We do so by trying to say smart things, wear clothing that compliments us, by practicing good hygiene, by working out and going to the gym, etc. 
• Goffman correctly argued that individuals carry a very fragile “self”.  We are easily embarrassed and humiliated.  Due to this, we are constantly preoccupied with following expectations and taking care of our appearance.  We live in fear of making mistakes.  However, since impression management must be practiced at all times of the day that we come in contact with people, it is very difficult to maintain.  

Civil Inattention

• When we walk down a school hallway or a crowded street, we follow certain expectations regarding respecting other people’s space.
• If a person walks forward expecting everybody else to move out of the way, this person is seen as rude.  If we were to stare at someone too long, the person may feel threatened or insulted.  If we simply walked forward without consideration of other people, we might anger other people, or at worst, start a fight.  
• Another good example of this is an empty movie theater.  If you go see a movie in which there are not a lot of people in the audience, where would you sit? 
• Through civil interaction, then, we interact with one another by avoiding each other to some degree. 

Audience Segregation

• sudience Segregation is the practice of trying to keep the “audiences” in our lives separate from one another. 
• Throughout our daily lives we play different roles for different audiences.  We do not present our “selves” the same way to everybody, and we don’t try to manage the same impressions with everybody. 
• A teenager, for example, might try to present themselves as obedient and studious to their parents, but may present themselves as rebellious in order to seem cool to their peers at school. 
• In this scenario, the two roles, obedient vs. rebellious, conflict with one another.
• People try to maintain their different audiences separated from one another. 
• We try to segregate our work audience from our home audience.  It could be difficult to show someone from work what it is like to be in our pajamas and without make up at home. 
• We try to segregate our church audience from our club audience. 
• Furthermore, we do this in social media quite a bit.  We change our privacy settings to control what certain people can see.  

Dramaturgy

• Sociologists who look at microinteractions between individuals or small groups of people borrow the term dramaturgy from the theater arts.
• A dramaturgical approach to social interaction compares the way individuals behave to acting in a play. 
• There are many components to this metaphor that must be recognized.  There are:
  • actors
    • A play in the theater involves actors.  In real life, we’re all actors. 
  • roles
    • In a play actors play different roles.  In some plays, one actor may play many different small roles.  For example, Eddie Murphy played many different roles in the 1996 movie “The Nutty Professor”
  • scripts
    • The roles that we play come with certain scripts. 
    • We would not follow the script with our parents as we would with our closest friends, for example.  The script with your parents might be very different in certain respects; you might not use bad words with parents.  Yet, with your friends, your script might be full of bad words. 
  • audiences
    • in a theatrical play, we do our performances for an audience. 
    • In real life, we perform our roles and we follow the proper scripts with the right audiences as well.  Each audience that we encounter demands that we play a different role for them. 
  • front stages
    • in theater, the front stage is the place where the performance happens. 
    • It takes place in front of an audience.  In our everyday lives the front stage are the places where we interact with people.  Some of these front stages are very obvious.  
  • back stages
    • in theater, the backstage is where all the preparation for the performance happens. 
    • Actors put on their make-up and costumes in the backstage.  This is where they practice their lines and get ready.  
  • norms of collaboration
    • Finally, much like actors in a role must collaborate with one another to make the play work, individuals must do so in real life as well. 
    • In a play, if an actor forgets their line, another actor will improvise to help the first actor remember their lines.  By doing this, actors help each other save face and embarrassment in front of the audience. 
    • Thus, we collaborate to preserve each others’ egos. 
    • Another example is how we collaborate with one another in an apologetic situation. When someone apologizes to us, we usually accept their apology with a certain level of humility because doing so with self righteousness could create even more problems. 

Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology is the study of how people make sense of what other people say and do in the course of day-to-day social interaction. 
• It is concerned with the “ethnomethods” by which people sustain meaningful interchanges with one another.
• We are constantly interpreting the behaviors and words of people in order to make sense of them.  However, the way in which we interpret these behaviors is completely based on their context. 
• We do not just try to understand things literally, but rather, we input meaning into behaviors and interactions. 
• For example, when somebody asks you “how do you do?”  You interpret this the same way as someone asking you “how are you?”
• By taking into consideration the social context of social interaction, we are making use of background expectancies.  These expectations have become normalized and seem natural to us and they define our social situations for us. 
• Harold Garfinkle created ethnomethodology, and in order to show his students what it was, he asked them to break these background expectancies by going home and acting as hotel guests in their own homes. 
• Students in their own homes were very polite, did not engage in too much small chit-chat, they asked for permission to use the bathroom, television, etc.  The other house members responded with anger and confusion when the students broke the background expectancies of social interaction at home.
• These types of experiments are called breaching experiments. These experiments show how fragile social interaction is, and how much we depend on background expectancies in order for our interactions to develop smoothly.