Search

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet interviewing remains an indispensable sociological tool. This paper demonstrates the value that situationalism holds for interviewing. We examine seemingly contradictory findings from interview studies of middle-class identity (cultural hierarchies and/or egalitarianism?). We then render these contradictions comprehensible by interpreting data excerpts through 'methodological situationalism': Goffman's theories of interaction order, ritual, and frontstage/backstage. In 'situationalist interviewing,' we suggest that sociologists be attentive to the 'imagined audiences' and 'imagined communities'. These are key to identifying the situations, interaction orders, and cultural repertoires that lie beyond the interview encounter, but to which it refers. In sum, we argue for greater situational awareness among sociologists who must rely on interviews. We also discuss techniques and measures that can facilitate situational awareness. A promise of situational interviewing is that it helps us make sense of contradictions, ambiguities, and disagreements within and between interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post‐Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social positioning theory, or an account of the human individual that it grounds, qualifies as a quantum social theory. This is an assessment that I explain and defend in the paper. It is of interest in that, in a world where increasing numbers are seeking to construct quantum social theories, it serves to help demonstrate that this goal can be achieved without giving up on meeting criteria like explanatory intelligibility or power or discarding real‐world notions like human (and other) entities. As it turns out, a central feature of the account defended and a core element of the 'standard' interpretation of quantum mechanics are found to stand in an interesting, unanticipated and suggestive relation to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disorientation is a versatile, multidisciplinary concept. Whether associated with its spatial meaning or its non-spatial, more metaphorical sense, various disciplines have used disorientation to describe a broad range of philosophical, cultural, and social phenomena in the last decades. However, the focus on the concept from an emotional perspective remains scarce. To expand the current investigation on the topic, the present paper attempts a first approach to conceptualize disorientation as an emotional experience from an interactionist perspective. The paper reviews the previous literature, provides theoretical background and a working definition for the concept, and examines prototypical situations that are potentially disorienting for individuals, emphasizing the social and situated nature of the disorienting experience. The paper also comments on the relationships between disorientation and culture and points out some implications of the concept in mental health and psychological distress. Altogether, the paper argues about the value of disorientation as a powerful construct to gain insight into what, why, and how traumatic and everyday situations as well as current cultural and social challenges impact people emotionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines three programmatic responses to the problem of cognitive bias: virtue epistemology, epistemic paternalism, and epistemic collectivism. Each of these programmes focuses on a single level of epistemic analysis: virtue theorists on individuals, paternalists on environments, and collectivists on groups. I argue that this is a mistake in light of the fact that cognitive biases arise from interactions between these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more time coordinating them. This paper offers empirically based arguments for the interactionist approach, and contends that its adoption is an essential step for minimizing bias in empirical science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People display recognizably characteristic behavioral patterns across time and situations, with a given degree of regularity. These patterns may justify the attribution of personality traits. It is arguably the commonsense view that the proper explanation of these behavioral regularities is given by intrinsic properties of the agent's psychology. In this paper, I argue for an externalistic view of the causal basis of personality-characteristic behaviors. According to the externalistic view, the relevant behavioral regularities are better understood as the result of a systematic interaction between features internal to the agent and environmental-situational factors. Moreover, if the premise is granted that people are typically able to exercise a certain degree of control over the environmental-situational conditions they find themselves in, the resulting picture is of active sort of externalism, as people may at times engage in selection and manipulation of environmental-situational conditions as a way of managing their own behavioral tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a body of research on Organizational Behavior and Industrial/Organizational Psychology (OB/IO) that expands the range of empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing character-situation debate. This body of research, mostly neglected by moral philosophers, provides important insights to move the debate forward. First, the OB/IO scholarship provides empirical evidence to show that social environments like organizations have significant power to shape the character traits of their members. This scholarship also describes some of the mechanisms through which this process of reshaping character takes place. Second, the character-situation debate has narrowly focused on situational influences that affect behavior episodically and haphazardly. The OB/IO research, however, highlights the importance of distinguishing such situational influences from influences that, like organizational influences, shape our character traits because they are continuous and coordinated. Third, the OB/IO literature suggests that most individuals display character traits that, while local to the organization, can be consistent across situations. This puts pressure on the accounts of character proposed by traditional virtue ethics and situationism and provides empirical support to interactionist models based on cognitive-affective processing system theories of personality (CAPS). Finally, the OB/IO literature raises important challenges to the possibility of achieving virtue, provides valuable and untapped resources to cultivate character, and suggests new avenues of normative and empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we theoretically address the relevance of unintentional and inconsistent interactional elements in human–robot interactions. We argue that elements failing, or poorly succeeding, to reproduce a humanlike interaction create significant consequences in human–robot relational patterns and may affect human–human relations. When considering social interactions as systems, the absence of a precise interactional element produces a general reshaping of the interactional pattern, eventually generating new types of interactional settings. As an instance of this dynamic, we study the absence of metacommunicative abilities in social artifacts. Then, we analyze the pragmatic consequences of the aforementioned absence through the lens of Paul Watzlawick's interactionist theory. We suggest that a fixed complementary interactional setting may be produced because of the asymmetric understanding, between robots and humans, of metacommunication. We highlight the psychological implications of this interactional asymmetry within Jessica Benjamin's concept of "mutual recognition". Finally, we point out the possible shift of dysfunctional interactional patterns from human–robot interactions to human–human ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]