Chapter 6. Social Interaction
6.1. Micro-level Interaction
Social interaction is the process of reciprocal influence exercised by individuals over one another during social encounters. Usually it refers to face-to-face encounters in which people are physically present with one another for a specified duration. However, in contemporary society one can also think of social encounters that are technologically mediated like texting, zoom meeting, or direct messaging. In terms of the different levels of analysis in sociology—micro, meso, macro, and global—social interaction is generally approached at the micro-level where the structures and social scripts, the pre-established patterns of behaviour that people are expected to follow in specific social situations, that govern the relationship between particular individuals can be examined. However, as the sociological study of emotions indicates, the micro-level processes of everyday life are also impacted by macro-level phenomena such as gender inequality and historical transformations.
Emotional Life
The study of micro-level interaction has been a rich source of insight in sociology. The idea that people’s emotions, for example, have a social component might not be all that surprising at first because often individuals are subject to having “emotional reactions” to other people, positive or negative. The other person, or the social situation itself, brings on an emotion that otherwise would not arise.
However, sociological research has shown that emotions also can have a systematic, socially structured quality which is not immediately apparent. Studies of face-to-face conversations show that the outward signs of emotion like smiling or laughing are not equally distributed. For example, the predisposition to show emotion by laughing in a conversation is structured by differences in gender, status, role, and norm. Robert Provine (1996) studied 1200 two-person conversations, observed discretely in public places like shopping malls. He discovered that when a woman was speaking and a man was listening the woman laughed more than twice as much as the man. Similarly when a man was speaking and a woman listening, she was still more likely to laugh than him. “Female speakers laugh 127 per cent more than their male audience. In contrast, male speakers laugh about 7 per cent less than their female audience” (Provine, 1996). Provine suggests that this shows that males lead in producing humour while females lead in laughing at humour, but it might also show a pattern of social deference reflecting the unequal social status of men and women.
How a culture laughs, when it laughs and at what it laughs also varies through history. Jokes often hone in on what people are most anxious about as a culture. The Roman Classicist Mary Beard (2014) argues that while it is very difficult to go from the recorded literature to a confident appraisal of what laughter and its place in social life in ancient Rome was like, the nature