What’s the first thing that you have to do when you walk into a room?

1. Affect control theory (hereafter ACT) offers a dynamic model of social action that focuses on how people’s attitudes toward identities, behaviors, social settings, and emotions (i.e., the key aspects of social interaction) inform the actions that individuals take toward one another.

2. What’s the first thing that you have to do when you walk into a room? • You have to figure out who you are… • Symbolic interaction • Impression formation • Impression management • Cognitive dissonance • Culture

3. Core Ideas of ACT • Discerning a social event changes individuals' feelings about the elements in the event through a process of impression formation. • Impressions of individuals translate into expectations about the emotions that the individuals should be feeling. • Individuals construct events to confirm or restore their feelings about the cultural elements that are salient in the situation. • Social roles emerge as individuals construct events to confirm their salient social identities in the situation. • Interpersonal interactions are reduced to symbolism and general attitudes, and molded accordingly.

4. EPA Sentiments • The interaction between identities, emotions, behaviors, and settings can be reliably understood and predicted on the basis of three dimensions: Evaluation bad, awful good, nice Potency little, weak big, strong Activity inactive, slow active, fast -4 +4 -4 +4 -4 +4

5. EPA Sentiments: Airline Pilot • For example, males in our culture give airline pilots the following ratings: 1.38 1.74 0.62. • Females in our culture give the following ratings of airline pilots: 1.33 1.71 0.47. • Both males and females feel that airline pilots are somewhat good, somewhat strong and neither active nor inactive.

6. Finding out who we are when we walk into a room • Imagine that sentiments are floating around the room we’re in. Good things are near the front wall. Bad near the back. Strong things are near the ceiling. Weak near the floor. Active things are on the right. Inactive things are on the left. • Now, where would you “look” for an airline pilot? For a doctor? A child? A gangster?

7. G O O D

8. Re-interpretation & Re-identification • What happens if the airline pilot isn’t where you look for him/her? • Processes of re-interpretation and re-defining begin and actions, feelings and behaviors follow. • An alternative example: How differently would you think about your boss if he/she didn’t seem to care about your exceptional work efforts?

9. Diagram of Interpersonal Relations

10. Re-interpretation: Employee and Employer • The employee perceives that the employer is a giver of wages and is positively disposed toward him/her. • The employer ignores the employee, whereupon the employee re-identifies the employer as a "stuffed shirt." • The employee continues the work, but now feels angry and begins considering the injustice of the transaction. Work suffers.

11. Dynamics of EPA • Fundamental sentiments: The way that you feel in general about a person, place or thing (e.g., a teacher is seen by the culture as somewhat nice, somewhat strong, and neither active nor inactive). • Transient impressions: Social interactions create transient impressions of who the person is (e.g., a student brings the teacher an apple; this implies that the teacher is someone who is very nice, rather than only somewhat nice). • Deflections: Discrepancies between fundamental sentiments and transient impressions (e.g., a teacher’s socially defined identity is that she is somewhat nice, but the student’s gift suggests that she is very nice).

12. Dynamics of EPA • Identity-confirming behaviors: People behave as the culture expects a person in that role-identity to behave (i.e., a person with an identity corresponding to an EPA profile of 2,2,1 engages in behaviors that correspond to an EPA profile of 2,2,1). • Identity-restoring behaviors: Whenever social interaction creates a discrepancy, people use a variety of means (discussed shortly) to remove the deflection and to restore their identity.

13. Interact is a computer program that displays verbal descriptions of what people might do in a given situation, of how they might respond emotionally to events, and of how they might attribute qualities or new identities to themselves and other interactants in order to account for expected and unexpected happenings. • The program demonstrates how complex, yet predictable behavior can be.

14. Program Overview • Users create scenarios based on prescribed identities, emotions, behaviors and settings. • Predicted outcomes based on EPA ratings of prescribed identities, emotions, etc. • Number of scenarios virtually limitless.

15. Application of Interact • Try to predict behaviors, emotions and perceptions of identity that would arise from the following scenario: A student enters the class late, creating some disturbance, and explains brusquely that he had trouble getting his paper printed. He sits down, and as the professor tries to get the discussion back on track after the student's entrance, the student asks, "Just how much time were we supposed to put into this paper?" The professor stares at the student and quietly, very quietly, says, "As much as it takes." The student mutters, "Oh. All right." He looks away and makes no further disturbance.

16. What happened to the Professor and the student?

17. Interact in The Classroom • Seamless integration of new data into the simulation. • Laboratory activities • Predicting and interpreting events in one’s life • Interpreting literature • Research projects • Supporting other psychological theories

18. On the Web • Go to the following website to download Interact and find out more about affect control theory: http://www.indiana.edu/~socpsy/ACT/index.htm • This PowerPoint presentation can be downloaded from: http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~dborman/curriculum