Social
Interaction and Everyday Life
Important Terms
Civil inattention: the process where individuals acknowledge each other's presence.
Social Interaction: the process by which we act and react to
those around us.
Ervin Goffman: this person developed the concept of civil
inattention and believed that sociologists needed to concern themselves with
trivial aspects of behavior.
Charles Darwin: he believed that all emotional expressions
are the same for all humans.
Eibl Eibesfeldt: he conducted a study of six children born
deaf and blind to see how far their facial expressions were the same as those
of sighted and hearing individuals in particular emotional situations (1972).
Harold Garfinkel: he created the field of ethnomethodology. He
argued that in order to understand the way people use context to make sense of
the worlds, sociologists need to study the background expectations with which
we organize regular conversation.
Paul Ekman: developed FACTS (Facial Action Coding System)
for describing movements of the facial muscles that give rise to particular
expressions.
Microsociology: day to day interactions.
Macrosociology: the study of large-scale groups,
organizations or social systems.
Nonverbal communication: the exchange of information and
meaning through facial expressions, gestures, and movements of the body.
Body language: an example of nonverbal communication.
Roles: socially defined expectations that a person
in a given status follows.
Status: the social honor or prestige that a particular
group is accorded by other members of a society.
Social position: the social identity an individual has in a
group or society.
Impression management: preparing for the presentation of
one's social role.
Unfocused interaction: whenever individuals exhibit awareness
of other's presence.
Focused interaction: interaction between individuals engaged in a
common activity or in direct conversation with one another.
Audience Segregation: when individuals show a different
face to different people.
Back region: when individuals are able to relax and behave
informally.
Front region: when the settings of social activity in which
people seek to put on a definite performance for others.
Ethnomethodology: the study of the folk, or lay, methods people
use to make sense of what others do and particularly of what they say.
Conversation analysis: a methodology that examines all
facets of a conversation for meaning from the smallest filler words to the
precise timing of interchanges, pauses, interruptions, and overlaps.
Interactional vandalism: where a subordinate person breaks
the tacit rules of everyday interaction that are value to the more powerful.
Talk: the carrying on of conversations or verbal
exchanges in the course of day-to-day social life.
Conversation: verbal communication between two or more
individuals.
Shared understandings: the common assumptions which
people hold and which allow them to interact in a systematic way with one
another.
Response cries: seemingly involuntary exclamations
individuals make when, for example, being taken by surprise, dropping something
inadvertently, or expressing pleasure.
Slips of the tongue: the mispronunciation of words, as when
someone means to say “six” and instead says “sex.” Freud believed that slips of
the tongue conceal hidden anxieties or emotions.
Dramaturgical model: an approach to the study of social
interaction based on the use of metaphors (images, symbols) derived from the
theatre.
Personal space: the physical space individuals maintain
between themselves and others when they know them on a personal basis.
Social distance: the level of spatial separation maintained
when individuals interact with others whom they do not know well.
Public distance: the physical space individuals maintain
between themselves and others when engaged in a public performance, such as
giving a lecture.
Time-space convergence: the process whereby distances
become “shortened in time,” as the speed of modes of transportation increases.
Regionalization: the division of social life into different
regional settings or zones.
Clock time: time as measured by the clock – that is
assessed in terms of hours, minutes or seconds. Before the invention of clocks,
time-reckoning was based on events in the natural world, such as the rising and
setting of the sun.
Questions
·
What
is the first reason it is important to study daily social interactions?
Our day to day routines give us
structure and form to what we do, and we can learn a great deal about ourselves
as social beings, and about social life itself.
·
What
is the second reason it is important to study daily social interactions?
The study of everyday life reveals
to us how humans can act creatively to shape reality.
·
What
is the third reason it is important to study daily social interactions?
·
What
does the FACS stand for?
Facial
Action Coding System
·
Who
came up with the FACS and what is it?
Paul Ekman and the FACS describes
the movements of the facial muscles that give rise to particular expressions.
·
How
we act depends on what?
The roles we are playing at a
particular time.
·
How
does Goffman distinguish between the expressions individuals give and those
they give off?
Words and facial expressions
individuals use to produce certain impressions on others. The clues that others
may spot to check their sincerity or truthfulness.
Summary
1. Social interaction is the process by
which we act and react to those around us. Many apparently trivial aspects of
our day-to-day behavior turn out on close examination to be both complex and
important aspects of social interaction. An example is the gaze – looking at
other people. In most interaction, eye contact is fairly fleeting. To stare at
another person could be taken as a sign of hostility – or, on some occasions,
of love. The study of social interaction is a fundamental area in sociology,
illuminating many aspects of social life.
What happens if you stare at your mom, your neighbor, your classmate, a
stranger?
Look at, stare, gaze, stare into somebody.
The Study of Everyday Life – why should we concern ourselves with such
seemingly trivial aspects of social behavior?
i.
We
can learn a great deal about ourselves as social beings through the structure
of our day-to-day routines. Our lives are organized around the repetition of
similar patterns of behavior.
ii.
We
can learn about others
iii.
Studying
social interaction in everyday life sheds light on larger social systems and
institutions. All large-scale social systems, depend on the patterns of social
interaction we engage in daily.
2. Various different expressions are
conveyed by the human face. It is widely held that basic aspects of the facial
expression of emotion are innate. Cross-cultural studies demonstrate quite
close similarities between the members of different cultures both in facial
expression and the interpretation of emotions registered on the human face.
“Face” can also be understood in a broader sense to refer to the esteem in
which an individual is held by others. Generally, in our interaction with other
people, we are concerned to “save face” – protect our self-esteem.
3. The study of ordinary talk and
conversation has come to be called ethnomethodology, a term first coined by
Harold Garfinkel. Ethnomethodology is the analysis of the ways in which we
actively – although usually in a taken-for-granted way – make sense of that
others mean by what they say and do.
4. We can learn a great deal about the
nature of talk by “response cries” (exclamations) and studying slips of the
tongue (what happens when people mispronounce or misapply words and phrases).
Slips of the tongue are often humorous, and are in fact closely connected
psychologically to wit and joking.
5. Unfocused interaction is the mutual
awareness individuals have of one another in large gatherings, when not
directly in conversation with one another. Focused interaction, which can be
divided up into distinct encounters – or episodes of interaction – occurs when
two or more individuals are directly attending to what the other or others are
saying and doing.
6. Social interaction can often be
studied in an illuminating way by applying the dramaturgical model – studying
social interaction as if those involved were actors on a stage, having a set
and props. As in the theatre, in the various contexts of social life there tend
to be clear distinctions between front regions (the stage itself) and back
regions, where the actors prepare themselves for the performance and relax
afterwards.
7. Social roles are socially defined
expectations of an individual in a given status or social position.
8. All social interaction is situated
in time and space. We can analyze how our daily lives are “zoned” in time and
space combined by looking at how activities occur during definite periods and
at the same time involve spatial movement.
