What are the processes and mechanisms involved in interpersonal behavior, and how are these constrained by human biology, social structure, and culture? Drawing on and updating classic sociological theory, and with special reference to the most recent research in evolutionary and neurophysiological theory, this ambitious work aims to present no less than a unified, general theory of what happens when people interact.
Despite modern technologies that mediate communication among individuals, face-to-face interaction is still primal and primary. This book argues against recent social theory that postulates a dramatic change in the nature of human relationships under postmodernity and, instead, asserts that despite undeniable and accelerating change in people’s environments, certain basic human tendencies toward emotionally inflected, physically present social interaction remain strong.
Turner builds on first principles he locates in the work of Mead, Freud, Schutz, Durkheim, and Goffman. After brief overviews of previous work on the embeddedness of social interaction in sociocultural systems and in human biology, each chapter presents elements of the microdynamics involved in encounters: emotions, motivations (transactional needs), culture (normative conventions), role processes, status, demographics, and ecology. Each chapter ends with a series of testable propositions, which are then streamlined into a series of summary principles intended to motivate future research. The book concludes with some cautious hypotheses on the potential influence of microprocesses on broader social dynamics.

Jonathan H. Turner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Among his many books are On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect (Stanford, 2000) and A Theory of Social Interaction (Stanford, 1988)

FACE TO FACE

Toward a Sociological Theory of Interpersonal BehaviorBy JONATHAN H. TURNER

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4417-1

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................ix1. Theoretical Foundations...............................12. Sociocultural Embeddedness............................303. Biological Embeddedness...............................494. Emotional Forces......................................675. Transactional Forces..................................986. Symbolic Forces.......................................1487. Role Forces...........................................1708. Status Forces.........................................1919. Ecological and Demographic Forces.....................22110. Microdynamics........................................230Works Cited..............................................253Subject Index............................................265Author Index.............................................269

Chapter One

Theoretical Foundations

Despite modern technologies that mediate communication among individuals, face-to-face interaction is still primal and primary. True, we can communicate in instrumental tasks without seeing others, and we can even interact on a more personal level through nonvisual technologies. But, when we fail to see others, we imagine what they look like and what visual cues they give. The more emotions are aroused in an interaction, the more we try to visualize the facial expressions and body movements of others. The auditory channel alone simply does not communicate sufficiently the emotional side of interaction. Even when visual media, such as video-conferencing, provide us a picture of others, these images are often too crude for fine-grained reading of emotions; we can see the person, but our visual senses still cannot detect all the information that we naturally perceive when interacting in real face-to-face situations. Just how far technologies will advance in producing sharper images of others is hard to predict, but the very need to develop more refined technologies tells us something about what humans seek. We prefer visual contact with copresent others, especially with those in whom we have emotional investments; therefore, a theory of microsocial processes must begin with conceptualizations of the dynamics of face-to-face interaction.

Much recent social theory has postulated a dramatic change in the nature of human relationships stemming from what is seen as a "postmodern condition." Let me list some of the forces of postmodernity: the expansion of high-speed, high-volume, high-velocity global markets that can extract the symbols of local groups and distribute them as commodities for consumption by others; the influence of imaging technologies on social relations; the extension of visual advertising to marketing symbols and lifestyles over utilitarian commodities; the compression of time and space to the point of disrupting the rhythms of local groups that once formed people's identities; the cognitive overload generated by too much information and sensory input; the hyperdifferentiation making a self marginal to all groups and organizations; the ability to use an emotionally neutral medium like money to buy into groups; the ability to purchase in markets symbols of multiple selves for different occasions and stages of life; and the hyperreflexivity of self-analysis to the point of making the self unstable and unviable beyond the hard reality of the body. These and many other forces are hypothesized by various commentators to have changed the fundamental nature of social reality, including one's sense of self, commitments to local groups, emotional attachments, and forms of interpersonal behavior. Rarely are these outcomes of market dynamics, commodification of symbols, time-space compression, hyperdifferentiation, imaging technologies, reflexivity, and other forces of the postmodern world examined empirically. There can, of course, be little doubt that markets, advertising, commodification, imaging technologies, time-space compression, and differentiation have changed over the last few decades, but we can cast a skeptical eye to the hypothesized but rarely tested outcomes of these conditions. Has human interaction become less emotional? Have humans abandoned their emotional attachments to local groups? Have people lost their sense of a core self (Dunn 1998)? Has culture become incapable of providing emotionally charged symbols for group attachments in local time and place? Have individuals become incapable of meaningful interpersonal relationships? I think that even a cursory sense of the empirical world would answer these questions in the negative (Allan and Turner 2000). There are some good reasons for this conclusion.

First of all, like early modernist theory during the classical period in sociology (that is, 1800-1920), present-day postmodern theorists compare contemporary trends against the backdrop of a rather romanticized view of community in preindustrial societies. Against this naive and romantic portrayal, early theorists saw modernity as generating pathologies, such as anomie, alienation, egoism, and marginality; and postmodernity implicitly engages in much the same futile exercise, comparing late-twentieth-century capitalism to a past reality that never really existed.

Secondly, postmodernists make the same unsubstantiated assumptions about human nature as modernist theorists, assuming that humans are naturally highly social and that, therefore, forces that reduce sociality and solidarity among individuals are pathological. Although humans are social, to a degree, they have never been emotional junkies who seek deep, personal contact with all others in all social relations. In fact, as I will argue, human needs for sociality are not nearly as powerful as most sociologists postulate. People must work at face-to-face contact to keep it on track, as can be seen in the constant use of rituals and in the animation of vocalizations, facial expressions, and body gestures. Indeed, taciturn individuals are hard to "read," and we often find ourselves trying to carry both sides of the interaction when others do not seem responsive. Closely synchronized face-to-face interaction is not as natural as we often think; rather, it is a process that requires considerable effort in most instances. Why should this be so if humans are naturally so social?

An answer to this question forces an examination of human evolution, as I briefly explore in Chapter 3, but more fundamentally, we should begin our inquiry into face-to-face interaction by suspending old biases that have come down to us from old and tired philosophies and from unexamined assumptions about human nature. Let us question these assumptions about human needs for sociality and solidarity with others, and simply ask: What occurs when individuals engage in face-to-face interaction? What are the processes and mechanisms involved in interpersonal behavior, and how are these constrained by human biology, social structure, and culture? These are the questions I will address in the chapters to follow, but before moving on to them, we need to specify the domain of inquiry.

In approaching the study of interpersonal processes with a more open mind, freed from unquestioned past assumptions and untested contemporary assertions, we will see that the nature of human interaction always reveals certain fundamental properties...