AFFECT CONTROL THEORY

Lynn Smith-Lovin discussed Affect Control Theory as a model mediating structural and processual views of how people are socially competent. The model states that during interactions, people import meanings from a larger culture to create local realities.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, structural-functionalists saw the knowledge of rules as the key to being a competent social actor. This view was criticized on the grounds that it is too static, and it was countered by processual models that stressed the creative actions of agentic social actors. Under this model, social structure is actually repetitive patterns of agentic social actors creating streams of action.

Affect control theory mediates structural and processual views on what it takes for people to be competent social actors. This model states that people create local realities during interaction by evoking symbols; importing meanings from the larger culture. Cultural meanings provide stability and patterns to social interaction. When people encounter a situation or role previously unknown, they are not completely lost, but rather use cultural meanings to process responses.

Affect control theory differs from symbolic interaction in several ways: it uses a common metric which is mathematical in form; it links culture to local interactions through measured meanings; it provides a social account of individual emotions, behaviors, attributes, and labeling; and it uses the situation and not the individual, as the unit of analysis.

The common metric is a very general measurement of meaning. It allows the use of impression-formation equations to describe how meanings change in different contexts and situations. These equations are actor-behavior-object regressions that help to see how actors’ impressions are shaped by their actions and the objects of those actions. Using those equations as descriptions of the empirical reality of how meanings change, the affect control principle is applied: that people try to maintain meanings during the course of interaction (see Robinson and Smith-Lovin 2006).

Evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) dimensions are used to explain substantial variance in semantic meanings across vocabularies in a wide variety of language cultures. Within a culture, EPA meanings are relatively stable across a variety of important social dimensions (age, socioeconomic status, gender).

How, then, do meanings change as a result of situations, and of exposure to the actions of others? The dynamic part of this model is driven by a control-system. There’s a reference state: people are trying to maintain the culturally-given meanings that come with their and other people’s role identities and behaviors. There is also an observed state: this depends on the occurrences of a particular situation. Based on the difference between the two, there is a response to try and bring meaning back. The affect control principle dictates that individuals behave in ways that maintain their affective expectations generated by their meaning of the situation. Thus for example, during a business meeting each individual present is aware of his or her role and that of the others. If someone interrupts the speaker with an unexpected behavior (such as jumping on the table), he or she is disrupting the reference state, and someone will act in a way to make the situation meaningful again (such as reprimanding the person).

Deflection is the amount of disruption in the definition of the situation that’s produced by current events. Use of the common metric allows for a mathematical definition of that deflection. Deflection is a property of the situation and not of the individual. Hence, when deflection occurs in a situation between two people, a third person can repair the action. In the previous example, person to bring meaning back into the situation does not necessarily have to be the speaker or the interrupter. Meaning occurs at the level of the situation, so identity is more than an individual attribute.

The discussion following this presentation centered on two topics:

· How reframing happens

· How the model explains differences in meaning

Relabelling can happen through a very large deflection that affects enough people simultaneously that they have to think about things differently to make sense of them. Alternatively, it can occur through a combination of identities in the locus of one person that shifts meaning because of a greater structure. For example, as women evolved from caregivers to become also professionals, reframing of “women” occurred (for more on the model’s treatment of multiple identities see Smith-Lovin 2003).

Finally, reframing can occur through social networks, as having positive social connections with numerous people can change one’s view of particular situations. The model tends to assume consensus with subcultural differences. People can agree on meanings, but not necessarily labels. For example, people tend to agree on what constitutes an abortion, but not on the label, as some see it as a medical procedure, others as a crime.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 826