Understanding Social Interaction Chapter 5

1. Understanding Social Interaction Chapter 5

2. After studying this chapter, you should be able to do the following: Know what the major types of social interaction are. Understand the influence of contexts and norms in social interaction. Know what ethnomethodology is. Be familiar with the different types of social interaction. Understand the concepts of status and role. Know the difference between role strain and role conflict.

3. Contexts Social Action Refers to anything people are conscious of doing because of other people. Involves two or more people taking one another into account. Social interaction is a central concept to understanding the nature of social life.

4. Three elements that define the contextof a social interaction

5. Norms What makes human beings act predictably in certain situations? The presence of norms Norms are specific rules of behavior, agreed upon and shared, that prescribe limits of acceptable behavior.

6. Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology The study of the sets of rules or guidelines that individuals use to initiate behavior, respond to behavior, and modify behavior in social settings.

7. Ethnomethodologists believe all social interactions are equally important because they provide information about a society’s unwritten rules for social behavior the shared knowledge that is basic to social life.

8. Ethnomethodology seeks to make us more aware of the subtle devices we use in creating the realities to which we respond. Ethnomethodology addresses questions about the nature of social reality and how we participate in its construction.

9. Dramaturgy Dramaturgy States that in order to create an impression, people play roles, and their performance is judged by others who are alert to any slips that might reveal the actor’s true character. Sees these interactions as governed by planned behavior designed to enable an individual to present a particular image to others. (For a discussion of how successful we may be when judging the truthfulness of others image presentation see Day To Day Sociology: Can You Spot a Liar?)

10. Can You Spot a Liar? Can You Spot a Manipulator?

11. Types of Social Interaction Nonverbal Behavior Exchange Cooperation

12. Nonverbal Behavior Waving Hand Yawn

13. What are some other examples of nonverbal communication?

14. Exchange When people do something for each other with the express purpose of receiving a reward or return, they are involved in an exchange interaction.

15. Cooperation A cooperative interaction occurs when people act together to promote common interests or achieve shared goals

16. Conflict Conflicts arise when people or groups have incompatible values or when the rewards or resources available to a society or its members are limited. Conflict always involves an attempt to gain or use power.

17. A Problems with conflict is: often leads to unhappiness and violence causes many people to view it negatively

18. Do you think it is possible to have a society without conflict?

19. Competition Competition is a form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict within agreed-upon rules.

20. What are some examples of competition based on the definition? How can good competition be corrupted?

21. Elements of Social Interaction

22. Statuses Socially defined positions that people occupy Ways statuses can be pertained to Religion Education Ethnicity Occupation

24. Ascribed statuses Conferred upon us by virtue of birth or other significant factors not controlled by our own actions or decisions; people occupy them regardless of their intentions. Birth Order Sex

25. Achieved statuses Occupied as a result of the individual’s actions—student, professor, garage mechanic, race car driver, artist, prisoner, bus driver, husband, wife, mother, or father.

26. Roles Roles are the culturally defined rules for proper behavior that are associated with every status.

27. A status may include a number of roles, and each role will be appropriate to a specific social context. For example: As the child of a military officer, Kay Redfield Jamison found that children had to learn the importance of statuses and roles and the proper behavior to be displayed toward those who occupied those positions.

28. [The] Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn’t already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels, who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls.

29. Role Sets All the roles attached to a single status are known collectively as a role set .

30. What is your role set?

31. An individual’s role behaviors depend on the statuses of the other people with whom he or she is interacting.

32. For example: As a college student you behave one way toward other students and another way toward professors. Similarly, professors behave one way toward other professors, another way toward students, and yet a third way toward deans

33. Role Strain When a single role has conflicting demands attached to it, individuals who play that role experience role strain

34. For example: The captain of a freighter is expected to be sure the ship sails only when it is in safe condition, but the captain also is expected to meet the company’s delivery schedule because a day’s delay could cost the company thousands of dollars. These two expectations may exert competing pulls on the captain, especially when some defect is reported, such as a malfunction in the ship’s radar system. The stress of these competing pulls is not due to the captain’s personality, but rather is built into the nature of the role expectations attached to the captain’s status.

35. Role Conflict An individual who is occupying more than one status at a time and who is unable to enact the roles of one status without violating those of another status is encountering role conflict.

36. Role Playing The roles we play can have a profound influence on both our attitudes and our behavior. Playing a new social role often feels awkward at first, and we may feel we are just acting pretending to be something that we are not.