Sociological Imagination: How to Gain Wisdom about the Society in which We All Participate and for Whose Future We Are All Responsible (Part 14)

I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.

Quincy Jones

Socialization

(Part D)

 by

 Charles Lamson

 Role Playing and "Face Work"

Why do Americans and Asians often have so much difficulty understanding each other even when they are playing the same role? Why are adolescents so hung up about their dealings with other kids? And why is it that in some communities seemingly small insults are treated as major signs of disrespect? These are examples of the kinds of problems that arise when people actually play the roles for which they have been socialized. They can be analyzed according to the rules of interaction known as face work.

In his book Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1965) Erving Goffman defines it, face is the positive social value a person claims for herself or himself by acting out a specific set of socially approved attributes (e.g., politeness, humor, strength, cuteness, sensitivity). Through his close observations of seemingly routine greetings, formulas of politeness, and the give-and-take of small talk. Goffman identified the rules of interaction whereby people seek to present a positive image of themselves, their "face." Once they have established a specific image, they seek to defend it against any possible threat that might cause them to "lose face." The concept of saving or losing face is found in cultures throughout the world. Indeed, in most Asian cultures the rules of face-work are even more elaborate than in the West. The importance of such unwritten rules of interaction is explored more fully in later posts. Most of us take it for granted that we want to maintain our self-respect and not lose face in social situations, but we do not give much thought to the actual interactions that serve to maintain face. Goffman explains: Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a standard of considerateness; he is expected to go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings. . . . The person who can witness another's humiliation and retain a cool countenance himself is said in our society to be "heartless," just as he who can unfeelingly participate in his own defacement is thought to be "shameless." (1965. p. 31) The way we apply these rules of face work in performing our roles differs according to the prestige of the people involved. When firing a junior clerk, for example, the boss does not go to nearly the same links to take into account the employee's feelings as he does when firing a vice president. Recent studies of role-playing among adolescents in inner-city communities draw on these insights. Where there is very little prestige of any kind for people to share, "fronting"---or pretending to play roles that one cannot really perform (e.g., great ballplayer, ladies' man) is extremely common. So, therefore, are potential threats to one's face. Face work in such communities---among gang members, for example, can become a deadly business, especially in situations where one senses disrespect (i.e., feels that one is being "dissed") (T. Williams and W. Kornblum, 1994. The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects). emotions play a strong part in these interactions. When people believe that they have seriously lost face, their feelings can run extremely high, especially if their peers do not hurry in to defend them. Rapid social change it tends to heighten the difficulties people have in playing the rules they have been socialized to perform. As Goffman points out: A person's performance of face work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were not socialized in this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. (1965. p. 31) As populations become more diverse through the process of social change (e.g. immigration and migration), the possibilities for cultural confusion over the rules of successful role playing in school or on the street can multiply dramatically. The interactionist perspective on socialization emphasizes how people become social actors and how they intuitively adopt the rules and rituals of interaction, such as face-work, that exist in their cultures. But it does not address how people acquire their notions of morality. We know that people generally learn their values and ideas of morality as young children in the family, but research on child development shows that the acquisition of morality is not a simple matter. Theories of Moral Development Throughout life we face a wide variety of moral dilemmas, which have a significant effect on our personalities. In consequence, social scientist have devoted considerable study to the processes through which people develop concepts of morality. Among the best known students of moral development are the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget under the American Social psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Piaget stands with Freud as one of the most important and original researchers and writers on Child Development. In the 1920s he became concerned with how children understand their environment, how they view their world, and how they develop their own personal philosophies. To discover the mental processes unique to children, he used what was then an equally unique method: He spent long hours with a small number of children, simply having conversations with them. These open-ended discussions were devoted to getting at how children think. In this way Piaget discovered evidence for the existence of ideas that are foreign to the adult mind (Berman, 1997. Children's Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsiblity; D Elkind, 1970. Children and Adolescents: Interpretive Essays on Jean Piaget). For example, the child gives inanimate objects human motives and tends to see everything as existing for human purposes. In this phase of his research, Piaget also described the egocentric aspect of the child's mental world, which is illustrated by the tendency to invent words and expect others to understand them. In the later of phases of his research and writing. Piaget devoted his efforts to questions about children's moral reasoning---the way our children interpret the rules of games and judge the consequences of their actions. He observed that children form absolute notions of right and wrong very early in life, but they often cannot understand the ambiguities of adult roles until they approach adolescence. This line of investigation was continued by the American social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose theory incorporates Piaget's views on the development of children's notions of morality. Kohlberg's theory of moral development emphasizes the cognitive aspects of moral behavior. (By cognitive we mean aspects of behavior that one thinks about and makes conscious choices about, rather than those that one engages in as a result of feelings or purely intuitive reactions. In a study of 57 Chicago children that began in 1957 and continued until the children wear young adults, Kohlberg presented the children with moral dilemmas such as the following: A husband is told that his wife needs a special kind of medicine if she is to survive a severe form of cancer. The medication is extremely expensive, and the husband can raise only half the needed funds. When he begs the inventor of the drug for a reduced price, he is rebuffed because the inventor wants to make a lot of money on his invention. The husband then considers stealing the medicine, and the child is asked whether the man should steal in order to save his wife. (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971. The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post Conventional World. Daedalus) On the basis of children's answers to such dilemmas at different ages, Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development consisting of three stages: (1) preconventional, in which the child acts out of desire for reward and fear of punishment; (2) conventional, in which the child's decisions are based on an understanding of right and wrong as embodied in the social rules or laws; and (3) postconventional, in which the individual develops a sense of relativity and can distinguish between social laws and moral principles. Subjects in the preconventional and conventional stages often immediately assume that stealing is wrong in the dilemma Kohlberg has posed, but postconventional thinking in older children causes them to debate the fairness of rules against stealing in view of the larger moral dilemma involved.  Gender and Moral Reasoning  Kohlberg's studies have been criticized for focusing too heavily on the behavior of boys and men from secure American families and not exploring possible alternative lines of moral reasoning that may prevail among females or people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. Pioneering work by social psychologist Carol Gilligan, an early collaborator of Kohlberg's has produced an impressive body of evidence that demonstrates the propensity of females to make moral choices on the basis of a somewhat different line of reasoning from that generally followed by males. Gilligan's research, and that of others who have followed her lead, shows that females are more likely than males to base moral judgments on considerations of caring as well as justice or law. More than their male counterparts, females tend to look for solutions to moral dilemmas that also serve to maintain relationships. Caring solutions that consider the needs of both sides are therefore more often invoked by females (A. Garcia, 1996 Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings. Sociological Inquiry, 66, 197-214: Gilligan, et al, (Eds.) 1998. Mapping the Moral Domain; D.J. Wren, 1997. Adolescent Females' "Voice" Changes Can Signal Difficulties for Teachers and Administrators. Adolescence, 32, 463-470). A good example of this difference appears in the work of D. Kay Johnston (1988), in which adolescent boys and girls were presented with dilemmas taken from Aesop's Fables. The young people were read a fable that presents a moral dilemma and then asked what they understood the problem to be and how they would solve it. In the fable of the dog in the manger (see Figure 1), the problem is clearly that the dog has taken sleeping space from the deserving ox. Some adolescents judge the situation purely in terms of which animal had the right to the space, and made statements like "It's [the ox's] ownership and nobody else had the right to it." Others sought a caring solution that would take into consideration both animals' needs, and made statements like "If there's enough hay, well, this is one way, split it. Like, if they could cooperate" (Adolescents' Solution to Dilemmas in Fables: Two Moral Orientations---Two Problem-Solving Strategies. C. Gilligan, et al (Eds.), Mapping the Moral Domain). FIGURE 1 The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1 The table in Figure 1 shows that boys were more likely than girls to give solutions based on rights, whereas girls were more likely than boys to choose solutions that emphasized caring. Some chose solutions that combined the two approaches. As Gilligan notes, "An innovative aspect of Johnston's design lay in the fact that after the children had stated and solved the fable problems, she asked, 'Is there another way to think about this problem?' About half of the children spontaneously switched orientation and solved the problem in the other mode (from Gilligan et al., 1988. p. xxi). On the basis of this and much subsequent research, Gilligan concludes that by age 11 most children can solve moral problems both in terms of rights (a justice approach) and in terms of response (a caring approach). The fact that a person adopts one approach in solving a problem does not mean that he or she does not know or appreciate others. Gilligan and others who studied moral development and gender point out that adolescence is a critical time in the development of morality and identity. However, in schools and elsewhere in society the message that comes across is that norms, values, and the most highly esteemed roles require that there be a "right way" to feel and think. Most often this right way is associated with the justice focus and the caring focus is silenced, along with the voices of girls and others to whom it appears to be a valuable alternative mode of moral reasoning (Wren, 1997). In adolescent girls and many minority students, this form of silencing can be detrimental to the development of the self in social situations. *MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 126-129* end In his book Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1965) Erving Goffman defines it, face is the positive social value a person claims for herself or himself by acting out a specific set of socially approved attributes (e.g., politeness, humor, strength, cuteness, sensitivity). Through his close observations of seemingly routine greetings, formulas of politeness, and the give-and-take of small talk. Goffman identified the rules of interaction whereby people seek to present a positive image of themselves, their "face." Once they have established a specific image, they seek to defend it against any possible threat that might cause them to "lose face." The concept of saving or losing face is found in cultures throughout the world. Indeed, in most Asian cultures the rules of face-work are even more elaborate than in the West. The importance of such unwritten rules of interaction is explored more fully in later posts. Most of us take it for granted that we want to maintain our self-respect and not lose face in social situations, but we do not give much thought to the actual interactions that serve to maintain face. Goffman explains: Just as the member of any group is expected to have self-respect, so also he is expected to sustain a standard of considerateness; he is expected to go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and he is expected to do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings. . . . The person who can witness another's humiliation and retain a cool countenance himself is said in our society to be "heartless," just as he who can unfeelingly participate in his own defacement is thought to be "shameless." (1965. p. 31) The way we apply these rules of face work in performing our roles differs according to the prestige of the people involved. When firing a junior clerk, for example, the boss does not go to nearly the same links to take into account the employee's feelings as he does when firing a vice president. Recent studies of role-playing among adolescents in inner-city communities draw on these insights. Where there is very little prestige of any kind for people to share, "fronting"---or pretending to play roles that one cannot really perform (e.g., great ballplayer, ladies' man) is extremely common. So, therefore, are potential threats to one's face. Face work in such communities---among gang members, for example, can become a deadly business, especially in situations where one senses disrespect (i.e., feels that one is being "dissed") (T. Williams and W. Kornblum, 1994. The Uptown Kids: Struggle and Hope in the Projects). emotions play a strong part in these interactions. When people believe that they have seriously lost face, their feelings can run extremely high, especially if their peers do not hurry in to defend them. Rapid social change it tends to heighten the difficulties people have in playing the rules they have been socialized to perform. As Goffman points out: A person's performance of face work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction. Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were not socialized in this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. (1965. p. 31) As populations become more diverse through the process of social change (e.g. immigration and migration), the possibilities for cultural confusion over the rules of successful role playing in school or on the street can multiply dramatically. The interactionist perspective on socialization emphasizes how people become social actors and how they intuitively adopt the rules and rituals of interaction, such as face-work, that exist in their cultures. But it does not address how people acquire their notions of morality. We know that people generally learn their values and ideas of morality as young children in the family, but research on child development shows that the acquisition of morality is not a simple matter. Theories of Moral Development Throughout life we face a wide variety of moral dilemmas, which have a significant effect on our personalities. In consequence, social scientist have devoted considerable study to the processes through which people develop concepts of morality. Among the best known students of moral development are the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget under the American Social psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Piaget stands with Freud as one of the most important and original researchers and writers on Child Development. In the 1920s he became concerned with how children understand their environment, how they view their world, and how they develop their own personal philosophies. To discover the mental processes unique to children, he used what was then an equally unique method: He spent long hours with a small number of children, simply having conversations with them. These open-ended discussions were devoted to getting at how children think. In this way Piaget discovered evidence for the existence of ideas that are foreign to the adult mind (Berman, 1997. Children's Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsiblity; D Elkind, 1970. Children and Adolescents: Interpretive Essays on Jean Piaget). For example, the child gives inanimate objects human motives and tends to see everything as existing for human purposes. In this phase of his research, Piaget also described the egocentric aspect of the child's mental world, which is illustrated by the tendency to invent words and expect others to understand them. In the later of phases of his research and writing. Piaget devoted his efforts to questions about children's moral reasoning---the way our children interpret the rules of games and judge the consequences of their actions. He observed that children form absolute notions of right and wrong very early in life, but they often cannot understand the ambiguities of adult roles until they approach adolescence. This line of investigation was continued by the American social psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose theory incorporates Piaget's views on the development of children's notions of morality. Kohlberg's theory of moral development emphasizes the cognitive aspects of moral behavior. (By cognitive we mean aspects of behavior that one thinks about and makes conscious choices about, rather than those that one engages in as a result of feelings or purely intuitive reactions. In a study of 57 Chicago children that began in 1957 and continued until the children wear young adults, Kohlberg presented the children with moral dilemmas such as the following: A husband is told that his wife needs a special kind of medicine if she is to survive a severe form of cancer. The medication is extremely expensive, and the husband can raise only half the needed funds. When he begs the inventor of the drug for a reduced price, he is rebuffed because the inventor wants to make a lot of money on his invention. The husband then considers stealing the medicine, and the child is asked whether the man should steal in order to save his wife. (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971. The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post Conventional World. Daedalus) On the basis of children's answers to such dilemmas at different ages, Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development consisting of three stages: (1) preconventional, in which the child acts out of desire for reward and fear of punishment; (2) conventional, in which the child's decisions are based on an understanding of right and wrong as embodied in the social rules or laws; and (3) postconventional, in which the individual develops a sense of relativity and can distinguish between social laws and moral principles. Subjects in the preconventional and conventional stages often immediately assume that stealing is wrong in the dilemma Kohlberg has posed, but postconventional thinking in older children causes them to debate the fairness of rules against stealing in view of the larger moral dilemma involved.  Gender and Moral Reasoning  Kohlberg's studies have been criticized for focusing too heavily on the behavior of boys and men from secure American families and not exploring possible alternative lines of moral reasoning that may prevail among females or people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. Pioneering work by social psychologist Carol Gilligan, an early collaborator of Kohlberg's has produced an impressive body of evidence that demonstrates the propensity of females to make moral choices on the basis of a somewhat different line of reasoning from that generally followed by males. Gilligan's research, and that of others who have followed her lead, shows that females are more likely than males to base moral judgments on considerations of caring as well as justice or law. More than their male counterparts, females tend to look for solutions to moral dilemmas that also serve to maintain relationships. Caring solutions that consider the needs of both sides are therefore more often invoked by females (A. Garcia, 1996 Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings. Sociological Inquiry, 66, 197-214: Gilligan, et al, (Eds.) 1998. Mapping the Moral Domain; D.J. Wren, 1997. Adolescent Females' "Voice" Changes Can Signal Difficulties for Teachers and Administrators. Adolescence, 32, 463-470). A good example of this difference appears in the work of D. Kay Johnston (1988), in which adolescent boys and girls were presented with dilemmas taken from Aesop's Fables. The young people were read a fable that presents a moral dilemma and then asked what they understood the problem to be and how they would solve it. In the fable of the dog in the manger (see Figure 1), the problem is clearly that the dog has taken sleeping space from the deserving ox. Some adolescents judge the situation purely in terms of which animal had the right to the space, and made statements like "It's [the ox's] ownership and nobody else had the right to it." Others sought a caring solution that would take into consideration both animals' needs, and made statements like "If there's enough hay, well, this is one way, split it. Like, if they could cooperate" (Adolescents' Solution to Dilemmas in Fables: Two Moral Orientations---Two Problem-Solving Strategies. C. Gilligan, et al (Eds.), Mapping the Moral Domain). FIGURE 1 The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1 The table in Figure 1 shows that boys were more likely than girls to give solutions based on rights, whereas girls were more likely than boys to choose solutions that emphasized caring. Some chose solutions that combined the two approaches. As Gilligan notes, "An innovative aspect of Johnston's design lay in the fact that after the children had stated and solved the fable problems, she asked, 'Is there another way to think about this problem?' About half of the children spontaneously switched orientation and solved the problem in the other mode (from Gilligan et al., 1988. p. xxi). On the basis of this and much subsequent research, Gilligan concludes that by age 11 most children can solve moral problems both in terms of rights (a justice approach) and in terms of response (a caring approach). The fact that a person adopts one approach in solving a problem does not mean that he or she does not know or appreciate others. Gilligan and others who studied moral development and gender point out that adolescence is a critical time in the development of morality and identity. However, in schools and elsewhere in society the message that comes across is that norms, values, and the most highly esteemed roles require that there be a "right way" to feel and think. Most often this right way is associated with the justice focus and the caring focus is silenced, along with the voices of girls and others to whom it appears to be a valuable alternative mode of moral reasoning (Wren, 1997). In adolescent girls and many minority students, this form of silencing can be detrimental to the development of the self in social situations. *MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 126-129* end The Dog in the Manger A dog, looking for a comfortable place to nap, came upon the empty stall of an ox. There it was quiet and cool, and the hay was soft. The dog, it was very tired, curled up on the hay and was soon fast asleep. A few hours later the ox lumbered in from the fields. He had worked hard and was looking forward to his dinner of hay. His heavy steps woke the dog, who jumped up in a great temper. As the ox came near the stall the dog snapped angrily, as if to bite him. Again and again the ox tried to reach his food, but each time he tried the dog stopped him. Moral Orientation of spontaneous Solution for the Dog in the Manger Fable, by Gender Orientation                                               Female                                            Male --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rights (justice)                                            12                                                  22 Response (caring)                                      15                                                    5 Both                                                              3                                                     1