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.
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