Book summary “The presentation of self in everyday life”: summary

Introduction

You often feel that social life requires constant vigilance, as if you are acting on a stage. Every encounter demands that you manage impressions, project a desired image, and navigate the expectations of others. When your performance slips, you experience awkwardness and social friction.

Erving Goffman argues in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that social interaction is a staged performance. You use theatrical techniques to maintain a stable definition of the situation and guide how others perceive you.

The book examines these dynamics across five core areas.

• How do you construct social fronts and manage settings, appearance, and manner?
• Why do you rely on teams to maintain cooperative performances and protect shared secrets?
• How do front and back regions shape your behavior?
• What happens when discrepant roles threaten the stability of an interaction?
• How do you use defensive and protective practices to salvage troubled encounters?

1. Performances and Fronts

When you enter a social situation, you present a routine that guides how others perceive you. Performers range from being fully sincere and convinced of their own act to being entirely cynical with no inward belief in their routine.

While a sincere performer believes in the reality they stage, a cynical performer has no inward belief. You might use the performance merely as a means to other ends. Cynicism can be motivated by self-interest or by the demands of an audience that forces practitioners to put on a comforting show.

Examples of these routines include:

• doctors giving placebos;
• shoe clerks telling customers a shoe is the size they want to hear;
• mental ward patients feigning bizarre symptoms to protect student nurses.

The social front consists of standard expressive equipment including the setting, appearance, and manner, which define the situation for observers.

The setting comprises fixed background items like scenery and furniture. Personal front includes items intimately identified with the performer.

Appearance signals social statuses and ritual states. Manner warns of the interaction role you expect to play.

A Chinese mandarin carried by eight bearers through a town projects a stern, massive, and uncompromising appearance and manner.

Performers must actively infuse their activity with signs that dramatically highlight confirmatory facts. Unexpressed work often goes unappreciated. Because essential core tasks may not be visible or self-explanatory to observers, practitioners must divert energy into communication or dramatic expression to make their competence apparent.

Medical nurses on a hospital floor struggle because quiet symptom observation looks like wasting time. Surgical nurses instead perform highly visible bandage changes.

Performances tend to offer an idealized view that incorporates and exemplifies the officially accredited moral values of society. When presenting yourself, you act as a ceremony, rejuvenating shared community values. Upward mobility often involves adopting the proper sign-equipment and ritual practices of higher strata, such as lower castes in India adopting vegetarianism and Sanskritic customs.

Scottish lairds lived frugally on oatmeal and herring between visits, but ransacked tenants to provide lavish banquets when entertaining Englishmen.

To maintain an idealized version of themselves, performers systematically conceal secret pleasures, errors, dirty work, and compromising motives. You hide actions that contradict official standards, such as secret economies, corrections made before a report is seen, physically degrading dirty work, and compromises made to acquire a role.

Middle-class housewives left The Saturday Evening Post on the living room table while concealing True Romance in the bedroom.

2. Teams and Cooperation

Many performances require intimate cooperation among participants who form teams to maintain a united front and protect shared secrets.

Interactions frequently require the intimate cooperation of multiple people to foster a sustained definition of the situation. This creates an emergent team impression that acts as a third level of fact between individual performance and total interaction.

Medical hospital internists have an intern review a patient chart after the staff has secretly studied it the night before, with duties split evenly to ensure a good presentation.

Teammates are bound by reciprocal dependence to maintain the show and reciprocal familiarity due to their shared secrets. Any single member has the power to give the show away or disrupt the interaction through inappropriate conduct. Because you are accomplices who know the truth behind the front, you share a formal relationship of familiarity and intimacy without necessarily having organic warmth.

Police officers patrolling in pairs witness each other's illegal or semi-illegal acts and develop a heroic solidarity to stick by each other's story.

To maintain a solid impression of reality, teams must present a united front and adhere to a strict party line. Public disagreement among team members destroys the illusion and creates a false note. Therefore, teams often enforce a principle of unanimity where members debate privately but must conform publicly once the line is set.

Cabinet committee meetings allow civil servants to express views freely in private, but they are strictly barred from directly opposing their minister in public.

Team members must suppress immediate urges to punish or correct a failing teammate until the audience is gone. Correcting or showing hostility toward a teammate in front of an audience shatters the united front and exposes internal mechanics to outsiders. Superordinates across authoritarian organizations are strictly required to show consensus in front of subordinates.

Public school teachers feel strongly that a principal must support the staff against complaining parents, and teachers must never contradict each other in front of students.

Controlling the physical setting gives a performing team strategic advantages in managing information and maintaining security. Performing on home ground allows you to use scenic means and props to convey information or filter what the audience can perceive. However, it also means the team cannot conceal facts that are naturally conveyed by their scenery.

Sorority members use three distinct calling card trays, namely golden girls, look-agains, and pots, to secretly sort prospective members during rushing events.

3. Regions and Region Behavior

Social establishments are spatially organized into places where performances are given and places where the fostered impression is contradicted. A front region is bounded by barriers to perception and is where performers embody certain standards of politeness and decorum.

Social establishments are spatially divided into front regions for public performances and back regions where illusions are constructed and relaxed.

Conversely, a back region or backstage is where illusions are constructed, props are stored, team members are coached, and performers can relax out of character. Simone de Beauvoir describes how women behind the scenes with each other drop their male-oriented play-acting, relax in dressing-gowns, and prepare their makeup and tactics.

Standards maintained in a performance region divide into politeness regarding audience interaction and decorum regarding general comportment. Politeness governs how a performer treats the audience in conversation or gestural interchange. Decorum governs comportment within visual or aural range of the audience, further divided into moral ends in themselves and instrumental duties demanded by employers.

An office worker or saleswoman may be required to stand, keep a fixed smile, and refrain from chewing gum even when not actively talking to anyone. Workers must maintain appearances of intense labor through make-work or project an image of genteel uselessness through make-no-work. Establishments often require employees not only to produce output but to visibly look busy when bosses approach, leading to empty performances like tightening already tight bolts.

In a shipyard, workers abruptly started bending pipes or tightening firm bolts whenever foremen or superintendents walked by. Higher or barely genteel classes maintain a fiction of never doing serviceable work after dinner, hiding useful tasks under the sofa.

Controlling access to the backstage is a crucial impression management technique used by service workers and institutions to buffer themselves from external demands. Keeping audiences away from places where work is actually performed conceals mistakes, messy preparation, and the actual effort required, protecting the reasonableness of fees or maintaining institutional reputations.

Undertakers keep relatives away from workrooms where corpses are drained and stuffed, and mental hospitals bar visitors from chronic wards.

Western society maintains two distinct behavioral languages: an informal backstage style and a formal frontstage style. The backstage language includes reciprocal first-naming, profanity, sloppy posture, substandard speech, and minor bodily noises, whereas frontstage behavior strictly disallows these potentially disrespectful acts.

Stewardesses on uncrowded evening flights settle into rearmost seats, change into loafers, light cigarettes, and create a muted circle of non-service relaxation.

• Use reciprocal first-naming and co-operative decision-making backstage
• Engage in profanity, open sexual remarks, and elaborate griping backstage
• Adopt rough informal dress and sloppy sitting or standing postures
• Permit minor physical self-involvements such as humming, whistling, chewing, and belching in private

4. Discrepant Roles

Performances require strict information control because certain facts, if noticed, would discredit or disrupt the fostered impression. Teams must over-communicate some facts and under-communicate others to maintain expressive coherence.

Various secondary roles such as informers, shills, and service specialists acquire destructive information and threaten the stability of performances.

Erving Goffman divides secrets into several distinct types that you must manage during any interaction:

• dark secrets: hidden facts incompatible with the maintained self-image;
• strategic secrets: intentions and capacities concealed to prevent others from adapting effectively;
• inside secrets: marking group membership and social distance;
• entrusted secrets: obliged to be kept through relations;
• free secrets: disclosable information known about others.

A lawyer disclosing the improprieties of a client threatens both the client's show of innocence to the court and the lawyer's show of trustworthiness to the client.

The informer role involves entering a team in a false guise to acquire destructive information and sell out the show to the audience. Informers who join with premeditated plans are called spies, while those who join sincerely and later disclose secrets are called traitors, turncoats, or quitters. They can be professional or amateur, high or low estate, and motivated by money or conviction.

A shill appears to be an ordinary, unsophisticated audience member while actually acting in league with the performers. This role provides a visible model of desired audience response or generates necessary reactions at critical moments for the performance. Shills extend beyond respectable entertainment into everyday life, such as conversational gatherings where a spouse feeds appropriate leads to a partner.

A stick is hired by a gambling booth operator to win flashy prizes so the crowd is induced to gamble. A shillaber rushes up to a circus ticket box at the psychological moment when the barker concludes his spiel.

Service specialists who construct, repair, or maintain a client's show acquire destructive information without sharing the risks of performance. Specialists such as architects, accountants, lawyers, doctors, janitors, and filling station managers obtain backstage views that reveal discrepancies between a client's public front and private reality. Professional ethics and discretion prevent them from exposing these secrets, though status differences create complex ambivalences.

Hotel security officers finding rejected drafts of suicide notes in wastebaskets show that final feelings were rehearsed to strike the right note.

Colleagues share a community of fate by presenting the same routine, allowing them to drop fronts and exchange confidences among themselves. They speak the same social language and share working codes based on discretion, cynicism toward superiors, and mutual assumptions that peers will not misunderstand or repeat confidences. Renegades break this code by exposing collegial secrets to the public.

Simone de Beauvoir noted how women form friendships to exchange confidences, recipes, and construct a counter-universe questioning male superiority.

5. Communication Out of Character and Impression Management

Performers engage in surreptitious communication and defensive measures while audiences use protective practices to prevent disruptions.

You act as though your responses are spontaneous and sincere. At the same time, you manage a dual involvement in unofficial currents of communication. This dual involvement must be carefully managed to prevent official impressions from being discredited.

An American general and his wife were pulled over by MPs while driving in an open army jeep without a trip ticket or driver's permit. When the general popped on his four-star overseas cap, the tough MP stopped dead in his tracks, blurted out Good Lord! in a momentary collapse of his portrayed character, and slapped his hand over his mouth.

When teammates go backstage out of the audience's sight, they regularly derogate the audience in ways completely inconsistent with their face-to-face treatment. Secret derogation maintains team solidarity and compensates for the loss of self-respect incurred by treating the audience with polite deference face-to-face.

Common techniques for derogating the audience include:

• mock role-playing satire;
• using uncomplimentary terms of reference or code titles instead of polite terms of address.

Salesgirls in Frances Donovan's study played a caricature game called customer during lulls. British colonial officers in Dennis Kincaid's study watched Indian dancing girls mimic and caricature bored British guests after parties ended.

Team collusion involves secret signals, subterranean vocabularies, and staging cues that allow teammates to coordinate their performance, request assistance, or express hidden consensus while maintaining the illusion of a sincere front.

Examples of team collusion are concrete:

• shoe salesmen use harmless-sounding phrases like asking Benny, what size is this shoe? to signal that the width is actually a B;
• furniture salesmen use T.O.-ing to transfer a difficult customer to a special salesman acting as the manager.

Performances are constantly threatened by specific types of disruptions that undermine the projected reality and cause embarrassment. Goffman categorizes major performance disruptions into unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas or gaffes, and scenes.

Ponsonby describes a ceremony where an attaché pinned an insignia star so firmly to a velvet cushion that Prince Alexander struggled to pull it loose, spoiling the most impressive moment.

A disciplined performer appears spontaneously engrossed in an activity while remaining affectively dissociated enough to handle emergencies.

You must exercise presence of mind to cover up teammates' mistakes, practice self-control over private problems and prohibited affects, and maintain poise across different settings. Howard S. Becker notes that irregular marijuana users only become regular users once they learn they can remain high and successfully carry off a performance before non-smokers without betraying themselves.

10 Key Ideas

1. Performers range from being fully sincere and convinced of their own act to being entirely cynical with no inward belief in their routine.
2. The social front consists of standard expressive equipment including the setting, appearance, and manner, which define the situation for observers.
3. Practitioners must divert energy into communication or dramatic expression to make their competence apparent because essential core tasks may not be visible or self-explanatory to observers.
4. When presenting yourself, you act as a ceremony that incorporates and exemplifies the officially accredited moral values of society to rejuvenate shared community values.
5. Many performances require intimate cooperation among participants who form teams to maintain a united front and protect shared secrets.
6. Social establishments are spatially divided into front regions for public performances and back regions where illusions are constructed and relaxed.
7. Various secondary roles such as informers, shills, and service specialists acquire destructive information and threaten the stability of performances.
8. Performers engage in surreptitious communication, such as team collusion and secret derogation of audiences, while audiences use protective practices to prevent disruptions.
9. Major performance disruptions that undermine the projected reality and cause embarrassment include unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes.
10. A disciplined performer appears spontaneously engrossed in an activity while remaining affectively dissociated enough to handle emergencies and maintain poise.