Symbolic Interaction and Nonverbal Communication
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This chapter provides a framework for the analysis of nonverbal communication or behavior. Aspects of SI have been discussed in previous chapters, but in this section, an integrated format is provided. SI has a long history and it presents an insightful way to understand human behavior. Extensive research is being conducted from this perspective. Chapter ten is meant to blend with this chapter. In that chapter, readers are introduced to problems and given opportunities to assess their nonverbal skills.
In recent years, scholars have focused on the "return of the actor", or human agency (Tourraine, 1985). Not all research approaches include the subject as actor nor do they include the subject's interpretation and meaning of behavioral episodes. Because SI is broadly conceived, it is sometimes referred to as an approach rather than a theory (Nye & Berardo, 1966). The breadth of the approach permits the scholar to include materials from many areas of inquiry, as in this text.
SI is based on the following assumptions: that communication requires the use of shared symbols; that self and identity are constructed through interaction and that humans create society through interaction. It is the thesis of this book that the symbolization process applies to both verbal and nonverbal communication, as suggested years ago by Mead, an early founder of the approach. Humans create metaphors for the body and for body actions.
Within the general SI approach, there are many perspectives, each of which favors its own methodologies. The Chicago School of SI tends to focus on the individual in micro-interactive situations, such as dyadic events, often using ethnographic methods. This approach has been referred to as situationism. The Iowa School of SI tends to focus on existing macro-structures, such as social class, and it tends to use more quantifable methods than do scholars from the Chicago School (Meltzer, 1972; Stryker, 1980). The differences between the schools of thought, of course, are not absolute. Recently, attempts have been made to find a middle way between the approaches (Ritzer, 1990).
This chapter focuses on aspects of the history and development of SI with the expectation that students and researchers will better understand the approach of this book. SI is a perspective that can enrich a researcher's analysis of human behavior and it can provide a way for the student to integrate studies in nonverbal communication; indeed, it can help a student frame and interpret nonverbal events. A Problems and Applications section is found in the next chapter.
Researchers in various disciplines employ widely ranging models or paradigmsin their focus on human behavior. (1). A research program may be very restrictive or it may be very broad, depending on the goals of the researcher. It may be confined to the laboratory or it may focus on the natural life-worlds of the subjects.
Framing A Selected SI Vocabulary
A vocabulary associated with SI has been developed over a long period of years. Major concepts include the following.
The human body, of course, is involved in nearly all communicative episodes. Contrary to a common assumption, the body is not merely a flesh object with skin and bones. Rather, it has symbolic meaning to the owners and to others who observe it. In reflective conversations with themselves, people create meanings for their bodies as part of the way they experience the world. People evaluate their bodies, thinking of them as ugly or pretty, obese or thin. Psychological, social and cultural meanings are applied to the body. People incorporate the perceived attitudes of others in their self assessments.
The presentation of self is an everyday occurence and the body is intimately involved in these presentations. People learn how to use their bodies to influence others and to respond to them. As self presenters they are actors on a metaphorical stage; as observers of others, they are part of a metaphorical audience.
The self-concept is essentially the product of social interaction (Gecas, 1982). The self is inescapably a social self. People create their identities based on the influence of others; parental and peer influence are of paramount importance. Self, or identity, is expressed in verbal and nonverbal communication as a form of facework.
The self is involved in all nonverbal communication; lines of action are formed, based on the sense of self, and adapted to social circumstances. People perform multiple roles in life, such as lover, parent, child or worker. People perceive how to act appropriately to avoid personal embarrassment. They can misread situations and botch them; they can deceive others or "ham" it up. They can play simple or elaborate games to impress others, acting with considerable skill. They can also be very awkard and shy in the presence of others.
Human nonverbal communication is interactive and intersubjective; that is, there must be a sharing of meaning between participants in a nonverbal event for there to be mutual understanding. Display rules and codes are embedded in the social contexts of action; the concept of appropriateness is derived from the underlying codes. From one perspective, humans seem to play elaborate games in their interactions.
Social status influences human nonverbal behavior. For example, wealthy people born to money and to the associations and privileges of wealth, behave differently from those who are born in poverty, their codes of conduct having been derived from different contexts or standpoints in society. Their presentations of self reflect the status of the economically privileged person; the expectations of their peers reinforces their behavior (LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993). By acting as they are expected to, people of privilege consciously and unconsciously reinforce the norms of their social status, class or standing.
Powerful master themes, such as social class, power and dominance, age, gender and ethnicity are involved in, and expressed through, everyday interactions. Humans create a sense of identity, which are really the sum of the ways that they think of themselves (Longemore, 1998).
Framing the SI Nonverbal Process
In inner conversations with the self, I think about who I am, based on my perceptions created in interactions with others. After sizing up the demands and expectations of a social situation, I construct or build up meaningful lines of action that will help me adapt to the circumstances. I know that the other participants in the social event will respond. They, in joint interaction with me, will react to what I do; in turn, they will respond nonverbally. Our mutual actions are contingent one upon the other.
I make sense of the sequence of interactions and, should I meet the individuals again, I may modify my actions or continue similar actions in the future. I know that different contexts and situations call for different behaviors and by taking account of them, I expect to act appropriately, although I know that I can act however I choose to. As an actor, I usually know when my efforts to interact with others have failed or succeeded.
As mentioned above, nonverbal behaviors are usually contingent, one behavior leading to the next. Most of the time, people are involved in social events where only two or a few more people are involved. Personal forms of agentry are typical. Many times, however, people are involved in large public and mass events, such as sports or musical events. Forms of public ritual are expressed in these circumstances (Deegan, 1989). Whether they are marriage ceremonies, funerals, political conventions, or worship rituals, public events contain the social rules of engagement.
Perhaps most personal lines of action are preplanned and intentional, although the planning may be fuzzy or awkward. For example, people plan to dress fashionably for job interviews to make a good impression. They may even practice the interview in a dress rehearsal at home. On the other hand, many body behaviors are adaptive actions that require little previous thought. Scratching and itching are automatic responses to the signals that are sent by the central nervous system. People usually brush their teeth while thinking about other things, such as last night's date. Even when waving goodbye, the action is nearly phatic because people do it without deep meaning or thought. Routinized behaviors are habituated and often highly skilled, the result of considerable practice. Although they require little conscious attention, they are the products of learning (Schegloff, 1986).
Whether or not people intend to communicate something with their bodies, they are always on stage, either frontstage or backstage (Goffman, 1959) in one way or another. For example, people reading books in a library may be thoroughly engrossed in what they are doing, completely unaware that others may be observing them; their posture and so on, trying to make sense of who they are, attributing meanings to them. The reader has communicated something to the observer without intending to, completely unaware. In this sense, people are always on stage. Humans cannot not communicate (Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson, 1967). It is common for researchers to separate intentional and accidental communication, but both occur together. Even when nonverbal communication is intended, as in the wink of an eye, the targeted observer may miss the connection altogether, focusing on something else. The separation of intentional and accidental communication by researchers helps them do their researcher, but it is artificial.
There are levels and types of nonverbal communication. There may be singular episodes that are not repeated or there may be very complex, long-term behaviors. A rough form of planning is necessary to create a relationship, for example. Romantic relationships, seemingly simple, are indeed complex. They are contingent, recursive, non-linear involvements full of social and cultural meaning, deeply involving the emotions and personal schemas of the participants. Although the planning and staging of romantic involvements may be blurry, even confused, it is a necessary part of the romantic "spiral".
There are many short-term routines associated with maintaining a relationship, such as putting a piece of toast in the oven, or taking the other party out to lunch, but the overall relationships is exceptionally complex. People may "work" on nonverbal communication in self-talk or conversations with the self and never take any subsequent action. In other words, people can plan to do nothing that is observable to others, which, of course, is a often a chosen line of action. People may respond to perceived emergencies in signal response; they may also choose beforehand not to respond in the middle of the night to an accident involving others.
Nonverbal communication has been studied in various ways, from a variety of perspectives from very early times to the present. Roman orators taught their pupils how to speak, how to use their bodies in spoken presentation. Historiographers have shown us how queens and emperors lived and anthropologists have shown us cave paintings depicting nonverbal activities (Schramm, 1988). Modern psychologists, philosophers and others have pieced together new approaches to the study of communication, as any book on nonverbal communication will reveal. (Anderson, 1999; Burgoon, Buller & Woodall, 1996; Knapp & Vangelisti, 1992; Richmond & McCroskey, 1992).
As mentioned, there appears to be a return of the actor in modern research and there appears to be a new appreciation for the dependency of the spoken language upon the nonverbal "language"(Gilroy, 1996). Of course there has always been a relationship between the spoken word and the unspoken (Key, 1980), but recently there is a renewed emphasis. Everyday language rests on a nonverbal base. Children at birth rely on nonverbal means of communication, developing spoken language only later. The history of collective human growth reflects the same dependency of language upon a nonverbal base. Space, time, custom and practice; the ways that humans think about themselves and adorn themselves; and the ways they paint, use artifacts and construct buildings---all of these activities find their way into the spoken language. As Burke (1966) indicated long ago, language is symbolic action.
The human language is symbolic; that is, people create metaphors for their bodies and for the events in their life-worlds. Symbols are arbitraily constructed by people and they become short-cuts to meaning, used again and again (Duncan, 1968; Fontant, 1993). Symbols do not have meaning in themselves; humans attach meaning to them. For example, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom to many people; but others may find meaning in the fact that the statue is a woman. People invest meaning into objects, people and social situations. Symbols are a type of logic-in-use, passed on from one generation to the next. The white dove has symbolized peace and freedom for centuries.
Symbols may be shared publicly, but they often have private, individualized meanings. Each person uses the symbol in specially construed ways. In this book, the body and self-identity are symbolized and labeled, as are human relationships, buildings and other entities in life.
Framing Body Symbolization
Unlike lower order animals, humans have the ability to "see" their bodies, which become objects of existence. They make sense of their bodies and label them using terms such as beautiful, ugly, obese or slim. Cultural and social meanings for the body are invested in the ways that people symbolize their bodies. Peers, fellow workers and parents bring their own sets of meanings to the person who reflects upon her body.
In a media-saturated society, images are played up; individuals take note of them and use them in their own self-evaluations. People know what a female "perfect 10" is and they know what a male "hunk" is. In other parts of the world the American body index may have little meaning because people construe the shape and form of the body in very different ways. Beauty in other countries may include the perception that large busts or bottoms are attractive to men, suggesting that the perception of attractiveness is a function of evolutionary development. (Jankowiak, Hill & Donovan, 1992). The body, a corpus of flesh, is socially defined (Vlahos, 1979). Humans think of themselves as young, middle age or old, as Black, Cuban, Navajo or Chinese, as male or female. Each set of self labels is a learned, adapted perception. They are umbrella terms that help people adapt socially. Group members are conscious of an identity, although it may be loosely constructed and quite general. The labels may be applied rigidly or flexibly. But the point is, they are invented as part of the self identification process (Barot, 1999; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldbergen & Truk, 1986; Doyle, 1989; Giddens, 1991).
Symbols are somewhat stable, especially in cultures that are slow to change; they are transportable from generation to generation. Even colors have meanings that are associated with different cultures. Red, for example, is particularly important to the Chinese. The legal profession in America uses royal blue and purple colors as part of its distinctive history (Gage, 1999). Each individual attaches meaning to colors, preferring one over the other.
Signs, symbols and icons have been extensively studied by semioticians (Kim, 1996; Perinbanayagam, 1985). They believe that signs and human action are bound together. They are studied as tools that give meaning to everyday life. Symbols are a class of signs as are icons. While a sign designates something---for example, the classic smoke therefore fire process--an icon represents an entity often by bearing likeness. The CBS logo, the eye, is iconic as is the NBC Peacock. The cross is an icon for the Christian church and the Star of David is an icon for members of the Jewish faith.
The importance of signs, symbols and icons to human action can not be overestimated. Indeed, if they did not exist the normal processes in society would disappear. Traffic lights and road signs, but one simple example, regulate the flow patterns of traffic. In addition, they represent the law of the land. In short, there is a critical relationship between signs and human behaviors. People who fear spiders or snakes or other things often react in frightened ways in signal response.
Icons may be very popular, such as the image of Elvis Presley who is said to be an American icon. Each generation, of course, creates its chosen icons. There is an inherent, inseparable relationship between signs, symbols and icons. They are tools that humans use to give meaning to their worlds. Cultures symbolize gender, age, or ethnicity in many different ways.
Framing Cultural Symbols
Symbols are often unique to cultures. On the other hand, some symbols are known across cultures but given a slight twist of meaning by a particular culture. For example, in the Western world, the dragon has been symbolized as evil, part of the forces of evil. In the Eastern world, particularly in traditional China, the dragon is a symbol of joy, of dynamism and good health and fertility; it is a protector against evil.
Sand is a symbol of purity in the Middle East, used even for washing, but, in the Western world, it is often thought of as an unstable element, impermanent, as in sinking sand. The Navajo tribal people have long used sand in artwork and in religious ceremonies. Thus symbol construction varies from culture to culture (Fontant, 1993).
Social is socially constructed. Each routine act, each interactive routine, reinforces society, maintaining it and changing it. Born into society, people may think that it is durable and unchanging, permanent. In fact, consciously and unconsciously, humans make choices that affect society. When actions are shared by large numbers of people, as in the Cuban revolution, great changes are made in the traditional society.
Humans create tools that change society, sometimes irrevocably. Modern communicative tools, such as the internet, the computer and television, are deeply imbedded in society, dramatically altering them. In short, people enact society, sometimes through their technologies. The technologies, in turn, influence the behavior of people. It is a circular process.
Framing Human Interaction
SI scholars focus on interactive units of analysis and upon the theme of personal agentry; that is, humans are not caused to act, they act out of choice. They do, however, act in accordance with their interpretation of the demands of the situation. Their past experiences influence how they will act, but they act in the present drawing upon their past construals.
Although human behavior is patterned, it is not completely predictable. People can maintain situations, modify them, or ignore them completely. They can act alone or they can choose to join others in a joint action, even a cause. Humans, of course, are socialized in general ways. They create and maintain a sense of place, of context and situation. Feral children are not socialized and they cannot create a sense of place in an established society.
In the final analysis, society is the collective result of all human actions. Society takes on broad characteristics that distinguish it from others. One characteristic of democratic American society is that it promotes the egalitarian ethos.
The role of dreams and unconscious processes, discussed in chapter four, is now being researched extensively, as is the topic of consciousness. Although humans become conscious of their bodies very early in life (Mccoby, 1998; Morris, 1992), they are not always conscious of the processes that influence them. People are often very attentive to needs, to self and to body; on the other hand, many people seem unaware of elementary aspects of life, such as emotions. In short, there are levels of awareness. Many people are highly reflective; others seem to walk about unaware of self and others.
Mead (1934) and others have focused their attention on mind, self and society, emphasizing the fact that people construct who they are, reflect upon themselves and hold inner conversations with themselves. They create lines of action based on an assessment of self and the possibilities for action in social circumstances (Blumer, 1969; Jones, 1964; Leary, 1996). In short, they engage in a sensemaking process.
Self identification is a key to human growth; it is also a key to human interaction. People hold mini-theories about life, they have tacit knowledge about social matters; they have cognitive schemas that are based on their experiences from the past. Part of the self-labelling process results in a sense of self, labeled the symbolic face. People, of course, have a physical face, but the reference here is to the images that they present to others. The concept of face is psychological, social and cultural (Ting-Toomey, 1994). The so-called frozen face of the Navajo or the Korean is physical, but the underlying cultural rules and norms are symbolic, It is said that American females exhibit a politeness bias because they "wear" a smile. The physical face is invariably entertwined with the symbolic face.
Face is related to role-playing; indeed, people create a professional face, such as that of a lawyer, a doctor or a plumber. The lines they enact are usually related to the notion of face. For example, the image of the doctor is maintained by her ability to perform medical procedures and to the fact that she has medical knowledge. Her lines of action are clearly representative of the profession. When they are not, she may, in fact, suffer the consequences. Professions require that their members maintain face. All humans, of course, have a symbolic face; it gets played out in identifiable ways, a type of symbolic signature.
Dramaturgy, or the acting component of human behavior is closely associated with impression management. Goffman (1959) believed that people try to maintain face to avoid embarrassment. Jones (1964, 1990) researched how people ingratiate themselves with others. Scores of researchers have researched the deceptive practices of people in interaction. The concept of first impressions is well-known. In short, humans present themselves, manage themselves in human interaction from a variety of postures, for a variety of reasons. Impression management may be skillful or awkward. As mentioned, shy people are frequently unskilled at interaction, withdrawing from it, even finding reasons for their behaviors (Baron, 1996). Thespians are trained to act in front of audiences and they are frequently skillful in daily interactions. Actors and actresses have historically received voice training (Heinberg, 1964) stemming from the early Romans and Greeks who knew the value of vocal power and robustness. The voice is a key part of human presentation and its paralinguistic qualities "give the person away" (Mahl, 1987; Pittam, 1994). In short, humans try to perform in front of audiences, although they are differentially skilled at it. Many people, of course, are unaware that they are performing.
Human behavior is always situated in time, place and space. It is situated in social context, a fact that deeply influences how human behavior is conducted (Carbaugh, 1996: Ellis, 1999). Social codes and display rules influence how people will behave. Nowhere written down, they are picked up on, caught during the socialization process. For example, young children learn not to burp in public. In this example, the parent may have directly socialized the child by giving it specific direction; on the other hand, the child may have learned how to behave indirectly, tacitly, by watching others. Either way, the implication is that the parent responds to socially imbedded codes that influence human conduct. Such codes may be pandemic, across entire cultures, or they may be shared distinctively by certain members of society. What one should do on a foxhunt to identify with other foxhunters is a very specific example of hidden codes, associated with a sport that has traditionally been part of the ways that the wealthy in Britain live. Human experience is framed by coded information. When human behavior is common to a society, it is considered normative, although it can be functional or dysfunctional. That is, not all behavior exhibited by large numbers of people are considered desirable, as in crime or hate group behaviors. People are put into prisons, a place where their freedoms are curtailed because of their negative behaviors. Prisons are total institutions that restrict and control behaviors.
Television presents framed sequences of human behavior that are recognized by the viewer. It has been suggested that television reflects human society, representing it (Altheide, 1997) and that it maintains the ongoing structural nature of society. This has been disputed by scholars, there being a wide number of research models dealing with television. However, television clearly frames human action, whatever the perspective, and it, too, must operate within contextual rules.
The distinction has been made between micro behaviors, or those associated with dyads and small groups, and macro behaviors, or those associated with very large groups, even nations. The middle ground has been called the meso area where mid-size activities are conducted. Humans take part in all kinds of groups and, to a large extent, the distinctions are merely for the purposes of research. For that reason, attempts have been made to link the various emphases together (Ritzer, 1990).
All readers of this book engage in interaction with others, mostly in dyadic or small group situations. Perhaps all, however, have taken part in wider ceremonies, like marriages and funerals. Perhaps most have taken part in Labor Day national demonstrations, parades and marches. In short, humans are engaged at all levels interactively. Themes and festivals earmark societies. Disney World and the New Orleans Mardi Gras are examples in the United states. The Antiguan festival and the Brazilian Carnivale are other examples of rituals and ceremonies. Public activities like these are often celebratory (Turner, 1986), transcending the time and clime of the moment, binding people together. The Blessingway is a religious ceremony long performed by the Navajo as a way of binding them with nature. The Lion Dance of the Chinese have historically conveyed particular meaning to the members of Chinese society. In short, humans create and take part in human interaction at many levels.
In this section a brief overview of Symbolic Interaction is presented. The scholars who are discussed are but a handful of those who are working in the field. Some of their work is indicated in the reference section, but their work entails much more than is presented here. This section is designed as a resource for students and faculty who are new to the field. The work of these scholars appears in the previous chapters.
SI was popularized by scholars like Blumer, Goffman, Turner and Jones, but the foundations resulted from the work of a number of philosophers, sociologists and psychologists. Early work was heavily influenced by an analysis of the pragmatics of everyday life. Humans were thought to be willful, thinking people, not mere organisms maneuvered about by various social forces. In short, the human was proactive in human affairs, making choices about the objects of their existence. The scholars under discussion lived before the turn of the century and their work continued into the mid-part of this century.
Simmel, thinking sociologically and interactively, observed that ideas get transformed in the social marketplace, where social reality is constructed. Ideas, formed by people, are influenced by the situation in which they find themselves. For example, a professor thinks about life differently from a bricklayer. This does not imply superior-inferior status. Today, Simmel's work is part of the field referred to as the Sociology of Knowledge.
Famous for the concept of the looking glass self, Cooley showed how humans grow through interaction with others. Humans take up meaningful activities that become part of their self-identification. By examining possible actions that he might take, working out definitions of the situation, the person defined himself in the process. He emphasized sympathetic instropection, which eventually influenced modern symbolic interactionism.
A philosopher and pragmatist, he was fascinated by the ways that humans construct meanings, believing that he could determine how people think by analyzing their social activities. That is, he thought that human activities were outgrowths of the values and thought patterns of individuals. He developed the concept of the multi-faceted self; people had as many selves as others recognized in them.
Although he had been called the father of SI, he did not invent the term. His student, Herbert Blumer, below, invented the phrase. Mead spent his life constructing a "meaning" system involving human behavior. He distinguished between the mind and the body, but he noted that gestures produced meaning in others. The self was reflexive, meaning that people think about and interpret what is happening around them, taking account of it in inner conversations with the self. He believed that thoughts were a form of self-talk or meta-talk, to use modern terms. He thought that symbols were defined in action terms, behaviorally. People thought about the meaning of actions. Symbols were relatively stable and known to both the user and others in interaction. Gestures, for example, such as the shaking of the fist, may lead the observer to react in self-defense. The observor perceives the shaking of the fist and responds accordingly. Each party understands what shaking the fist may mean. The gesture, of course, can be misinterpreted. Mead created a philosophy of the act.
Framing the Act
Mead thought that there were stages in the production of human acts:
In this scheme, humans make decision; they do not act because of some inner drive, force or motivation. Instead, they will to act. (See Mead, 1938 , Blumer, 1969 and Charon, 1995, for discussions about these points).
Mead knew that all people have a past, present and future. He thought that when acts were performed, consciousness was manifested. The mind and the body worked together to produce unified sets of actions, a view that ran contrary to the narrowly interpreted behaviorism of his time (2).
For Dewey, the thinking process included the definitions of objects that occupied a person's world. A person creates lines of action after reviewing the various alternatives available to achieve her goals.
Perhaps more than any other person, Blumer, a student of Mead's, laid out much of the language and approach of modern Symbolic Interactionism, a phrase he is credited with coining. He popularized Mead's ideas. He believed, for example, that humans act toward things and toward others, based on the meaning that they have for them. Meaning comes from social interaction, not from within the object. Humans choose to act; they are not caused to act.
He emphasized that groups were individual collectivities working together. Eventually, group action will result in cultural and societal formations, maintenance or change. Joint actions, networks and social functions take on a character that is separate from individuals; but they do not operate automatically. Individuals must make them work. Society is continually renewed by the actions of individuals and groups.
Goffman, who wrote after the mid-part of this century, contributed the dramaturgical perspective in SI, a perspective that is important even today. He noted, as a sociologist, that people seem to follow scripts and play games in interaction. His ideas about the presentation of self and their interactive rituals formed the basis for research that continues to this day. His vocabulary is filled with words and phrases from the world of theatre, such as script, scene and actor, frontstage and backstage. In the theatre there is always an audience; in real life, the audience were the participants in interaction, each observing the other.
Goffman noted that when an individual comes into the space or presence of another person, he seeks out information about that person, ranging from the way the person dresses to the way she acts. If the actor does not know the other party, he derives cues from her behaviors, often applying untested stereotypes to that person. In this sense, the observer sees the other party giving off cues, or "shining", as he said. The idea of a symbolic face was promoted by Goffman.
He observed that humans act toward others to influence their actions; for example, an actor may want the other observing party to think and act positively toward him, so he acts to help create desirably images. A proper body orientation worked to influence the other party. Goffman believed that a person has a right to be treated in accordance with the way he presents himself, ascribing authenticity to that person. For example, a police officer wants the observer to take him seriously; otherwise, the policeman's power and authority break down. Of course, humans do not always act sincerely but they act to avoid embarrassment. Role expectations and role performances form the basis of society, as do rules, which act as frames for human action.
Victor Turner's work was in anthropology. Unlike the others above, he focused mainly on ceremonial and ritualistic and public events. Therefore, in modern parlance, he focused on the meso and macro features of cultures. He was interested in how humans symbolize their worlds through their actions. He thought that ceremonies and rituals expressed the essential thoughtways, beliefs and values of a given culture. Even though celebrations appear to be fixed, personal inventiveness may occur within the framework, as in the music, the choreography or costumry of a celebratory event. People can stylize dramatic presentations.
Although there is an individual interface in ceremonies and rituals, they transcend the everyday life of individuals, drawing on root metaphors, archetypes, paradigms and models for action. Through rituals humans can transfer cultural meanings and tradition from one generation to the next. Indeed, Turner believed that members of traditional cultures have a need to celebrate in communal activities. Birth, puberty, marriage, season activities, religious holidays and other events are marked by special kinds of dress, dance and food. There may be body painting, the wearing of masks and the carrying of spears. Often the sacred or holy are celebrated with rituals that are very different from those found in desacralized, secular societies. By celebrating, members of traditional societies re-affirm their traditional valules, their moral and esthetic approaches to life.
Turner stated that symbols were polysemic; that is, symbols may be interpreted in many ways, arbitrarily. The Raven, the totem pole, masks, dances and other performances have symbolic meaning for those who perform them. Symbols may be dense with meaning, acting like the tip of an iceberg, or they may be shallow. The entire human sensorium may be employed in rituals and ceremonies, revealing the deeper symbolic meanings of culture.
The work of Jones stemmed from Social Psychology. He was keenly interested in impression management and the self-presentation process. He was particularly interested in how people ingratiate themselves with others, often employing deceitful practices or other techniques to earn attention and acceptability in others.
His academic writing was multi-sided, his interest expressed in how people do research, especially in the preparation stages, and how they employ methodologies. His topic ranged from social deviance to cultural and humanistic aspects of SI. Student behaviors on campuses were a particular interest.
Unlike the others mentioned above, Burke worked essentially in a literary field. He noted that language was a form of symbolic action and he employed the theatrical pentad in his work. He described how the metaphors of scene, act, script, stage and method influenced human communication. He taught that games and sociodrama are important modes of lie. Social acts, he said, were created by human agents engaging in significant moves which elicit responses from others. These moves and acts lead to symbolization and meaning, to language and grammar. Human cultures serve as rough drafts for action, which is found in nonverbal communication. Self actions, he stressed, were processual and ongoing, not static.
In an attempt to blend the macro and micro versions of SI, Couch drew upon the new technologies of the electronic age to develop a new type of social science, from the ground up. He thought that the dyad was the most elementary unit of analysis and tried to show how two actors worked together to perform coordinated actions. He wanted to perform science for the betterment of mankind, hoping to improve human lives.
His conceptualization of the "stable-man" point of view as contrasted with the "emergent-human' point of view, marked his work. Warriner put emphasis upon the freedom of the individual to choose. He thought that the physicalist model of thought in science reduced human freedom and could not account for the ways that people act. Humans shape society; they do not conform to it. Humans and societies are engaged symbolically and dynamically.
Concerned with the structure of society, which he believes is created by everyday persons as they act toward self and others, he believes that the major themes, such as social class, power and ethnicity are not separable from indivduals. Individuals act in concert with ongoing social structures. Structures provide the norms and rules that humans use as they daily routines.
Society provides opportunity for recreation, creativity, constraint and identity formation. These are ties between the individual and the social structure. Structural elements exist in society but are enacted and reinforced by individual actors who are acting on their own behalf, unwittingly maintaining the social structures.
Like others above, Carbaugh focuses on the social construction of the self in a Meadian sense. It is a consequence of interactive life. Humans are situated in society, a fact that influences their communicative activities.
These editors organized a sizable body of literature that deals with how the human self is constructed in a mediated world, essentially the world of television. Emphasizing the multi-vocality of how self is expressed, they show how self-image is a major aspect in the evaluation of self-identity.
Deegan extends the work of Turner, whose main interest was in traditional cultures. Deegan's interest is in contemporary cultures. She applies Turner's theories with modification to American life. Emphasizing the core codes found in American life, she attempts to show how the cults of time, bureaucratization, sexism and capitalism prevail and how each contains a set of rules that influence human conduct in modern society. For example, people go to work on time and they encounter sexism in everyday life in joint encounters with others. Macro themes, such as sporting events and modern rituals and displays form the fabric of modern American society, influencing the choices that people make and how they present themselves.
Concerned with the separation of social structure from individual human action and behavior, Giddens wants to find ways to tie everyday behavior into the prevailing social structures, treating them as fluid and dynamic entities, not causative. He wants researchers to depart from using laboratory models, to turn to more humanistic models in which human agency and meaning can be taken into account. Participation by the subject in the research is an important, often overlooked feature of good research.
Giddens says that there is a tie between human habitus, creativity and constraint, self-identity and society, and between individual agency and social structures. Humans create structures; they recreate them as well.
Primarily interested in naturalistic, non-laboratory research, Denzin promoted the field of Symbolic Interactionism by editing the series, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, helping to found a related society. His research focuses primarily on the self, on the family and socialization processes. Deeply interested in how scholars interpret behavior, he produced a number of books and articles focusing on qualitative research.
Interested in interaction in everyday life, Prus draws heavily upon the use of ethnographic methodologies to study ventures in everyday life, such as salesmanship, prostitution and gambling. All human activities are products of human interaction. His basic interest is to pragmatize the social sciences.
Her first work in SI dealt with human communication. Her more recent work has focused on human identity, gendered lives, civility in everyday life and social mosaics. Relational communication, or interpersonal communication, are important aspects of her work.
Jerome Bruner and others have focused on joint or mutual knowledge and action. Humans bring to relationships verbal and nonverbal knowledge, which they share jointly. A child, watching her mother, takes part nonverbally in jointly attentive activities, such as mutual smiling, grasping and pointing. The mother and child sharing are intersubjective partners, as are other people who jointly act together. Reciprocity is based on correctly perceived intentions.
Human actions are always open to identification, whether an individual is identifying his own action or those of others. Identification is necessary so that people can understand one another. People hold implicit theories about how their actions will be received or understood. All plans have antecedent conditions; that is, one must have some kind of prior reason in order to act. Plans, images, scripts, intentions and goals arise from implicit theories. From this view, human behavior is what people think it is.
A common sense psychology pervades the way that people decide the meanings behind human activities; they seem to have a sense of the subconscious, of motivating factors and so on. In identifying meanings of acts, observers must make a connection, decide the intent, reflect upon it and attribute meaning to it. The stream of bodily action is accompanied by a stream of verbal action.
Modern American society is heavily saturated by the media, principally television and the internet. The effect of mediation upon human identity is the thrust of this work. Gergen, for example, is concerned that the media present the young with incoherent, sometimes destabilizing materials that can lead to identity confusion.
Semiotics is the study of meaning as expressed in signs, the smallest element of meaning. A symbol is a type of sign. Codes are sets of signs and rules. Assumptions about signs and codes lead to human action. Two people, from similar backgrounds, share in coded meanings. Anything can be a sign. For example, people see the behavior of others as signs. Codes are included in all human affairs, from science to art, from meditation to action. Symbols, types of signs, are polysemic; that is, they can be interpreted in multiple ways.
Theories, implicit and explicit, guide everyday human behavior. Whether people are driving their cars, playing golf or making love, they are engaged in the act of impression management. The presence of other people presents a possible stage of action. People act before others to influence them or to enhance their own self-images. The presentation of self is nearly always designed to achieve a goal.
Not all people are skilled at impression management, or self-presentation. Shy people, as mentioned, appear to lack the social skills to manage themselves well. Pathological conditions, of course, intrude upon the ability to present oneself successfully. Most people, however, can intentionally improve their abilities at impression management.
Ethologists are usually persuaded by evolutionary theory; they may study humans or they may study lower order animals, such as primates. The behavior of animals can shed light on human behavior, as many ethologists have shown. At the same time, scientific ethology can uncover some of the mysteries of animal behaviors. They have shown, for example, that dolphins and chimps appear to have a sense of self, recognizing themselves in mirrors. They have shown that chimps can learn and use a nonverbal 'language' and they can use tools for their own purposes. Some researchers suggest that the differences between human behaviors and chimp behaviors is a matter of degree rather than kind, an issue that has been in the forefront of research for many years.
Postmodernist research and writers bring a special perspective to the meaning of symbolic life. They note that the social and cultural milieu found in modern, technologically advanced cultures is very different from that of industrial, or modern society. Humans, they say, now live in a post-modern age in which the authority structures are changing and the texts, or contexts of experience, are being decidedly modified. Relationships of power and dominance, of social class and ethnicity, of aging and gender, are being redefined. Standpoint and co-cultures are two important terms related to self-identification processes. In a broad sense, women and people of color are achieving new vocalities, having new choices and the possibilities of redefinition of the circumstances in which they find themselves. The authority of institutions is diminishing, ushering in new possibilities for self-identification. New information technologies are leading to new ways to organize society. New social texts are being formed. Nonverbal communication will be influenced accordingly.
SI scholars and researchers follow several scientific principles:
Framing Scientific Principles
The central principle is that researchers can understand human action best when they are able to access the thinking of their subjects. Researchers do work in naturally occurring situations.
SI researchers tend to resist the use of causal variables because their focus is upon human agentry, rather than on the causes of human behavior.
The careful description of human action is basic to good science.
If an SI researcher had to choose between the use of a living-subjects approach versus a predictive hypothesis-testing model, she would probably favor the use of real-life observations, using surveys and questionnaires and other ethnographic tools. The multiple methods approach, however, enables SI scholars to combine many research methods, including laboratory approaches, in their work(3).
The language of quantitative study has been developed over a long period of time. Terms such as parsimony, precision, orderliness, logic and numeric representation are imbedded in the research. Computer simulations and projections are often used. Theory, hypothesis and method are rigorously pursued. The quantitative approach is abstract and extractive; that is, it is not necessary for researchers to work in the field or to use participative means to do their research, although this is a possibility.
In much quantitative work, rats and pigeons are used. In communication studies, it is common to use freshman or sophomore subjects, who often get credit for their participation in the research. The experimenter is usually interested in determining differences between groups by using instruments or situations to which the students have responded. The idea of "real life" is simulated or implied. Everyday contexts are usually ignored in the laboratory in an effort to control the variables. By eliminating confounding and interacting variables, the researcher can turn out highly precise, well measured findings which can be compared quite easily to other studies, or to replicate them..
Framing Quantitative Approaches
There are varieties of quantitative approaches, but they share a common physical model taken from the natural sciences, usually emphasizing control of variables, well defined procedures, hypotheses, methodologies and countable outcomes. Usually performed in the lab, away from confounding influences, they tend to focus on small pieces of human behavior, using simple or elaborate statistical and mathematical procedures. Aggregates of data are compiled in such a way that they can be verified by other researchers in replicating the studies. The actor, subject or participant in the study is usually represented by numbers or categories. An issue of extrapolation to real life situations is often apparent.
Human nonverbal communication is complex and dynamic; it includes human choice, action and sensemaking. It is a symbolic process. The actors involved in nonverbal communication act as their own agents; they interpret the behaviors of others. In a sense, humans create their own destinies.
It is believed by many that nonverbal communication is best studied where it occurs, in natural settings. Ethnographic and survey methods are often used. These tools lend themselves to how people define and negotiate their behaviors and how they take up roles in interaction. Although qualitative methods are desirable, the multiple methods approach enables researchers to triangulate or gain many measurements focused on the same phenomenon.
While a quantitative approach takes account of the amount of something, qualitative approaches try to take account of the subjective meaning of something, the how, where and why of something (Dabbs, 1982).
Framing Qualitative Approaches
Qualitative methods focus on the real life-worlds of individuals, often taking into account the meanings that the study has for them. Humans are "soaked" in culture (Ellen, 1984) and it is important to deal with the subject's emotions, motivations, symbols and their meanings to participants. Empathy is required for the researcher to produce good research (Berg, 1989). Popular qualitative techniques may include participant observation, interviewing, experiment in natural settings, photographic techniques, historical analysis, text analysis, sociometry and sociodrama, and ethnomethodological and non-intrusive measures.
A multiple methods approach adds strength to qualitative studies. A kind of triangle of error can be established when methods produce differences in outcomes. SI researchers interested in qualitative research do not have to ignore formal research in the laboratory; the can combine it with their research.
Ethnographic methods are qualitative and they enjoy a special status among many researchers. They allow the local logics of participants to be used, the moments in the lives of people (Boden, 1990). These methodologies permit the researcher to analyze the world as it happens. One of the problems of ethnographic research is that the experimenter needs to find ways to become invisible to the participants.
Ethnomethodologists tend to focus on the rationality of human action, suggesting that humans act purposively most of the time, although irrationality can be involved. Because people, or subjects, use local logic in their course of behaving, it is the job of the researcher to determine what that logic is, to try to determine what the meaning of an event is for that person. It is apparent that studies that focus on the overarching structure of society, but not on the individual, tend to lose sight of the local logic.
Thus ethnomethodologists tend to focus on the lived experiences of individuals, Humans behave locally but they are also caught up in, and respond to, pre-existing behaviors, habits, values, orientations and the basic 'givens; of society. Lines of action, therefore, are constructed in contexts. As mentioned, the researcher can use multiple methods ranging from questionnaires to films, oral history and content analysis.
Symbolic Interactionism, or SI, is an approach to the study of nonverbal communication that enjoys a long history, its use continuing to this day. William James and George Herbert Mead formed the basic thrust of the approach, but it was given special impetus by Herbert Blumer, Erving Goffman, Victor Turner and Edward Jones, each of whom popularized the approach.
The use of the human body, the processes of identity formation and the study of human interaction are important features of SI. Contemporary researchers often focus on "live" behavior, using qualitative methods to help them understand the meaning of nonverbal actions. People present themselves and manage themselves, often in small groups but often in collective events as well. Humans vary considerably in their abilities to present themselves in social situations.
Questions for Thought and Discussion
Berg, B. L. (1995) Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Deegan, M. J. (1989). American Ritual Dramas: Social Rules and Cultural Meanings. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Meltzer, B. N.(1972). Symbolic Interactionism: Genesis, Varieties and Criticism. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul.
Prus, R. C. (1996). Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
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