Erving Goffman And The Theory Of Social Action
Of course, this also happens to you: every time you meet a friend or acquaintance, you say that your life is going very well. If you stop to look, whenever you access social networks, you will find numerous profiles that reflect prosperity. Precisely to take perspective on this biased and biased showcase, it might be interesting to see the world from the point of view of Erving Goffman and his theory of social action.
Goffman created a great work in which he addressed a complex topic: the creation of the human personality through its interaction with the environment. For this sociologist, a good part of each person’s conduct depends on their relationships with others.
Who is Erving Goffman?
Before continuing, it is worth shed some light on the figure of Erving Goffman. This man was a Canadian psychologist and sociologist who passed away in 1982. He left leaving a great legacy that we will delve into today.
Throughout his professional career, he has devoted much of his energies to participant observation to study human behavior. His work gave rise to theories about social interactions and the place each person has in a social hierarchy.
During his tenure, Goffman published several prestigious books. Some of the titles that stood out were “Stigmas”, from 1963, “Relações em Público”, from 1971, and “The Representation of the Self in Daily Life”, from 1957.
The Theory of Social Action, by Erving Goffman
Now let’s get into Erving Goffman’s theory of social action. As we have said before, she argues that human conduct depends on her personal settings and relationships. Therefore, we are all immersed in a constant management of our image in front of the rest of the world.
This interaction that each individual performs with their environment encourages them to seek the definition of each situation with the objective of being able to control it. In this way, we try to manage the impressions that others will form about us.
In this case, it could be said that we are actors playing our role in front of an audience that can be one or more people. It seems obvious to believe that Goffman is right on this point, as we all try to project a favorable image to others. Whether trying to like, please, sympathize, make them hate us… we all act trying to be conscious with the intended image.
For Goffman, and always under the prism of his theory of social action, when interacting, what we really seek is to create impressions that form interference in the public. We do this because we think these interferences will be beneficial to us, as we will try to reflect in them the aspects of our identity that we wish to communicate; moreover, they will show our intentionality.
The public image we project
Under Goffman’s theoretical parameters, each individual manages their relationships trying to make them adapt to the meaning of the public image they would like to project. In this way, it creates its own successive projections that will be present in one way or another in the communication with its potential interlocutors.
To better understand, let’s say that we want to make a good impression on someone and get that person to like us. For that, we will create and project for that person an image that we consider to be the best of us.
Building on this theory and its examples, psychologists like Rafael Ramírez Lago consider it excellent for studying the projections we pour into our social networks. In this sense, it could be said that we seek to create our own presentations that reflect a positive image through videos and photographs that show our happiness.
In this way, the theory of social action would explain the different roles we play according to the demand of each of our social interactions and the image we want to project. Thus, we would seek to obtain benefits, find good social accommodation and ultimately find our place in the world.
the representation game
However, for Goffman this type of interaction gives rise to a set of representations. These representations would never convey the real identity, only the dreamed, wanted or desired.
In other words, one could even identify the human being as a kind of public relations of oneself. We use our interpretation as a marketing campaign to show others the best of us.
Finally, we would like to point out that Goffman’s theory of social action is somewhat aesthetic and raises some doubts. Are we really like that? Is our social world centered on the image we want to project? Is social media a speaker of theory?
I don’t have the answers, but 2 billion people have a Facebook profile and the fact that most of these profiles have a positive bias is perhaps a sign that this psychologist was on the right path.
