Identification

What happens when you go in a place? For one thing, you have to figure out who you are. You may not think about it much. Usually you define the situation and your place in it fast and unconsciously. But you can see what's happening when things mess up. Have you ever walked into a room expecting one group of people - like coworkers - and found someone else instead - like your sweetheart? When it happens you can feel yourself dropping the readiness for some actions and preparing yourself to act in other ways. You're changing who you are in the sense of changing from one role to another, from one social identity to another.

Obviously, another thing you have to do when you enter a scene is figure out who the other people are. That may be simply a matter of recognizing people in uniform like a bus-driver, or those who always have the same role with you like your mother, or it may be more complicated like figuring out whether another person is being sweetheart or co-worker right now when he or she can be both at different times. Who you are depends on who others are, and what roles others take depends on the role you have, so you have to figure these things out simultaneously.

The solution to the puzzle of defining everyone may require more information, like knowing where you are. You and a co-worker aren't supposed to act like sweethearts at the place you work; and it's strange to act like co-workers when you and your sweetheart are alone in a cozy romantic restaurant.

Once you've defined the situation, you can name the setting and the social identities that everyone has. Ordinarily you don't say the names out loud, but you generally could if someone asked you to describe where you are and who you are and who are the people with you.

Actually you usually maintain several different identities in a situation. for example: friend, host, housekeeper. You alternate among your current identities for the performance of different kinds of behavior. You also alternate among these different selves in experiencing other people's actions, thereby providing multiple interpretations of events. In any particular event, switching among available self identities changes the self significance of the action and convolutes resultant emotions

Dealing With Particulars

Identities like bus-driver, mother, co-worker, etc. are associated with general social roles that set expectations about what you and the other person should do in a scene. Even an intimate identity like sweetheart involves a general role defining proper behavior. Sometimes, though, we have extra information about people, and we want to qualify our definitions of situations to reflect this knowledge, thereby adjusting general role expectations so as to be more realistic. Such adjustments modify the person's basic identity with specifications of traits, moods, biological characteristics, statuses, or moral dispositions.

Traits provide the most flexible means of characterizing an individual's uniqueness in a situation. Attributing a trait to a person amounts to interpreting peculiar situational participation as normal for that individual, and assuming that the same peculiarity occurs in any situation the person enters. A few of the hundreds of traits in English are shown on the chart below.

The organization of the chart makes it obvious that a trait attribution is a way of understanding a person as more pleasant or more unpleasant than most people, as livelier or quieter than most people, as more commanding or less so than most people.

Moods are another way of characterizing an individual's uniqueness in a situation. A mood interprets a person's peculiar situational participation as normal, but only at the present time - not in all situations, and not even in the same situation on other days. Some moods that can be attributed to someone are shown in the following chart.

Note that pleasant moods are not distinguished in terms of the individual's potency. Many languages including English do not provide words describing moods ( or emotional states) that are both pleasant and submissive.

Sometimes we account for an individual's peculiar participation in scenes by stressing a biological characteristic of the person - like sex, age, body type, handicapped - or a status that the person has - like wealth, education, class. These, too, adjust the expected pleasantness, liveliness, and superficiality of the person's expected performances in a situation. Imagine someone telling you that they left your car with an aged, fat, half-blind, illiterate and impoverished car mechanic! You might guess that the mechanic either has special genius in her fingers, or your car will end up in worse shape than it started!

Still another way that we adjust our expectations for a person in a situation is by noting the kind of character that they have: moral, noble, helpful, kind, fair, sensible - or immoral, petty, selfish, mean, unfair, foolish. We may use this kind of qualification especially when we want to put a rhetorical handle on the person, in order to negotiate with her ("you're a fair person, right?") or with others ("she's too selfish to depend on").