Chapter 5

1. Chapter 5 Society and Social Interaction

2. Chapter Outline • Understanding Social Interaction • Types of Social Interaction • Elements of Social Interaction • Institutions and Social Organizations • Societies

3. Social Distance Zones • Intimate • Varies from direct physical contact with another person to a distance of 6 to 18 inches. • Used for private activities with another close acquaintance.

4. Social Distance Zones • Personal • Varies from 2 ½ to 4 feet. • Is the most common spacing used by people in conversation.

5. Social Distance Zones • Social • Varies between between 4 and 12 feet. • Employed during business transactions or interactions with a clerk or salesperson.

6. Social Distance Zones • Public • Varies from 12 to 25 feet or more. • Used by teachers in classrooms or speakers at public gatherings.

7. Understanding Social Interaction • Social Action - Anything people are conscious of doing because of other people. • Social interaction - Two or more people taking each other into account.

8. Question • Most of the time you can be sure that other people want the best for you. • Strongly agree • Agree somewhat • Unsure • Disagree somewhat • Strongly disagree

9. The Context of a Social Interaction Three Elements: • The physical setting or place. • The social environment. • The activities surrounding the interaction—preceding it, happening simultaneously with it, and coming after it.

10. Ethnomethodology • The study of the rules or guidelines individuals use to initiate behavior, respond to behavior, and modify behavior in social settings. • Ethnomethodologists view all social interactions as equally important because they provide information about a society’s unwritten rules for social behavior.

11. Dramaturgy • Erving Goffman believed that human interaction can be studied on the basis of principles derived from the theater. • In order to create an impression, people play roles, and their performance is judged by others who are alert to any slips that might reveal the actor’s true character.

12. Types of Social Interactions • Nonverbal Behavior • Exchange • Cooperation • Conflict • Competition

13. Eye Contact in the United States • We make eye contact more when we listen than when we talk. • The more rewarding we find the speaker, the more we make eye contact. • The amount of eye contact we try to establish with other people is determined in part by our perception of their status. • We feel uncomfortable if someone gazes at us for longer than 10 seconds at a time.

14. Exchange • When people do something for each other with the express purpose of receiving a reward or return, they are involved in an exchange interaction. • Most employer-employee relationships are exchange relationships. • The employee does the job and is rewarded with a salary.

15. Question • People who are better off should help friends who are less well off. • Strongly agree • Agree somewhat • Unsure • Disagree somewhat • Strongly disagree

16. Cooperation Interaction • Occurs when people act together for common interests or shared goals: • Members of a team assist one another to achieve a common goal—winning the game. • Family members cooperate to promote their interests as a family. • College students cooperate by studying together for tests.

17. Question • Suppose you had the flu and had to stay in bed for a few days and needed help around the house, with shopping and so on. How likely is that that you would ask an acquaintance for help? • Very likely • Somewhat likely • Unsure • Somewhat unlikely • Very unlikely

18. Conflict • Conflict appears to be inevitable in human society. • Conflict always involves an attempt to gain or use power. • Competition is a form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict within agreed-upon rules.

19. Competition • A form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict within agreed upon rules.

20. Marriage and Social Interactions • Husbands and wives cooperate in household chores and responsibilities. • They engage in exchange interactions. • Married people experience conflicts in their relationship. • The husband and wife whose marriage is damaged may find themselves in competition.

21. Statuses • Socially defined positions that people occupy. • Master status - One of the multiple statuses a person occupies that seems to dominate the others in patterning a person’s life. • Ascribed statuses - Statues conferred by factors not controlled by our own actions or decisions. • Achieved status - Statuses occupied as a result of an individual’s actions.

22. Statuses • Common status: • Protestant, college graduate, African American, and teacher. • Occupational status: • Doctor, computer analyst, bank teller, police officer, butcher, insurance adjuster, thief, and prostitute • Nonoccupational status: • Son, daughter, jogger, friend, Little League coach, neighbor, gang leader, and mental patient.

23. Statuses

24. Question • Family position, gender and racial identity are examples of: • achieved statuses. • a role set. • normative statuses. • ascribed statuses.

25. Answer: D • Family position, gender and racial identity are examples of ascribed statuses.

26. Roles • The culturally defined rules for proper behavior that are associated with every status. • Role set - All the roles attached to a single status. • Role strain - Conflicting demands attached to the same role. • Role conflict - An inability to enact the roles of one status without violating those of another status.

27. Roles

28. Question • A mother is torn between going to her son's soccer game or attending her daughter's ballet recital. This would be an example of: • role conflict. • role strain. • role playing. • her role set.

29. Answer: B • A mother is torn between going to her son's soccer game or attending her daughter's ballet recital. This would be an example of role strain.

30. Social Institutions • The ordered social relationships that grow out of the values, norms, statuses, and roles that organize those activities that fulfill society’s fundamental needs.

31. Society • A grouping of people who share the same territory and participate in a common culture. • Organized societies are rare among mammals with the exception of the wolf pack, the prairie dog town, and the baboon troop. • Society is universal among humans and must have performed major adaptive functions that increased the chances of human survival.

32. Types of Societies • Hunting and food-gathering • Horticultural • Pastoral • Agricultural • Industrial and postindustrial

33. Hunting and Food GatheringSocieties • Early societies foraged for vegetables and small game, fished, collected shellfish, and hunted larger animals. • They subsisted on whatever was at hand and when the food in an area was exhausted they moved on. • Anthropologists estimate that humans hunted for 1 million years, but it has been only 10,000 years since people began to experiment with the possibilities of organized agriculture.

34. Horticultural Societies • 12-15,000 years ago, a drying trend took place in what had been subtropical climates, and the deserts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East developed. • Some groups began to cultivate gardens and fields. • It appears women invented horticulture by planting seeds with the goal of having a sure source of food later, by observing the relationship between seeds and plant growth.

35. Pastoral Societies • Rely on herding and the domestication and breeding of animals for food and clothing. • Pastoral societies appear in many regions that are not suitable for agriculture such as semiarid desert regions and the northern tundra plains of Europe and Asia. • Pastoralism almost never occurs in forests or jungles.

36. Agricultural Societies • Societies that use the plow in food production. • Plowing turns the topsoil deeper, allowing for better fertilization and producing more food. • By 5500 B.C. farmers in the Middle East were using the plow and irrigation. • Reliance on agriculture had dramatic consequences for society. • Populations came together and gave rise to cities and new social arrangements.

37. Agricultural Societies • For the first time society was not organized principally in terms of kinship. • As cities developed, the need arose for some central authority that could serve the interests of the leaders by enabling them to collect taxes and create a military to protect the new centers of population. • These developments led to the emergence of the centralized state.

38. Industrial Revolution • Developed in the mid-18th century and gained momentum by the turn of the 19th century. • In 1798, Eli Whitney built the first American factory for the mass production of guns. • By the mid-1800s the invention of the steam locomotive and Henry Besemer’s development of large-scale production techniques at his steelworks in England, brought the industrial revolution into full swing.

39. Industrial Societies • Industrial societies use mechanical means of production instead of human or animal power. • They require an immense, mobile, specialized, skilled and well-coordinated labor force. • Industrial societies usually have an educational system open to all. • They require an organized system of exchange between the suppliers of raw materials and industrial manufacturers and between manufacturers and consumers.

40. Industrial Societies • All industrial societies have at least two social classes: • A large labor force that produces goods and services but has little or no influence on what is done with them. • A much smaller class that determines what will be produced and how it will be distributed.

41. Postindustrial Society • Postindustrial societies depend on specialized knowledge to bring about continuing progress in technology. • The computer and biotech industries are integral parts of postindustrial society. • Postindustrial societies depend on a well-educated population. • The economies of postindustrial societies are service oriented and more than half of theUnited States work is involved in service occupations.

42. Question • An educational system open to all is a hallmark of ________ societies. • hunting and gathering • pastoral • agricultural • industrial

43. Answer: D • An educational system open to all is a hallmark of industrial societies.

44. Quick Quiz

45. 1. According to Hall, which of the following is not a part of the context of social interaction? • The physical setting. • The social environment. • The relative power of each of the participants. • The activities surrounding the interaction.

46. Answer: C • According to Hall, the relative power of each of the participants is not a part of the context of social interaction.

47. 2. When people get together to promote common interests or achieve shared goals it is known as: • exchange. • cooperation. • conflict. • competition.

48. Answer : B • When people get together to promote common interests or achieve shared goals it is known as cooperation.

49. 3. Role conflict is likely to occur when an individual: • is unable to accomplish the tasks of the different roles. • is having difficulty accomplishing the tasks of different roles. • has a number of statuses that have different goals. • is not able to meet the demands of a single status.

50. Answer : c • Role conflict is likely to occur when an individual has a number of statuses that have different goals.