Chapter 4: Social Interaction

Introduction to Social 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.

Social interaction is generally studied at the micro-level. Sociologists are interested in examining ‘social scripts’ – pre-established patterns of behaviour that people are expected to follow in specific social situations and govern the relationship between particular individuals. Qualitative methods such as observations and interviews are one way to examine social interactions, group dynamics, and how people come to understand themselves and the world around them. However, micro-level processes of everyday life are also impacted by macro-level phenomena such as gender inequality and historical transformations.

Many sociological findings like the ones surveyed in this chapter may strike the newcomer to the discipline as counter-intuitive because people in modern society are so steeped in a certain way of thinking about themselves as unique individuals. In this way of thinking, the individual is understood to be independent of external influences and is free to make rational and autonomous decisions between different courses of action.

A sociologist, however, will point to the ways in which your decisions, actions and, in this chapter, social interactions are tied to larger social structures (social forces that impact individual behaviour such as cultural norms). What social scripts do you follow when interacting with a co-worker, asking someone to go out for coffee, greeting a friend, or managing an embarrassing situation? What external factors shape your motivations to attend postsecondary or pursue a particular major? How are your interactions and presentation of self shaped by internal (e.g., what I’m ‘actually’ feeling’) versus externally driven (e.g., what emotions should I display in a given situation)?

What this means is that the modern idea of the individual is not a product of universal “human nature” or of unique personal self-discovery but a type of relationship to the self that emerges under specific historical conditions. People make themselves into individuals using a model of individuality which is socially approved and learned over time. The inquiry of micro-level sociology is to examine the various ways in which the individual is produced in social interaction, just like any other human artifact.