Introduction
You walk down a crowded street every day, pass strangers in elevators, and share transit cars without a second thought. Yet you rarely collide, panic, or wonder why everyone behaves with such predictable order. You take this public harmony for granted because you assume that social life follows large institutions and laws.
Erving Goffman demonstrates that public order depends on a much more fragile, unwritten moral code. In Behavior in public places, the author argues that face-to-face copresence constitutes a distinct domain of study governed by minute rules of bodily decorum and situational proprieties. You learn how tiny gestures, glances, and postures maintain social peace among strangers.
The book moves from basic definitions of interaction to complex rules of involvement, unacquainted encounters, and situational improprieties. You discover answers to several core puzzles:
- How do you signal safety to strangers without speaking?
- What rules govern your right to look at other people in public?
- Why do certain minor bodily lapses threaten social order?
- How do public spaces maintain tightness or looseness?
1. The Problem of Social Order
Behavior in public and semipublic spaces constitutes a distinct and neglected domain of sociological inquiry that reflects the diffuse social organization of a community. You can examine these unwritten rules by studying infractions, etiquette manuals, and everyday gatherings.
Behavior in public spaces constitutes a distinct domain of sociological inquiry governed by moral norms of physical copresence rather than legal or economic systems.
Data for this report are drawn from observations at Central Hospital, a 7000-bed Federal hospital the size of Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., a 300 population subsistence farming community on Shetland Isle studied for a year, and historical manuals of etiquette.
Variables of approval
Normative rules governing public conduct involve complex variables regarding the strength of approval and the specific consequences of failing to uphold the rule. Approval ranges from public applause for heroism or skill down to unnoticed conformity where no felt event occurs. Disapproval ranges from extreme mandatory penalties like jail for breaking laws down to tolerated offenses that the offended person must let pass. Furthermore, rules often apply to substitutable classes of acts rather than singular rigid behaviors.
An American high-school girl refraining from wearing nylon hose with saddle shoes and wearing bobby socks instead passes completely unnoticed.
The model of social order
Social order functions as a framework regulating the modes and means by which individuals pursue their objectives, operating distinctly from legal, economic, or ethical systems. Unlike closed natural systems or zero-sum games, the model focuses strictly on moral norms governing immediate interaction.
Traffic rules and the resulting traffic order provide a clear analogy for how a social order regulates the mode of pursuing objectives without specifying the objectives themselves.
2. Introductory Definitions
Face-to-face interaction combines linguistic messages with embodied expressive information, requiring individuals to maintain an interaction tonus.
Linguistic versus expressive messages
When you communicate, you rely on two distinct channels of expression. Linguistic messages use formally established symbols that you intend and control. They can be stored or held as legal evidence. Expressive information is given off or exudes from you without the same deliberate calculation.
- Linguistic messages give information through voluntary symbols.
- Expressive messages provide symptomatic information about your physical complex.
- Expressive cues allow you to deny responsibility for unintended meanings.
Immediate copresence creates a unique communication environment characterized by richness of information flow. When you use your naked senses to receive embodied messages, you simultaneously make yourself available as a source of information to others.
Visitors on Shetland Isle walking together at night could cause locals an eighth of a mile away to raise their eyebrows if they laughed loudly by local standards.
Interaction tonus
Activities occurring within a physical situation must be analytically separated into merely-situated aspects and intrinsically situational aspects. Merely-situated activities could occur just as easily outside social situations or when alone. Situational aspects depend entirely on immediate conditions of copresence, such as physical risk to the body or bodily expressed emotion.
A library user reading a book engages in merely-situated activity through their choice of books. They must also respect situational proprieties by not treating the library as an illicit meeting place.
When you enter a social situation, you are obliged to maintain an interaction tonus. You must exercise disciplined control over your personal appearance, face, and body movements.
Inmates in prison adopt apathetic facial expressions called dog-facing when viewed by authority to conceal their true feelings.
3. Involvement and Body Idiom
Participants communicate non-verbally through a normative body idiom while using involvement shields to conceal temporary withdrawals or side tasks.
Even without spoken words, you ascribe meaning to physical acts and appearance. Because you cannot stop communicating via body idiom, you are socially required to convey appropriate impressions and fit expected norms.
A girl wears a perfume she knows her boyfriend likes, presenting the performance as if for everyone in the vicinity.
Body idiom and shields
People use physical barriers called involvement shields to safely conceal improper involvements or temporary withdrawals from social obligations. Because effective involvement must be inferred through conventional signs, you use shields such as rooms, newspapers, or hands to block perception of bodily signs or objects of involvement when you want to bypass situational proprieties.
Student nurses at Central Hospital walking through a connecting tunnel would slow up and spitefully light a cigarette during their brief period of low visibility.
Allocation of involvement
You divide your attention into main involvements that absorb primary interest and side involvements that run parallel without threatening the main task. Men and animals possess the capacity to carry out minor muscular activities in an abstracted fashion simultaneously with a main task. These side involvements operate as a fuguelike dissociation from the main line of action.
Humming while working or knitting while listening serve as typical side involvements.
Social occasions establish a distinction between dominating involvements required by the setting and subordinate involvements allowed only conditionally. A dominating involvement demands primary readiness and attention based on the social occasion, whereas a subordinate involvement is sustained only to the degree that attention is not patently required elsewhere.
While waiting to see an official, you may converse with a friend or read a magazine until your turn is called.
Subordinate involvements must express surface respect for the controlling business at hand and are often concealed with a show of being mere distractions.
Because subordinate involvements threaten obligatory behavior by risking the absorption of too much attention, cultures develop specific idioms and rules to regulate them, which change over time and across social groups.
Charles Dickens in 1842 noted the offensive and widespread American custom of tobacco chewing and expectorating in public places like courts and hospitals.
Public street behavior requires the visible orientation of having a destination or purpose, with purposeless loitering often resulting in legal intervention. Being present in a public place without orientation to apparent goals outside the situation—known as lolling or loitering—violates public order norms. You often use portable involvement shields or correct tasks to mask a lack of destination.
Samuel Beckett described his fictional character Molloy being questioned and arrested by a policeman simply for resting awkwardly astride his bicycle.
Propriety in middle-class society requires you to give visible evidence that you have not wholly surrendered yourself to an occasioned main involvement. Even during intense focus or tasks, you are expected to retain and exhibit a slight margin of self-command and self-possession. Total abandonment or overinvolvement without reserve is often treated as a breach of situational decorum.
When a man slips on an icy pavement, he may hold his body stiff and erect with a painful smile to show he has not lost control of himself.
4. Involvement Regulations
Individuals manage self-involvements, creature releases, and away states while protecting their reputations from being misconstrued as occult involvements.
Auto-involvements and creature releases
Auto-involvements are self-directed physical acts involving your own body or associated objects. These acts usually serve self-decorative, self-indulgent, or somatic functions. Saul Bellow quotes a beauty handbook detailing various auto-involvements women can perform while doing housework, telephoning, or watching TV. Etiquette books warn men against combing hair or looking in mirrors in public.
Checking up on personal appearance involves reparative work and involvement shelters. You rely on half-shielded washstands in business offices to permit this auto-involvement safely. Extreme auto-involvements like masturbation are sometimes tolerated under specific institutional conditions like mental wards, prisons, or manufacturing workrooms. Havelock Ellis cites Pouillet's 1880 account of a young female factory worker experiencing an intense auto-involvement orgasm while operating a sewing machine.
Creature releases are fleeting physical acts that slip through self-control and momentarily assert your animal nature. A man hides a yawn behind his hand, scratches his private parts from within his pants pocket, or wipes his itchy nose on a handkerchief.
The state of away
The state of away occurs when you turn your attention away from the real world of the social situation and enter a private, playlike world. This inward emigration can take the form of reverie, brown study, woolgathering, or daydreaming. Dishwashers in a tourist hotel on Shetland Isle and local stage musicians allowed their minds to wander completely during routines.
You can also go away through talking to oneself or utilizing visible materials as toy-involvements. A Shetlander attending an undesirable social gathering would tease the household cat and repeat responses the cat would supposedly make if it could talk.
Occult involvements occur when you exhibit activities that give others the impression of unawareness of being away. A mental hospital patient walked for two days believing she was going to a little island with a loaf of bread and fishing hooks. You actively modify ambiguous actions to protect your reputation. A man searching for a cufflink in the grass on all-fours breaks the rule against talking to himself to make it clear his search is natural.
5. Face Engagements
Encounters require mutual accessibility, civil inattention, and strict adherence to leave-taking rules to prevent interpersonal friction.
Civil inattention
You acknowledge another person's presence in a minimal interpersonal ritual called civil inattention. You give a brief visual notice before immediately withdrawing your gaze to show you harbor no hostile designs.
Passing on the street, people eye each other up to about eight feet away, apportioning the sidewalk by gesture, and then cast their eyes down.
By performing this courtesy, you show you have nothing to fear or hide. You practice this by:
- giving enough visual notice to demonstrate appreciation that the other is present;
- openly admitting to having seen them;
- withdrawing attention at the next moment to show they are not a target of special curiosity.
Encounters and accessibility
Face engagements or encounters occur when two or more participants in a situation join openly to maintain a single focus of cognitive and visual attention with preferential communication rights. A surgical team coordinates their actions seamlessly based on the immediate needs of the patient during an operation rather than explicit verbal chains of command.
You are bound by an implicit communication contract to remain accessible for face engagements while relying on others not to abuse that privilege.
Participants in an encounter are obligated to release others when conventional closing cues indicate a desire to terminate the interaction. You gather up gear when exit cues are felt in the air. You slide forward to the edge of the chair. You launch into a thank-you speech of your own.
6. Acquaintanceship and Recognition
Social recognition rules govern acquaintanceship, formal introductions, and the avoidance taboo known as the cut.
Acquaintanceship is a social relationship created when two individuals can personally identify each other and mutually acknowledge this information. This establishes a nonterminable basis for future face engagements. If you forget someone's face, re-establishing the original context restores engagement rights.
Cognitive recognition is privately placing or identifying someone's personal identity. Social recognition functions as an open ceremonial gesture of contact, such as returning a greeting. Police line-ups and pickpockets identifying an unknown plainclothesman by his merits are instances of cognitive recognition.
The cut and introductions
Middle-class society maintains a strong taboo against the cut, which is the direct and intentional refusal to acknowledge an acquaintance's greeting overture. Because of this severe taboo, you will often act as if you simply did not see the overture to preserve a social fiction.
Rigault experiences anxiety when seeing lawyer Maître Marguet on the street. He carefully monitors whether the lawyer will acknowledge him before deciding how to execute his greeting.
- When walking with a friend and a third person stops to speak to one of you, the other walks slowly on without standing awkwardly by for an introduction.
- Do not join a walking pair unless invited to do so by the person you know.
- Incorporate a newcomer into an ongoing conversation by stating the current topic without performing a formal introduction.
7. Engagements Among the Unacquainted
Acquainted persons need a reason to avoid each other, whereas unacquainted persons need a valid reason to initiate face engagements in public.
This tacit contract protects you from dangerous or unwelcome contact. Greeting acquaintances saves them from the affront of being overlooked, while refraining from soliciting strangers saves them from exploitation.
Open persons and free needs
Certain social positions and out-of-role behaviors strip you of your usual right to be unmolested. Incumbents of roles like salespersons, policemen, and priests are exposed to public inquiries.
The first Americans to drive Volkswagens laid themselves open to face engagements from strangers because they were not seen as driving a serious car.
Unacquainted individuals may initiate contact to satisfy free needs when an unthreatening request provides a guarantee of good intentions. A man looking for a dropped key on the grass can comment on his predicament to a passing stranger to prove he is not involved in illicit activity.
Counter-control strategies
You can employ specific protective strategies, such as the terminal squirm or ignoring appeals, to escape unwanted importunities.
- Pretend not to notice the beggar's appeal to spare them the embarrassment of a refusal.
- Refuse the request by saying No, I am sorry.
- Stop and offer help by suggesting a charitable organization to which the unfortunate can apply.
8. Communication Boundaries and Mutual-Involvement
Society relies on socially recognized boundaries rather than actual physical walls to restrict communication between regions. Thick walls are honored as communication barriers, giving rise to conventional situational closure. Social arrangements restrict communication to specific parts of barriers like doors, leading people to act as if more communication is cut off than is physically true.
Conventional situational closure and sound control separate engagements while restricting exposed mutual-involvements in public.
Children in middle-class society are taught that shouting through walls or tapping on windows is impermissible, and entering requires knocking on the door. Dickens noted that in America a century ago, curious onlookers would let down carriage windows, thrust in their heads, and discuss his personal appearance with indifference.
Regulating mutual-involvements
Individuals are often obliged to open themselves up for mutual-involvements based on the requirements of the present occasion rather than prior relationships. Participants must demonstrate regard for the social occasion by engaging in courtesy involvements with others.
Mrs. Toplofty, seated next to a man she despised at dinner, stated she would say her multiplication tables for the sake of her hostess, reciting twice one are two and continuing through the tables.
Encounters have a tendency to drift from the prevailing mood of the social occasion. If an encounter drifts past the range of variation permitted, such as a quiet chat becoming too boisterous or argumentative, it must be cut back or checked by participants or authorities.
Nurses scrubbing at surgical scrub sinks would start with light sociable chatter that gradually became louder and boisterous until the head nurse had to come in and shush them.
9. Tightness and Looseness
Social occasions vary along a continuum of tightness and looseness that dictates the required level of situational devotion and bodily decorum.
Erving Goffman uses tightness and looseness to describe this central axis of situational regulation. Tight situations demand constant orientation and devotion to the gathering. Loose situations permit unoriented activities, auto-involvements, and minimal margins of disinvolvement.
A park on a summer Saturday afternoon serves as a loose setting where people can doze off, wear torn clothing, or eat from baskets. A ceremonial investiture represents a tight setting requiring constant devotion.
The tightness continuum
Public streets in Paris are noticeably more loose than those in Britain or America. You can eat bread while walking or dine at open sidewalk cafés.
Social occasions follow standard temporal contours of change. An official meeting starts with a multifocused milling period, moves into concentrated official proceedings that exhaust the situation, and ends with another multifocused arrangement.
Cultural and class variations
Lower-class males who work in clothes that do not require meticulous cleanliness can afford to touch and be touched by their physical environment. Middle-class individuals face heavier obligations to keep relatively erect and ready to respond interactively.
10. Situational Improprieties and Conclusions
Situational improprieties reflect broader alienation, while psychiatric diagnosis serves socially to protect the moral order of public gatherings.
Symptomatic significance
You will find that a person remiss in situational proprieties often displays parallel insensitivity in broader social life. On Shetland Isle, the few men who did not bother to shave regularly also refused to keep a tidy front yard and declined to support local socials in a regular way.
Individuals use self-imposed uniforms or bodily alterations to publicly proclaim their distance from ordinary societal norms. College students and beatniks express distance from the employed adult population by wearing full beards or a two-day growth and bedraggled clothes.
Mental hospital patients often use bizarre situational incongruities as symbolic gestures of contempt and alienation toward a restrictive institutional environment. At Central Hospital, Erving Goffman observed a mute youth walking down ward halls with a thoughtful look and two pipes in his mouth, and another balancing a dinner-roll on his head while eating.
Gatherings as little societies
Social gatherings function as microscopic societies where immediate and continuous attention, interest, and orientation are owed to the group as a moral entity.
Society requires mechanisms to defend itself against the doubts cast by people who break situational rules. In Trinidad's Shango cult, individuals experiencing weré possession break ceremonial regulations by spitting on tombs or using vulgar language, yet are tolerated by onlookers like naughty children.
By classifying severe situational offenders as mentally sick rather than merely offensive, the medical model provides a soothing rationale that preserves the moral rightness of social occasions. This protects participants from facing the fragility of situational proprieties.
10 Key Ideas
- Public order depends on a fragile, unwritten moral code of physical copresence rather than legal or economic systems.
- Face-to-face interaction combines linguistic messages with embodied expressive information, requiring individuals to maintain an interaction tonus.
- Participants communicate non-verbally through a normative body idiom while using involvement shields to conceal temporary withdrawals or side tasks.
- Individuals manage auto-involvements, creature releases, and away states while protecting their reputations from being misconstrued as occult involvements.
- Encounters require mutual accessibility, civil inattention, and strict adherence to leave-taking rules to prevent interpersonal friction.
- Social recognition rules govern acquaintanceship, formal introductions, and the avoidance taboo known as the cut.
- Acquainted persons need a reason to avoid each other, whereas unacquainted persons need a valid reason to initiate face engagements in public.
- Conventional situational closure and sound control separate engagements while restricting exposed mutual-involvements in public.
- Social occasions vary along a continuum of tightness and looseness that dictates the required level of situational devotion and bodily decorum.
- Situational improprieties reflect broader alienation, while psychiatric diagnosis serves socially to protect the moral order of public gatherings.