Impression management sociology quizlet series#

United States Forces Iraq – Pat down practice – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.Ī telling example of this effect comes from the story of a criminal justice professor from Florida named George Kirkham. This view lies at the heart of the symbolic interactionist perspective and helps us understand how and why roles (or to be more precise, our understanding of what behavior is expected of someone in a certain status) make social interaction possible. Although we usually come into a situation with shared understandings of what is about to happen, as the interaction proceeds the actors continue to define the situation and thus to construct its reality. Sociologists refer to this process as the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1963).

It is what we make of it, and individuals who interact help construct the reality of the situation in which they interact. These examples indicate that social reality is to a large extent socially constructed. Not surprisingly, their parents quickly became flustered and wondered what college was doing to their daughters and sons!

Impression management sociology quizlet series#

To illustrate his point, he had his students perform a series of experiments, including acting like a stranger in their parents’ home. Sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) argued that unexpected events like these underscore how fragile social order is and remind us that people are constantly constructing the social reality of the situations in which they find themselves. If they are violated, social order might well break down, as you would quickly find if you dared to ask your cashier how her or his sex life has been, or if two students sitting in class violated their student role by kissing each other passionately. Suppose you were shopping in a department store, and while you were in the checkout line the cashier asked you how your sex life has been! Now, you might expect such an intimate question from a very close friend, because discussions of intimate matters are part of the roles close friends play, but you would definitely not expect it from a cashier you do not know.Īs this example suggests, effective social interaction rests on shared background assumptions, or our understanding of the roles expected of people in a given encounter, that are easily violated if one has the nerve to do so. (Analogously, if actors in a play always had to read the script before performing their lines, as an understudy sometimes does, the play would be slow and stilted.) It is when people violate their roles that the importance of roles is thrown into sharp relief. This, in fact, is why social interaction is indeed possible: if we always had to think about our roles before we performed them, social interaction would be slow, tedious, and fraught with error. Roles thus help make social interaction possible.Īs our example of shoppers and cashiers was meant to suggest, social interaction based on roles is usually very automatic, and we often perform our roles without thinking about them. Regardless of our individual differences, if we are in a certain status, we are all expected to behave in a way appropriate to that status. Our earlier discussion of roles defined them as the behaviors expected of people in a certain status. As you read this section, you will probably be reading many things relevant to your own social interaction. This section draws on their work to examine various social influences on individual behavior. Partly for this reason, sociologists interested in microsociology have long tried to understand social life by analyzing how and why people interact they way they do. For social order, a prerequisite for any society, to be possible, effective social interaction must be possible. This means that all individuals, except those who choose to live truly alone, interact with other individuals virtually every day and often many times in any one day. To recall our earlier paraphrase of John Donne, no one is an island. List one or two gender differences in nonverbal communication.Ī fundamental feature of social life is social interaction, or the ways in which people act with other people and react to how other people are acting.Provide one example of role conflict or role strain.Describe what is meant by dramaturgy and by impression management.