Word: behavior
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sympathetic Smile. Such behavior indicates a considerable dependence on the complicity of the audience, which is expected to accept the performance at its face rather than at its true value. In considerate society, the audience seldom lets the performer down-in part, as Goffman repeatedly notes, because the roles of performer and audience interlock. A man rushing for the bus dons a sheepish smile to indicate his awareness of how silly he looks. His observers reward his performance-that is, the smile-by smiling sympathetically back. With this response, they become performers, and the bus chaser becomes the audience...
...penalties for breaking the rules can be serious. Even minor infractions provoke them. Goffman has described the restrictions imposed on suitable behavior in the rain. A man in a trench-coat will naturally pass muster. So will one who is coatless, as long as he suggests by his deportment-hunched shoulders, an impromptu newspaper umbrella-that he is alive to his predicament. So will arm-locked young lovers, sublimely indifferent to their drenching. But someone who walks along unprotected and apparently unaware of the downpour is likely to evoke a startled and uneasy response...
...reason, says Goffman, is that he offends the hidden code of behavior to which all "normal" people subscribe. The man oblivious to the rain is guilty not just of a trivial impropriety, but of the greater sin of social unpredictability. No one can guess with any assurance what ceremony he will next profane. No one can be sure of his respect of public order, without which society would regress to the jungle. Goffman is still exploring the patterns of behavior at social gatherings, which he believes have all the systematic qualities of a language. He is also at work...
...before joining the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Goffman spent a year of research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His experiences there, recorded in Asylums, strongly affected his developing theories on social behavior. Goffman's understanding of mental patients borrows more from the unwritten rules of social occasions than from psychiatric theory. In his opinion, many inmates are simply people who have so flagrantly broken the rules of seemly behavior that they have been dismissed from the game. "I know of no psychotic misconduct," Goffman has written, "that cannot be matched precisely in everyday...
Even his critics concede that Goffman has skillfully explored an area of life that has until now been both neglected and misunderstood. "The individual is known by the social bonds that hold him," writes Goffman in Behavior in Public Places. "And through these bonds he is held to something that is a social entity with a life substance of its own." However trivial social exchange may seem at the levels Goffman examines, "it is out of these unpromising materials that the gossamer reality of social occasions is built. We find that our little inhibitions are carefully tied into a network...