Actions That Confirm Sentiments

Individuals seek experiences that confirm cultural sentiments in real events. Performing actions is one way to get such experiences. For example, if you are thinking of yourself and your interaction partner as friends, then you engage in actions that confirm friendship, like complimenting, congratulating, encouraging. You avoid positive acts that would strain the meaning of being friends - like mothering, cautioning, blessing - and especially you avoid nasty or destructive acts that would undermine friendship like discouraging, deprecating, or browbeating the other.

An actor chooses a behavior that will convert immediate feelings about each person participating in the event into new impressions that are as close as possible to the sentiments associated with each person's identity.

Example: Suppose an individual sees herself as a doctor and her interaction partner as a patient. This leads her to feel that she is fundamentally quite good and powerful and neither lively nor still, and the patient is fundamentally neither good nor bad, quite weak, and slightly quiet. Suppose that the interaction is just beginning so nothing has happened to deflect transient meanings of the two interactants away from the fundamental meanings.

Now what behavior should the doctor perform to best confirm the fundamental meanings of both individuals in the situation? She might consider a behavior that is neutral in goodness, powerfulness, and liveliness (like study or evaluate), and such a behavior is not too bad a choice because it confirms the meaning of patient almost perfectly. However, such a behavior makes a doctor seem less good and potent than she really is. So the doctor increases the niceness of her behavior to quite good to get around that problem. A behavior that is quite good and neutral on potency and activity (like talk-to, understand) confirms the meaning of patient well, and it almost perfectly confirms the evaluation and activity aspects of a doctor's fundamental meaning. This behavior still leaves the doctor seeming not quite as powerful as she is supposed to be, but a more powerful behavior would detract from the goodness she is trying to confirm. She settles on talking to the patient and showing that she understands the patient's problems.

Doing so produces a transient meaning of the doctor as quite good, slightly powerful, and neither lively nor still. This emergent meaning is less powerful than a doctor should be, so her next action has to be more potent to avoid straying too far from the fundamental meaning of doctor. She performs a behavior that is quite good, slightly powerful, and neutral on activity (like console, soothe). Though such a behavior is better than alternatives, it leaves the doctor's emergent meaning still lacking the ideal level of potency, and meanwhile the patient begins to seem overly favored.

The favored patient makes subsequent events seem more positive, allowing the doctor to turn to a behavior that is only slightly nice, slightly powerful, and slightly quiet (like direct, counsel). Though optimal at this point, such a behavior contributes to emergent meanings of the doctor as less good and powerful than ideal, and of the patient as better and less powerless than a patient is in general - impressions that will continue until the interaction ends, unless something unexpected interrupts the process.

In essence, an individual chooses behaviors to generate outcome impressions that are as close as possible to the sentiments that are salient in the situation. The individual minimizes deflection - the difference between transient and fundamental affective meanings in the situation.

Individuals only rarely mull over their behavior options self-consciously as in the doctor-patient example above, because the human mind quickly and automatically evokes ideas of actions that confirm fundamental meanings. Nor do we have to model the process in trial and error terms, since well known procedures exist for minimizing a quantity like deflection in a mathematical model.

Partners as Resources

Affect control theory posits that an individual takes on different identities in different situations, and each identity constitutes the self in that particular situation. So what about general self concepts? Perhaps a general self concept is shaped by the identities that an individual must fill, and subsequently becomes a higher order identity controlling which additional identities an individual is willing to fill. Or perhaps the general self concept is the sentiment that an individual holds about her or his personal identity, indicated by the individual's name - the adjunct identity that is affected by each event in which the individual participates. Whatever the case, it seems reasonable to assume that individuals strive to confirm their self concepts, just as they try to confirm sentiments attached to other identities.

Middle class Americans think of themselves as good, potent, and active. At least that's how thousands of undergraduates in U.S. universities have rated "I, myself" over the past three decades. Only a small minority of undergraduates rated themselves as bad, or as impotent, or as inactive. So we can expect that most middle class Americans strive to experience themselves in general as good, potent, and active.

Interpersonal resources are needed to maintain a distinctly positive self concept. In particular, children, and agreeable subordinates, are useful resources to have around when one feels the urge to be good, potent, and active. For example, an easy way to confirm a positive self concept is to perform a nice action on a charming innocent - amuse a toddler. Being in the company of disesteemed others provides fewer opportunities for building events that make one feel good and in control. The company of hostile others provides practically no resources for self fulfillment: it is hard to act toward them in ways that are self fulfilling, and additionally they engage in nasty actions that make one feel unpleasant, vulnerable, and depressed, pushing one away from one's good, potent, and active true self.

Sometimes you might think that you'd be better off without the company of others. Why not engage in self directed actions to affirm yourself - grooming yourself, singing to yourself, treating yourself? Actually, self-directed actions never are as fulfilling as the same behaviors can be when directed at others. So if you think of yourself as a really good, potent, and active person, then you have to seek out the company of others and engage them as resources for experiencing your true meaning of self. Only someone who maintains a fairly neutral concept of self can confirm the self satisfactorily in isolation.

Ironically, those who with distinctly negative self concepts need human resources the same as those with positive self concepts. Individuals can confirm themselves as rotten by acting nasty toward innocents, can confirm themselves as weak by groveling for the stalwart, and can confirm themselves as inactive by rebuffing everyone. So individuals who are needy because they are feeling insufficiently bad, impotent, or stagnant will seek out admirable alters in order to create negative events that let the needy individuals experience the negative meanings of themselves. Of course, such events distress the alters. In fact, such encounters are a major reason why people with positive self concepts   seek out valued and accommodating interaction partners in order to reconfirm the self as good, potent, and active.

Conflicted Interactions

People can bring different sentiments to a situation and thereby work at cross purposes as they try to confirm their sentiments.

The more one individual achieves sentiment confirmation in a situation where people have different sentiments, the more the other individual feels that emergent meanings are diverging from fundamental meanings. The two are caught in a conflict where confirmation of one person's sentiments is problematic for the other.

Ending conflict in an interaction requires that at least one interactant changes the sentiments that he or she tries to confirm in the relationship. That could happen if an individual redefines the interactants in identities that the other's actions confirm. Or an individual could change sentiments about the existing identities to new values that are confirmed in the relationship.

Filtering Behaviors

Usually an individual has alternative ways of sustaining an affective meaning system. For example, a person might be able to affirm a good identity through humor, achievement, or nurturing others. Selecting one kind of affirmation over others cannot be predicted by a theory of expressive order like ACT because any such affirmation would be expressively appropriate. Thus, at best ACT specifies a set of behaviors that includes the behavior an individual actually performs.

Logical appropriateness is a factor influencing how people choose among behaviors that are affectively correct. For example, greeting a friend could feel affectively appropriate late in an interaction, but the behavior is logically performed only when an interaction begins because "greet" implies initiation of an interaction.