The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

"This is one of the quintessential books on impression management and social interaction. A later Goffman work, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior , designates all social interaction as ritual and can be viewed as a complementary text to this one. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a fascinating book that provides a wealth of insight into social interaction, which Goffman describes in terms of theatrical performance. This concept is explored in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It . One of its most quotable lines is: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Goffman contends that the roles we play in our daily lives and social interactions are performative in nature, because we always strive to create a favorable impression. According to Goffman, our social interactions are largely governed by avoidance of embarrassment. In every face-to-face interaction—whether you are checking in at a hotel, speaking with a receptionist, giving a talk, or going on a date—one of your primary goals is to avoid anything that is related to embarrassment. “We want to be liked and respected by the people around us” He describes us as social actors. We are theatrical performers who employ strategies, almost as costumes, in our social interactions to help us to achieve our goals. My focus as a researcher is not on highly calculated behavior. While Goffman presents us as social actors who are conscious of our impression management efforts, my research and other recent studies show that this is not always the case. While we may be motivated to manage the impressions that we make on others, we are not necessarily hyperaware of this. Often, we are simply guided by intuition to speak or to behave in a certain way. Even then, it does not always succeed. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we are always calculating our social world. Goffman’s book leans in that direction but is still a very interesting book. I also find embarrassment to be an amazing phenomenon. If you can reflect upon the last time you were embarrassed, it is simply fascinating to consider whether you would feel comfortable telling someone else about it, and the reasons why you would or would not want to do so. Goffman writes that one of our primary goals is that we want to save face. Recent research, including my own, demonstrates that when you express embarrassment, it encourages people to trust you. If you share an embarrassing story about yourself, and you are able to laugh about it, this serves as a social lubricant. People may view you as being mature and easygoing, and they will want to work with you. I’m not saying that embarrassment is always beneficial, but one of the proven benefits of expressing embarrassment is that it helps to build a higher level of trust. If you can also laugh at yourself, the benefit is even greater."

"It’s about trying to systematically understand the ways in which people behave in social situations—how they collaborate with others to make and maintain their sense of self by playing certain roles. It’s a way to analyze social interaction without defaulting to the idiosyncrasies of the individual. Rather, Goffman is interested in making sense of everyday interactions between ‘normal’ people in a highly systematic way. To me, that’s what’s so interesting about Goffman’s project: taking what looks like a messy, irreducibly complex assortment of human behavior and trying to suss patterns out of them. For Myers and Briggs, the answer was type. For Goffman, it’s ritual, practice, stigma. I love that quote, in part because it gets at something that’s true about parties as dramaturgical occasions. We go to parties and spend time obsessing over the minutiae of our face-to-face interactions and others’ perceptions of them. Who’s talking to whom? How are they standing? Who brought who a drink? Did they touch or brush their hand as they gave it to them? Who left first? Who left second? All of these unspoken social codes, these mutually sustaining interaction rituals, are precisely what Goffman was interested in. He was concerned with the way that these minute interactions and impressions could accrete, the way they could reflexively inform our future interactions and impressions, forming the sum total of what we understand as social life. “Goffman is interested in making sense of everyday interactions between ‘normal’ people in a highly systematic way.” Goffman really goes together with Fitzgerald in so far he is also focused on the manifestations of personality in these different, highly contingent social situations. That’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to him. He appears in The Personality Brokers in a chapter that reveals that the first institution to buy the MBTI from Isabel Briggs Myers was the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. During World War Two, the OSS was interested in how to match spies or covert operatives to the missions that were best suited to them. One of the ways they did this was by designing high-pressure dramaturgical exercises where each spy was asked to play a role. The scenarios range from incredibly banal ones—for example, a work situation in which one person plays the boss and the other plays the employer—to more dangerous scenarios, like being the leader of a troop that has to send one of its members out on a secret mission that’ll probably result in his death. It was the job of the leader to persuade his officer to take on that mission. The spies were asked to play these different characters, and the idea was that if you were good enough or adept enough at shifting your personality to suit the situations you found yourself in, then these roles would no longer seem like characters to you—they would somehow become an extension of your self. The interactions would transform from stilted melodramas to recognizable, believable interaction rituals. The audience was supposed to watch and judge the degree to which people actually inhabited the characters they’d been assigned. To me, this seems like a Goffmanian exercise insofar as it literalizes his metaphor of self-presentation as a performance. The OSS takes everyday face-to-face interactions and asks people to inhabit them in ways that make them feel intensely and unusually self-conscious of what they are doing. It becomes this set-up for the micro-sociological practice of paying attention to the minutiae of tone, gesture, and eye contact that Goffman pursues in Interaction Ritual , Stigma , and my favorite essay of his, “Where the Action Is.” It does so in this institutional context—the military—that puts an immense amount of pressure on people to behave according to certain behavioral rituals, knowing that they’re being scrutinized for it. While I don’t personally buy into the idea, one of the motivating questions behind the book was why so many people do. People I don’t think are delusional or crazy or desperate, people who I think are generally really smart and thoughtful people, many of whom are my friends and family members persist in believing in it, even though there’s no scientific basis for it. It was akin to asking the question of why people believe in God or hold onto any kind of spiritual belief when there’s no evidence for it. Where I now come down on that (and where I feel closer to those subjects than I did at the beginning) is that type offers an incredibly clarifying language for self-understanding. It does an exemplary job making the individual the master and arbiter of her own destiny. It says: look, now that you know who you are, you can embrace your preferences, your habits, your self, without any shame. You can figure out how to live according to those preferences, so you don’t feel like you’re constantly judging or berating yourself for not wanting the things that other people want. For many of the people I spoke with, it provided this incredible sense of liberation. “Type offers an incredibly clarifying language for self-understanding. It does an exemplary job making the individual the master and arbiter of her own destiny.” I obviously don’t feel it as strongly, but as I talk about in the book, there are moments when I slip into that language and it doesn’t feel wrong, or I’m not inclined to feel overly critical of it. Parenting seems like one of those areas for me. The utter lack of knowledge that you have about your own children, especially when they’re young and communication is either in early stages or doesn’t exist, and the fact you can only seem to glean anything about them through their preferences—which don’t have to be verbally communicated—made it surprisingly appealing to me. I often find myself slipping into the language of type when I’m talking about my own children. Of course, it’s important to pull back from that for many reasons. But for people who want some kind of clarity in situations where clarity isn’t immediately available, the language of type can be incredibly useful and helpful. Of course. That’s the dialectic—between the institution and the individual—that the book is always trying to understand. It’s impossible to use that language of introversion and extroversion without that language being informed and weighed down by a certain set of beliefs and ideologies. Those ideologies are set by institutions like corporations and schools that reproduce hierarchies of race, class, and gender by telling us what kinds of people we’re supposed to value in the world, who gets to have a place in the social order, who gets access to the language of individuality. The Personality Brokers is interested in how one can narrate the individual experience of type alongside the institutional experience of type, without dismissing either."

"This book really nicely captures this identity-generating process that I was describing before, this tendency for human beings to present different versions of themselves, observe how other people react, and then cultivate those identities that make them feel good about themselves. Goffman was really a pioneer in thinking about identity and how identities result from interactions. Often, when people think about identity, they think about something that’s given at birth: you are a British person, or you are male, or you’re female, or you’re an upper class person, or a lower class person. But Goffman, and many others after him, discovered the fluidity of our identities, that we tend to adapt according to our social environment. The interesting question for me is, how has social media created a different environment for us to develop our identities and, also, new tools to monitor how other people think of us? In many ways, I was trying to write The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life for the 21st century with my book, Breaking the Social Media Prism. Exactly. We can present profoundly different versions of ourselves in different social settings and we’ve known this for a long time. I mean, all of us might act very differently around our closest friends than we do with our grandmother, for example. On the other hand, the internet allows us to be completely different people. When Goffman was writing this book, we were at least accountable to other people in a real-life setting. I couldn’t say that I’m a 50-year-old female because of the interactional settings Goffman developed his theory in. But, online, I absolutely could. I could be anything. There’s endless flexibility and options in presenting different versions of ourselves. It doesn’t need to be as extreme as changing one’s gender or one’s ascriptive characteristics, it could also be just a matter of emphasis—emphasize the positive, downplay the negative, and then I seem much happier than I am. We’re all familiar with this kind of profound disconnect. But we haven’t really studied and understood how the disconnect between online and offline behavior is shaping how we develop our sense of self. Exactly. The case you mentioned in the book is a man who is a single office manager who lives with his mother. He’s in his mid-40s or 50s. He’s not living a life of high status and luxury. In fact, he’s a social outcast, particular because he lives in a liberal city and he’s a conservative. What I discovered in comparing his life online and off is that social media was really providing him with a badly needed sense of belonging. Even if it was very artificial, and even if it was indeed driven by likes and new followers and those types of things, for him, these were a vital source of self-worth."