Micro-Level Theories 1. Symbolic Interaction

a. Behaviorism b. Exchange Theoryc. Social Learning Theory d. Dramaturgy- Erving Goffman

i. Some people say he was an amateur actor Why he named his theory dramaturgy

ii. He said that when we are in the presence of other people, we present a character to those other people, just like an actor on stage presents a character to an audience

iii. Said we need the audience to believe in the character that we present to them, otherwise the interaction is not going to go very smoothly

iv. We use different strategies to these and different problems occur when these fail

e. Labeling Theory- Howard Becker i. In the 1950s and early 60’s he was a colleague of Goffman at

the University of Chicagoii. Talks about the process of labeling and how people come to

have labels…sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not, and sometimes temporary or permanent in your own mind and in the mind of other people

We act towards people according the labels they have May cause that person to act differently to the world

based on this…this is termed as self-fulfilling prophesy

a. When someone makes a prediction about someone else and that changes how other people deal with that person or how that person deals with other people around them

i. Ex: high school friend who married lady with a limp

1. The idea was painted in his mind by a table card reading

Sociobiology- 1975- Edward O. Wilson Don’t believe that organisms reproduce, but believe that genes reproduce.

o The organisms just aid in natural selection. Austria has the highest chance of survival and reproduction Marriage is the guy’s best strategy to make sure the woman he wants

reproduces his genes. o Men make most of these laws, not women.

Historically epidemic diseases have been the number one killers of humans.

o They no longer the number one killer of humans because we have come up with medicines and vaccines.

In what ways are humans biologically different from other animals?o Our brains are more complex, which gives us the capacity for

invention, because we have the ability of imagination. We can ask, “what if?”

o Humans have the most efficient cooling system of any animal. We are warm blooded…don’t have to cool ourselves.

o Lots of animals can run faster than humans, but no animal can run farther.

o We have the capacity for language. We have the cognitive ability to produce it and communicate it.

o Humans are not specialized. Our cognitive ability and physical characteristics allow us to adapt to basically anything.

World-Openness and Plasticity- we can mold and shape our behavior to basically any environment and any circumstance

Human biology has drawbacks:o Our instincts are very weak

As infants, we are helpless to almost any creature. Most animals can make noises, feed, walk, etc. within hours

after birth. o Every step of the way until we are fully developed, we need help. We

have to learn how to survive in both a physical environment, as well as a social environment.

o Feral children- children that have been deprived of human contact in the early stages of life

Feral refers to wild dogs What happens to most feral children?

Depends on level of deprivation and how long that went on

No contact but food until about 8:o Usually they never catch up, physically or

psychologically. o Use of language is restricted to that of a two year

old. o Look like a 12-year-old. o Never show emotions. o Die in late teens or twenties.

Earlier contact:o In Romania, there were number of orphanages

where children had very little contact to adults o Kids who had been there the longest never

caught up

o The ones who were there only a few years were caught up

Interaction with other humans is vital.

Common Stock of Knowledge Every society has their own “common stock of knowledge” in which its

members must have to be members in society Our society’s definition of a wide variety of situations William I. Thomas- “If men define situations as real, then they are real in

their consequences.”o At the very beginning of the 20th centuryo Thomas theory o One of the most famous quotes in sociology o If we define someone as a friend, we will treat that someone as a

friend o How you define the “cause” of your disease determines what

approach you take in curing it Societies need people to have the same definition for some things

o Traffic lights, proper driving behavior, etc. How do societies do this?

Peter Berger’s 3-Step Process: 1. Externalization

a. Person A has a definition of a certain situation that they have learned through either trial and error or some other way

b. They communicate their definition to Person B 2. Objectification

a. Person B receives the externalization from person A 3. Internalization

a. Person B has now heard and understand externalization from Person A and now internalizes it and makes their own definition from it from this point on

Just because one step happens, does not mean that the next step will happen.

o Miscommunication can happen o Person B understands what Person A means in a different way o In step 1 the process can be reversed onto Person A

Hunting example about what type of wood to use for the camp fire

Prerequisites need to be in place before process can happen:o We need to have languageo We need to have advanced cognitive abilities to be able to

understand complex ideaso Experience

Most comes from interaction with other people Some comes from trial and error

Symbolic Interactionism George H. Mead Symbols can be all different types of things

o Flags, language, etc. Language allows us to think about and plan for the future.

o With that, comes the ability to actually do something about the future. o We can coordinate these things with each other, which makes society.

“Self” o As humans, we have self-awareness. o We have the ability to step outside of ourselves and visualize

ourselves as an object and think about what we are doing, why, how well, what are the alternatives, etc.

o Takes many years to develop through cognitive development and social experience

Mead described two different parts of the “self”1. The “I”

a. The active part of the self. Us when we are doing something 2. The “Me”

a. The self as an objectb. This is our ability to look at ourselves in a figurative sense and

think about what we are doing and why and the impact of what we are doing

c. Talks about the reflexive nature of social interaction i. What I do towards you depends on what you do towards

me and vise versa 1. Planning out what to say to someone and then it

going wrong when they reply with something else Mead came up with 3 stages of development of the “self”

1. The Imitation Stagea. In our first 3 years of life b. Mead never actually gave this stage a name, but noted that in this

stage we are only really capable of imitating other people without no understanding of why

c. Our focus tends to be on our own physical needsd. Most people have no memory of this time in their life

2. The Play Stagea. Begins around pre-kb. Now we can start to understand roles, like mother and fatherc. We realize there is a classification of people in society

i. However, we still only understand roles in very simplistic ways 3. The Game Stage

a. Sometime around the age of 9, we move into this stage

b. We can now understand the complex relationship between each roles c. He called this the game stage because he used baseball to explain it

i. Each set position has relation to others positions on the playing field

d. We need to understand how one person in one position can affect another person in another position

e. 1) In this stage, you can take the role of the other (singular; seeing things from the perspective of the individual)

i. The ability to understand that someone in a different position with see things differently and will be affected differently by things than we will be

1. Doesn’t mean we will always do it, but we have the ability to do it

f. 2) In this stage, you can take the role of the generalized other. (Being able to understand society’s general expectations for people)

i. Expectations differ depending on what position the person is in

g. 3) In this stage, you can think introspectively.i. We can engage in self-analysis

ii. What we are doing, why, how it might affect other people, etc. 1. In doing so, we can think about different alternatives

and expected outcomes…and then make a choice

Charles Horton Cooley’s- The Looking- Glass Self Took the phrase from a Walt Whitman poem We see ourselves in other people after we come to know who we are To our interpretation, of the actions of others toward us, we come to know who

we are o So other people have expectations for us and give us constant feedback

about how well we are meeting those expectations “Reflected Appraisals”

David Kenny o A social psychologist o Wanted to see how much affect reflected appraisals had on people o Self-esteem tests before and after experiment o He found “modest” results

They affected some people a little bit, and some people they didn’t affect at all

Only good as a developmental theory…might be good for young people but no meaningful affect on adults

Our family’s and friend’s opinions of us matter the most to us because they know us the best…these comments were from strangers

By the time you get to be an adult, we have had a lot of reflected appraisals…a new one from a stranger will not outweigh all the other ones

Social Learning Theory o Second way we learn is through rewards and punishments o Third way…vicariously (watching other people)

Oppositional Codes1. Clothing and appearance2. Conspicuous consumption3. Speech

How we show members of a group that we belong to that particular group Ex: wearing LSU attire to show you attend the school “Primer” - sometimes used to refer to small books we give to kids Conspicuous Consumption- Thorstein Veblen

o He noted how wealthy people consume cultural artifacts that show no other purpose but to show a person’s standing in society

o People spending a lot of money on art Do we really need to?

Speech o Sometimes people in different classes use different forms of speech o Young people are always coming up with new patterns of speech with

words and phrases o There are differences in the way men and women speak o Where did these difference come from and why do they exist?o Black/white speech differences:

1. Physiological Difference People said there were physiological differences in the

mouth, throat, tongue, etc. between blacks and whites Problems with this theory: if this was true, it would be

universal…but it is not even constant in the U.S. Speech differences involved wording, etc. and not just

different pronunciation 2. African Origin

Has become an “of course” statement Says that African American speech styles extend from

languages that were spoken in West Africa back in the 1600s when Africans were brought to America as slaves

o Because of our segregated society, the patterns have stayed in African American society

They would say that these speech styles are grammatically correct

Should be considered as a separate dialect than English rather than incorrect

“Ebonics” or African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

3. Walter Wolfram’s Ocracoke Island Study Specializes in studying languages and speech Wanted to look and see how speech has changed over

time, which it does Became a firm believer on black and white speech

difference Compared different generations

o The older generations who went to school together had no speech differences

o Only diff. among younger generations who went to school separately during segregation

Had to discard theory of African American origin 4. William Labov (2004)- Do We Speak American?

Has been studying languages since 1960s Geographic differences in speech are becoming much

more noticeable that they were in the 1960so People thought they would be fading away as our

society became more mobile and with the global media, however exactly the opposite is happening

He looked at b/w speech differences o He said African American speech styles have

nothing to do w/ slavery, but are solely a product of the last 50 years and are becoming more prominent

o Said more of an urban phenomenon than rural If it was true about the slavery thing it

would be bigger in rural areas, but that’s not the case

o We are left w/ the conclusion that these speech styles are an oppositional code

o The Linguistic Poverty Hypothesis An explanation of white people swearing

Lower class people swear more than middle or upper class people according to this, because lower class people lack the vocabulary to express themselves in more accepted ways

Geoffrey Hughes Has written several things on swearing He has shown that historically swearing has been a

favorite pass time of both upper and lower class and the backlash seems to come from the middle class

“Flyting” was popular among upper class males in Scotland where they would see who could come up with the best insult

o Mostly done through letters that were sent back and forth

This hypothesis says the lower class uses swear words because they lack the intelligence to use other words.

Protestant religions have the strongest hatred against swearing but don’t have language to communicate without swearing.

Ever since WWII there has been a steady increase in public swearing and since the feminist movement in the sixties, a public increase in swearing by women.

Where do we learn the proper use of language? In school we are taught proper grammar

o We steadily become more and more educated throughout the years

o The more need people have to swear...so it should be going down…but it has not….it has increased

o Erving Goffman Founder of dramaturgy Dramatic enhancement of role

If a person’s ability or right to carry out a certain role might be questioned by certain people, then that person will exaggerate his or her role behaviors…they will go overboard in trying to demonstrate that he or she really can do this.

He used the example of nurses. Dramatic enhancement of narrative

Said that most of our interactions with other people involve “retellings”...we tell other people stories of ourselves

o To get people to listen to them, we embellish them to spice them up and get people to pay attention

Swearing is way to do this

The Saper- Wharf Hypothesis “Linguistic Relativity” First to crack the code in hieroglyphics Languages don’t only reflect their cultures but also influences and directs

their culture

o They said that any society’s language revolves around that society’s worldview

World view- depends on whether we are talking about an individual or society

Its cognitive ordering of the universe These push us to think us in certain ways and constrain us

from thinking in foreign ways We do 1 of 2 things when this happens We discard the idea as nonsense We conform the idea to fit in with society’s way of

thinking Sioux= “wakkan” Irequois= “orendo” Algonquin= “Manitou” most common ^^^^^^^String Theory?

Types of Societies by Tools and Technology We can classify different societies based on the tools that they have available

to them. Most “Primitive” (only meant as a description of their tools and tech…. not

their moral character, intelligence, etc.) o Hunting and Gathering Societies

Basic hand tools Spears, clubs, blades, etc.

Pretty much completely dependent on nature for their food supply

They have to constantly be moving around, following the game and the changing season

Most of the time, food is scarce, so they can only afford to feed just so many mouths…so they tend to live in small groups (25-150 people)

o Primary feature: everybody knows everybody o People are held together by affective bonds: you

have a close relationship with everybody in the group, and the appearance of a stranger would be taken as a very scary thing

Since things are scarce, they can produce little or no surplus

o This means, you can’t afford to anyone whom is not involved in food production

o Everyone tends to have the same knowledge and skill set

Low specialization and a low division of labor

Sexual division of labor No rich people, and not poor people

Low stratification Women’s work is just as vital to the group as men’s work is…

high equality They all tend to think in pretty much the same way Shared norms and values

Strong collective conscience o Emphasis on the collectivity

What is good for us?o Horticultural Societies

Still only have very simple hand tools, but they have learned how to plant crops on a very small scale and learned how to domesticate animals

So, they are not completely dependent on nature Tend to live in villages, since they have to be around to harvest

their crops Have several hundred people, since they have more food

supply Some had several thousand people in their community

Can have a few people not involved in few production, so here you start to see different occupations

Jewelry makers, etc. First start to see social stratification here

o Agrarian Societies Practice agriculture on a large scale

Plows, draft animals, wheels, etc. Can feed a lot more people and make very large

surpluseso Need of command and control to keep track of

things Formalized governments Urban revolution…development of our earliest cities Can support a large number of occupations that don’t involve

food production Carpenters, merchants, etc.

We see the invention of mathematics We see the development of money as a means of exchange Can afford standing armies that can be used to conquer

neighboring people to take control of their land and resources Grow into city-states and then into empires

Different cultures, backgrounds, etc. The institution of written law Darius I the Great of Persia

Had 3 wives

o 1 was his fav. 2 were for political reasons Fav. Wife tried to poison another…which is treason He had to banish her to Egypt

Some people could become wealthy…particular political elite, high priests, and the military

75-80% of population involved in harvest work and get little return

Highest rate of inequality in this type of society Dominated some of the most advanced countries as well as

some not so advanced o Modern Industrial Society

Mid-1800s in northern and western Europe and then in the U.S. and Canada

Agricultural production was the forefront of this industrial revolution

High specialization and high division of labor Everybody is doing something different for money

300-360 million people living in the U.S. Instrumental bonds

We buy clothes from some merchant who bought them from someone else

Weak collective conscious We still share some norms and values, but there are a

lot of differences as well So, we can no longer think what is good for “us”

anymore, because things are good in different societieso Oil price when low is good for consumers but not

for oil industry What is good for me?

Ralph H. Turner “The Real Self…” Where do we locate ourselves? Where do we look to as a measuring

standard? Institutionalists look to institutions.

o Institutions tend to be bureaucratic. They change very slowly. Culture Lag

o With industrialization, tech. always changes faster than society’s norms and values.

Can sometimes take several generations to catch up o In modern industrial societies, norms and values simply don’t answer

the same norms and guidelines for people as they did in simpler times.

Now, how do people measure up and find their real self?

o Turner says there been many benefits. We have created more “impulsive” people, people who are ready and willing to try new things and don’t look to traditional norms and values to try to find their real selves. They look to these as restraints that need to be broken.

He knows this can be a problem…crime, drug use, feeling of alienation, etc.

On the good side, it has opened up many opportunities for people to find out what they want to be.

John Hewitt: Dilemmas of the American Self Said Americans love to boil things down to a dichotomy

o Where you only have two options Black or white Good or bad Yes or no

Rural/Small Town America= Conformity and Oppressiono Tend to be quite conservative o Tend to have a lot of the same shared conservative norms and values o Very few minorities o For anybody that doesn’t fit into their mold, the pressures for

conformity become oppressive Modern Urban America= Freedom

o Freedom from the conformity and oppression of small town life, freedom for somebody to be their own self

o We have an obligation to live out our life on the larger stage of urban America, where we can actually make a meaningful impact on society

o Gives people more choices, and releases people from some pressures of conformity, but certainly still do have pressures, and are not free from them altogether by any means.

David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd Most people are living in urban areas and are surrounded by a lot of

people; however, most of the people are strangers. Different types of societies form different types of people. Modes of Conformity

o Most societies try to use social control to get the people to conform to their norms and values, and try to reduce the need of any other forms of control

Type of Person o Tradition-directed

Look to the traditional things in society to see if they are being the right type of people

Tend to live in smaller groups Internal mean of social control: shame

Wouldn’t want to do anything to bring shame to their family or themselves

o Inner-directed (or “autonomous”) These are people who, do to their upbringing and their

psychological makeup, are driven to go places that nobody else has gone.

Have difficulty-keeping friends, their marriage intact, because that is all secondary to them. They keep them distracted from their goals.

Internal mean of social control: guilt They feel guilty if they fail to achieve these big lofty

goals that set for themselveso Other- directed

Measure themselves by comparing themselves to other people and worry about what others think of them

Don’t want to have the oldest car on the block Want to be just as successful as the other people

around us Internal mean of social control: anxiety

How do we try to relieve this anxiety?o Crass Consumerism

Erving Goffman’s “Self” He says that a correctly staged scene needs an audience. The audience is a

product of the scene that the subject presents. When he talking about the self, he is talking about how we are who other people think we are and whom we think other people are…how we present ourselves to others.

He studied social interactiono What are the rules of social interaction and what happens when those

rules are broken? One of the first things he discovered was that when people come into social

interaction they have to figure out a definition: what is going on and who are the other participants?

o Not “who am I?” but “who are you?” Because that is the only way I will know of what I can expect

from you and I can get an idea of what you expect from me We try to help people along with getting an idea of who they think we are.

Idealization/ Impression Management

Impression management- we have the ability to control the info. We give to other people

Idealization- we tend to present an idealized version of ourselves to others

o This leads to a secondary kind of criticism from other people about Goffman

We are always trying to “fool” people about who we are or enhance our self-esteem

o Even some of our deceit isn’t necessarily a bad thing…it has to do with tact

We try to take other’s sensibilities into account and try not to offend those sensibilities

Ex: “Does this dress make me look fat?” o In terms of idealization, Goffman knows we tend to add typical

ideals of society into our act. We want other people to believe that we know and

understand society’s ideal and values and that we are capable of performing them

We want them to believe that we are competent person We are not trying to seem better, we are simply trying to

produce a sense of “self” and project it to other people On the other hand, there is some deceit within our

act. For the most part, people wear clothes that are

appropriate to their sex and show/ hide desirable and undesirable body parts.

We wear make up He describes ways we get people to get us:

o Our front Personal front

Physical appearance, how we decorate our bodies, our achievements, what we do with our bodies, etc.

Setting Involves the physical objects that we arrange

around us to foster a given impression o We can think of them as our stage props

Ex: A classroom is set up in a certain way o We can assume the students sitting in the

desks are students enrolled in the course A person has the right to carry out a certain

performance…doctor’s hang degrees on their walls o Is shows they have the right to do what they

do o Front Stage Regions

Places, not behavior

Places where we can expect to have an audience We know that there is going to be other people around,

watching us so that they can judge us. So, we know we are stage and have to put on a show.

o Back Stage Regions Places where we can exclude the audience, places where we

can keep people out We can step out of character and just be ourselves We can relax Also serve another purpose: where the “dirty work” takes

place Every show requires certain preparations

o These need to take place backstage o We need to do preparations to present to

other peopleo We can’t let other people see this or else they

will know how much of us actually is stagedo Teams

Where people coordinate their activities to present a show to other people

Need an area where they can plan their strategy, get their stage props ready, etc.

There also things they don’t want other people to see

Interactional Citizenshipo Describes the right that people have to go where they want o Some are based on sex o Handicapped buildings

Backchannel Communication o How we communicate with other people non-verbally

Our facial expressions, eye contact patterns, hand motions, etc.

o There are also some verbal forms of this “Uh huh, oh yeah”

When we figure the other person isn’t getting our non-verbal forms of backchannel communication

Collusive Communication o Info. that some other person is projecting and we aren’t buying it

(bc we know it’s not true), but we do not say anything to avoid confrontation. You can try to communicate to a few people around you without communicating it to everyone.

Attribution Theory

We judge people based on what we “know” about them. What we think we know can be based on our own personal experiences with that person or with other people like that person. Or, it can be based on widely held cultural stereotypes.

If we know one thing about a person, that forms 100% of our judgment about that person, because that is all we have to go off of.

Attribution Theory Implicit Personality Theory

o How we categorize people using social stereotypes Quite often, they are just plain wrong

o These stereotypes are often being reinforced by the people around us and by the media

Ingroups and Outgroupso Are they one of us or one of them o We tend to think that our own group is bettero Anyone who is different than us must be worse

Causal Attributions o Not only about who someone is, but about what they did and why they

did ito Internal causation- when we attribute a person’s actions and the

results of those actions to the personal characteristics of that individual

Ex: Mary aced the test, because she is a really good student and because of her internal qualities.

o External causation- when we attribute a person’s actions and the results of those actions to forces that lie outside of that particular individual

Ex: good/bad luck, coincidence, different circumstances, etc. The Fundamental Attribution Error

o When we are judging ourselves differently than we judge other individuals

o We tend to blame our success on internal causes, and our failures on external causes

For other individuals, we tend to do the exact opposite. The Ultimate Attribution Error

o Blame ingroup success on internal causes and ingroup failures on external causes

LSU won b/c good coach; LSU lost b/c bad ref. and weathero Outgroup…exact opposite

Labeling Theory- Howard Becker When we put a label on someone, it changes how people perceive him or her

and interact with them. Which in turn, changes how that individual interacts with the world around them.

o This can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

o When people label someone and it causes the person to act a certain way, they fulfill the prophecy.

Tell someone they’re a delinquent so many times they become one.

Denotative Meaning This is what a word actually stands for

o Ex: Tree- denotes a certain type of large plant Connotative Meaning

This is our affective response; the emotions that we feel when we hear/think of a word

o Ex: Tree- we likes trees, they provide for us

Charles Osgoode Semantic differentials- the differences between the connotative meanings of

different words He found (when he looked at what people wrote) that it all fell along three

different dimensionso 1) Evaluation- we look at whether things are good or bad

Good- tree; bad- serial killero 2) Potency- do we look at things being strong/powerful or

weak/powerlesso 3) Activity- people look at things whether they’re lively or passive

Test: Symbolic Internationalism

o Know the fundamentals of each Dramaturgy Sociobiology and its explanation for human behavior

o And the criticisms Farrow children and what happens to them We need to learn how to survive in a social environment

o Peter’s 3-step process about how we do it

Mead’s theory on symbolic internationalismo Know his 2 questions and answers

The different parts of selfo Different stages we go through before we have a self

Cooley’s idea of the looking glass self Know what oppositional codes are Black/white speech differences

o Know what the major theories are and walter and William theories and challenging them

Know the linguistic poverty hypothesis Saptor-wharf hypothesis Be able to compare primitive societies to modern industrialized

societies Turner’s article…what are the two different types of people that he

talks about Hewitt’s two different kinds of self

o Urban America and modern America David

o What the two forms of social control for each and what does that mean for people’s behavior not in industrialized societies

Narcissism Goffman’s dramaturgy

o What is it why do we do ito How does “self” by him differ from Mead’s

Impression managemento Know what it is and the strategies

Attribution theory o The causes and theories that go with it

Know the two different meanings of words