Erving Goffman Case

Erving Goffman

SOC101: Introduction to Sociology

Emily Frydrych

December 10, 2012

Erving Goffman

It is amazing to see the different types of behaviors you can see when you watch someone. When someone knows you are watching they may act different than if they think no one is watching. Mr. Goffman's theory aligns with my personal views. This paper will focus on Erving Goffman and some of his views on sociology and how it aligns with my personal view of sociology. It will also focus on his theory with evidence and the reason why Erving Goffman was chosen for this paper.

Erving Goffman was a social scientist who privileged ethnography in the field over the laboratory experiment, the survey questionnaire, or the mental test. His goal was a natural history of communication among humans. Rather than rely upon standardizing technologies for measurement, Goffman tried to obtain accurate recordings of human behavior through secretive observations (Pettit 2011). Human interaction is important because it helps develop a person's human behavior. It is very crucial for people to have human interactions to start a young age because it is the start of how that person portrays different behavior. The technology that we have today makes it difficult for some people to incorporate human interactions.

Front-stage behavior is what you want others to see (Vissing 2011). This kind of interaction portrays people as actors. This is something that you could see daily. There are needy people in the world but there are many people that act as though they are needy. You see people standing on the corner claiming to be homeless asking for money so they can eat or feed their children but instead they go and buy drugs or alcohol.

Back-stage behavior is what you do behind the scenes to create the person you want them to see (Vissing 2011). With human interaction, symbolic interaction will come to follow. Symbolic interaction focuses on how people make sense of interactions in specific situations. Essentially, we react to things on the basis of meaning or labels that we ascribe to those things. The meanings are influenced by social interactions we have with others, which we modify to new situations when we encounter (Vissing 2011).

Three insights of particular importance for a non-deterministic sociology faithful to lived experience emerge from Goffman's consideration of the self: (1) Individuals use other individual as sources of varied data on the basis of which to draw inference and construct action. (2) By varying their own behavior, individuals can influence the inferences that other are likely to make. (3) By manipulating