Morality,Affect,and Reputation in the Making of a Motivated Social Self

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of symbolic interaction’s theory of the self, alongside alternative implicit models in dual-process and practice theory, sociology continues to struggle with incorporating affect into models of the self. To address this gap, we distinguish between the conventional sociological understanding of Goffman’s self as cynical and masked and an alternative construct we excavate by paying close attention to negative cases like Goffman’s Asylums and Stigma. This alternative theory of self treats self and situation not as one-sided but as mutually constitutive. Unlike most models of self, our alternative is continuously motivated by humans’ desire to maintain reputation within a given situation; reputation making is dependent on the situation, and its ceremonial rules provide the context for the self’s realization of affective rewards. After considering how reputational claims around ceremonial rules reveal an affectively driven, moral self, we consider the theoretical and methodological implications of the theory for major strands within symbolic interactionism.

One of sociology’s central problems, at least since American sociology and pragmatism emerged in the early twentieth century, has been the social self. What is it? How is it constructed? How does it bridge the biopsychological elements of the human organism and the enormous and layered social world we inhabit? Theorizing the self has generally been left to symbolic interactionism (SI), which conceptualizes the self as emerging via a cyclical process between subject and object, driven and maintained by individuals’ reflexive attempts to verify their sense of self in the eyes of others (Blumer 1969; Mead 1934). In practice, however, most SI emphasizes the aspects of self most pertinent to the sociologist’s theoretical and empirical interests—for example, roles (Turner 1978), identity (Owens, Robinson, and Smith-Lovin 2010), or status (Ridgeway 2019). The self remains important across the SI tradition, but it is theoretically fragmented across a panoply of work that generally focuses not on the self, per se, but on what constrains it. The stakes for having a theoretically and empirically powerful conception of self could not be higher, suggesting a fresh take on the self is warranted. As the hinge between our nature and the sources of nurture, the social self stands at the center of sociological puzzles around decision-making, goal setting, motivation, and social action. The lack of clear focus on the SI self, though, creates two closely related problems.

First, despite Blumer’s (1969) best efforts, SI mostly adopts Mead’s (1934) social behaviorist pragmatism, seeing habitual action as the more common mode of action (see e.g., contemporary manifestations of SI such as Burke’s [1991] identity control theory), with creative, although delimited, action occurring only when faced with discrepancy, discomfort, or incongruence (Gross 2009). In this pragmatic model, humans are primarily reactive rather than desirous and proactive. Second, the affective motivators that a diverse array of sciences have revealed as central to cognition and action are largely considered derivative of and not foundational to a social self (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2023). ¹ For Mead, “self-consciousness rather than affective experience with its motor accompaniments, provides the core and primary structure of the self, which is thus essentially a cognitive rather than an emotional phenomenon” (Wrong 1963:313). And yet, cognitive and evolutionary science shows us that just about everything that makes us social (Damasio 1994; LeDoux and Brown 2017), including memory, perception, cognitive processes associated with rationality and decision-making, motivation (Berridge and Kringelbach 2008), and action (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017), is either caused or coordinated by affect. That is, the foundations of the SI self are predicated on evolved affective capacities that largely go underexamined. ²

Alternative models of the self do not do much better, in part because they are not actually interested in a theory of the self. The two most common are practice theory (Bourdieu 1998) and dual-process models (Vaisey 2009). Practice theory, although more cognizant of the importance of embodiment (Wacquant 2004), presumes that unconscious class dispositions (habitus) reflect well-worn strategies and preferences dependent on field location. Consequently, the self goes unexamined, assumed to be overdetermined by field-specific constraints. The dual-process model, which does well to reclaim the notion of a moral self, similarly locates action in automatic cognition, downplaying or backgrounding the fact that cognition is impossible without affective tagging (Damasio 1994). Indeed, habit or unconscious action is generally intentional, given that it is guided, controlled, or motivated (Miller Tate 2019) by pre- or unconscious affective responses (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017). Thus, all three theories struggle to imagine a self that is motivated, that seeks what it wants, and whose foundations are not only cognitive but deeply affectual because the self is secondary to the situations or interactions, fields and habitus, or deeply internalized schema that constitute it.

In this article, we locate a potential way out of this in a relatively surprising place: Erving Goffman. We say surprising because the conventional take on Goffman’s self is that there is not much of a model at all (Gergen 1991; Gouldner 1970). Goffman is decidedly not a symbolic interactionist (Verhoeven 1993), and thus sociology primarily interprets his self as a vehicle of structure and not of the agent. Goffman’s explicit use of terms like persona, for instance, embraces a Jungian notion of a self as “designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the nature of the individual” (as quoted in Storr 1983:264). It is equally true that Goffman’s explicit reference to a self is often submerged within the social-psychological theorizing of interactional “traffic patterns” (Goffman 1963a) and mundane ceremonial rituals (Goffman 1967) or disembodied through the emphasis on strips of activity (Goffman 1974:557). Furthermore, following Durkheim’s ontological position closely, Goffman seems to disregard the sociological import of anything intrapersonal, especially cognition. We make two arguments: First, intentional or not, another theory of self is lurking in Goffman’s work that is worth excavating, and second, this version of self provides an alternative model that gives primacy to affectual motivation saturated in moral compulsions.

In terms of the former claim, Goffman’s self unsurprisingly defies the standard SI takes on self (Verhoeven 1993). It is not pragmatic, activated deliberately in times of incongruence or problem only. It also diverges from the practice-theory take, which owes its roots to a Marxian view of structure and action in which the self is mostly a composite of class dispositions (habitus) deeply enculturated in our muscle memory and enacted in unconscious, strategic fashion. In the standard SI case, the self is habitual until creativity is called for, with actors sifting through alternative, delimited, yet open-ended responses. Practice theory, in contrast, relies too heavily on a reproductionist account that makes the self a character study in strategic habitualism (Gross 2009). The second self implicit in Goffman’s work lies between these two accounts: a deliberate, although not always conscious, actor whose efforts before, during, and after performances are motivated—that is, intentional, guided, and controlled (Miller Tate 2021). The self and the situation are therefore co-constitutive. Forged from a Durkheimian theoretical perspective via Radcliffe-Brown and Warner (Wynn 2016), the theory of self we sketch out is proactive in taking and making reputational claims within face-to-face encounters morally constrained by ceremonial rules. This self does not need internalized cognitive meanings or class dispositions because it is embodied and motivated by moral emotions like shame, pride, stigma, and honor. Such moral emotions are evolved neurophysiological responses to reputation (Boehm 2012; Scrivner et al. 2021; Tracy 2016), which are, in turn, sensitive to the sociocultural environment triggering those responses. In short, worth unearthing here is an affectually embodied self that generates reputation within a web of morally encoded rules that are as much an extension of the self as external to it (see, especially, Goffman 1967).

In this article, we take two steps to develop a theoretical framework around Goffman’s scattered take on the self. First, we show that contrary to Goffman’s critics (e.g., Gouldner 1970) and even his best interlocutors (Collins 1988:250), two distinct versions of self are in Goffman—the conventional Goffmanian self and the one implicit in his negative cases, what we might call an affectually motivated self. ³ The latter was perhaps not intended by Goffman but can be found in places where he highlights aspects of the self lost or absent because of extreme cultural or structural design and in the processes related to the emotional, interpersonal, and moral challenges that arise when faced with an “abnormal” self. It is fitting that our methodological approach is drawn from Goffman’s own advisor’s emphasis on incongruity as a means to revealing generalizable principles (Hughes 1958:49; Jaworski 2000). Thus, we find our alternative theory of self in Goffman’s essays on truly strategic actors, like conmen, who risk their reputations (and freedom) in the service of producing credible situations to their ultimate advantage, and, as noted earlier, most prominently in Goffman’s work on stigma (Goffman 1963b) and asylums (Goffman 1961a), where cultural beliefs or bureaucratic systems restrict or deny some classes of people’s moral claims for (presumably) “failing to maintain” reputation (Goffman 1967:48).

Second, by eliding the problem of how social reality gets inside of people and makes them act, this alternative theory of self offers a self that is proactive, moral, affectually motivated, and only sometimes deliberately scheming, strategic, or cynical. This self is not merely a product of the structural demands of the situation. Instead, as will become clear, the situation itself is produced by a self motivated to maintain and enhance reputation, whether deliberately or unconsciously. Ultimately, the self sketched here exemplifies Goffman’s conviction that the theater of life is a high-stakes gambit filled with moral performances, even in the most innocuous encounters, like waiting in line (Rawls 1989). It thus allows for a sociological self that accounts for habit and creativity without sacrificing or marginalizing moral commitments and affectual motivation. On the contrary, the self we posit treats morality and affect as foundational.

Our alternative theory of self resonates with a diverse array of theoretical traditions that supplement and support our assertions. Specifically, by making reputation the cornerstone, our excavation of Goffman allows us to draw on recent developments in the evolutionary science of affect and morality (Boehm 2012; Tracy 2016) and a strand of sociology that cares deeply about the noneconomic dimensions of status, honor, and reputation but rarely gets drawn into the social self, let alone Goffmanian sociology (Veblen [1998] 1899:15–22; Weber 1946:180–95). ⁴

The Sociological Self

The dominant SI theory of self remains indebted to Mead’s (1934) emphasis on the emergence and reemergence of self in interaction with others. In this tradition, the self emerges through socialization processes in which objects, like the self itself, acquire symbolic meanings that are mobilized in subsequent interactions to coordinate plans and activities. The advantages posed by the pragmatist tradition serve as a defensible explanation of social action that resists a rational actor model (Gross 2009). As a problem solver, the self alternates between habit and a creativity born from the contextual knowledge of past cues (real, imagined, or generalized) and responses. Creative motivation, however, only comes into play when the meanings of the situation become discrepant, requiring conscious effort (see Owens et al. 2010).

A long-standing criticism of SI has been its inability to deal satisfactorily with structure, hierarchy, and power (Coser 1976). Consequently, theories that imply a self (despite not really being about the self) are often leveraged as alternatives to SI. Practice theory, for instance, presumes the self to be more than just reflexive meanings but also a product of the structural position it occupies and a repository of interests, dispositions, and practices (Bourdieu 1977). Edging closer to the utilitarian position, the interest-oriented self may not always be fully aware of what it is doing, but enculturation ensures it internalizes a suite of strategies based on its position, and these strategies mark the self’s success or failure in realizing its goals. A second possibility appears in the recent marriage between cognitive science and cultural sociology. Vaisey’s (2009) evocation of the elephant-rider metaphor suggests most action is shaped by deeply internalized cultural schemas (the elephant) despite the rider’s best efforts to make deliberate decisions. Where practice theory veers closer to a Marxian vision of class interests, dual-process models steer us back toward a more responsible, judicious moral sociology that reclaims values without Parsonian baggage.

All three theories offer important vantage points for thinking about the self, but they have similar shortcomings related to desire and affect. ⁵ In terms of the former, sociologists either embrace a desire-less self that is mostly reactive, consciously or not, to discomfort or discrepant information, or they embrace a socialized self whose tastes and practices are greatly determined by one’s structural position in a field and often enacted unconsciously. All three theories obscure the central role of emotion or affect in building and sustaining a self and its pursuit (individual or collective) of tangible or intangible objects. Faced with these dilemmas, sociologists have attempted to modify these theories to account for a host of roles or actions that are difficult to make sense of, such as the adoption of psychoanalytic concepts to help understand the self under psychic or emotional siege (Summers-Effler 2004). What if we did not have to work hard to create a moral, affectual self because such a theory was implicit in existing texts?

From Cognitive to Affectual?

In some corners, Goffman’s comments on persona (quoted previously) are taken seriously, leading to the position that there is little “real” self in Goffman’s work (Gergen 1991; Gouldner 1970). More commonly, however, sociologists struggle with Goffman’s conventional self because there is “not so much a private, individual attribute, as a public reality, created by and having its primary existence in public interaction” (Collins 1988:250). Indeed, its private nature is notably lacking in the context of SI’s emphasis on internalized meanings and the capacity to have a private conversation of gestures with real, imagined, or generalized others (Burke 1991; Mead 1934). In this sense, Goffman’s self is severely lacking a cognitive intrapersonal element—something that belongs or is intrinsic to the individual. In Interaction Ritual, for instance, Goffman (1967:10) emphasizes face over self, arguing the former is a person’s most “personal possession and the center of his security and pleasure,” but it is “only on loan to him from society.” Goffman (1961b:87) envisions a person overwhelmed and overmatched by society: Enacting roles “implies a social determinism and a doctrine about socialization” that impels a person to “see to it that the impressions of him that are conveyed in the situation are compatible with role-appropriate personal qualities effectively imputed to him.” Self-expression is delimited because encounters are structures “in which a great variety of sign vehicles become available, whether desired or not” (Goffman 1961b:102, emphasis added). Arguably, this account underplays Goffman’s thoughts on moral emotions, reputation, and deliberate action, imagining us not merely as desireless but also powerless and oversocialized (Wrong 1962).

When Goffman explicitly discusses self, this version is drawn into sharper relief. Nowhere is this truer than in his essay on the moral career of mental patients, which he describes as an “exercise in the institutional approach to the study of self” (Goffman 1961b:127). The concept of “moral career” allows us to “move back and forth between the personal and the public, between the self and its significant society.” The reader feels, initially, there is something personal, something private, something that belongs to the individual, but the chapter quickly shifts to describing the circumstances that all inmates confront when admitted, processed, and domiciled in a total institution and how they “respond in some importantly similar ways” (Goffman 1961b:129). The private self is further buried in later Goffman (1974:557–59, 563, 573), where he seems to shed the metaphor of theater in the service of further disembodying the self. This self, expressed and measured in informal talk, becomes no more real than the characters in a play. The tales we tell about our “self” to others are structured by the frames we have internalized that provide meaningful orientation for our audience and allow us to animate our self as protagonist. The substance—for example, turning points like “losing a job” or “a tainted past”—feels like original, unique elements of character but are generic cultural artifacts belonging to a shared “corpus of cautionary tales, games, riddles, experiments, newsy stories, and other scenarios” (Goffman 1974:563). Indeed, this bleak outlook on a sociologically interesting self led Denzin and Keller (1981:59) to conclude, in their review of Frame Analysis (Goffman 1974), that “Goffman’s actors are monads, with single frames looking out at the world. . . . Selves are relegated to the sideline,” no better at making sense of the self in the “cons, hoaxes, frauds, and deceptions” that are hallmarks of his work than in the glaringly absent “greetings, good-byes, relational affirmations” that consume most of our social life.

This conventional version of Goffman’s self features a self overwhelmed, overdetermined, and oversocialized—the personal is merely a reflection of the institutional regime or conventions of talk that serve as its looking glass. This creates a striking contrast to the first and third essays in Asylums, where Goffman (1961a) sheds light on the variety of adjustments inmates make to build intrainstitutional reputations and broader strategies they use to carve out a sense of humanness. When Goffman leaves the unit of analysis he works best at, the encounter, his theoretical method loses some of its logical and rhetorical force. It is no wonder that although Collins (1988:258–59) concedes the fact that at times, Goffman “seems to admit a kind of director behind the scenes, choosing which self to enact at each moment,” Collins unsurprisingly concludes: “But what kind of self is this, over and above, any situational self?”

Contrary to these conventional takes, we argue that Goffman’s work on incongruous cases, like Stigma (Goffman 1963b) and Asylums (Goffman 1961a), shows a motivated self. The discredited of Stigma, for example, actively manage interpersonal emotions as they work to discern what other performers feel about people “like themselves” while restraining their own expression (Goffman 1963b:41; Gross and Stone 1964). Likewise, the discreditable, or those whose stigma is concealable, actively manage information so they can “pass” (i.e., their expressive equipment and body language do not give away their secret). Of course, one might dismiss these examples as generalizable to Goffman writ large, given they are “spoiled” and, therefore, special cases. Indeed, one may even argue they share with SI the notion of disconfirmation and discomfiture as the motivating mechanism, just without the cognitive processes identity or affect control theories identify.

And yet, Goffman was a student of Everett Hughes and a descendent of Durkheim, theorists who believed that generalizable truths were often revealed when occupations and religion, respectively, were stripped of the complex, symbolic veneer that hid their basic operating principles. In that spirit, we see these “spoiled” cases as laying bare the taken-for-granted aspects of self that are often secondary to Goffman’s analysis of situational dilemmas but nonetheless highlight our continuous efforts to protect the self, the other’s self, and the situation. Rather than emphasizing discomfort or discrepancy, we see a self that is affectually embodied and morally grounded. Most of us may not carry the mark of stigma, but throughout Goffman’s work, the implication that we are all potentially discreditable in any encounter or across situations points to a much more deliberate and proactive self. To not care about managing information that could pollute the self or others is to not act like the “type of person” who deserves self-respect.

Thus, if we step back from the special case Goffman presents, we are instantly confronted with the things “normals” take for granted and can begin to sketch the outlines of an alternative to not only Goffman’s conventional self but also the majority of sociological takes on the self: a self motivated to seek the “pleasure” of respect (pride), reputation (honor), and poise (dignity) and avoid the “pain” of disrespect (shame), stigma (dishonor), and lack of control (embarrassment; Goffman 1959:12–16). True, this alternative shares aspects with the other theories of the self. As with Goffman’s usual take, the self is constrained in its use of “sign vehicles”: Like practice theory’s self, the affectual and moral self uses strategies (consciously or not) for personal gain; and, like the dual-process model, the affectual and moral self acts on deeply rehearsed and internalized schema. Ironically, the weakness in Goffman—the lack of a cognitive sense of self—becomes the alternative’s strength and distinction vis-à-vis each of these theories. Our theory of self, unlike any other model, is always embodied in moral emotions, leading to reactive and proactive responses that generally obey sacralized rules.

Unmasking the (Affectually Motivated and Moral Nature of the) Self

Before we can develop this theory of self, we detour to revisit Weber’s (1946:180–95) thoughts on how status groups are distinguished by their claims to honor and esteem. Weber was dissatisfied with class, wealth, and instrumental rationality being the only or primary basis for group distinction. His addition of status groups captured the noneconomic grounds upon which groups order their material and ideal interests through traditional, affectual, or value-rational orientations (Bendix 1962:86–87). Although Weber (1946a:190) did not express status in terms of a sociology of morality, per se, status groups monopolized “honorific preferences” around clothing, cultural goods, and a host of material and ideal objects that were deemed special by their association with the shared lifestyles and consumption patterns of the status group (see also Veblen [1998] 1899:15–22, 25–34). Status, unlike wealth, takes for granted the social order and a belief that such an order is right and good (Weber 1946:172). A specialness encircles the fortunate, the smart, the beautiful, and the strong that makes less privileged groups strive to approach and emulate higher-status groups. Thus, there is something morally grounding about honor and esteem. They undergird the legitimacy of the social order by creating cohesion between socially distant groups and by justifying unequal influence based on unequal access to prestige.

We need not argue that Goffman was secretly a Weberian to see how his implicit notions of self resonate with Weber’s ideas on status. Goffman rarely used language approximating Weber (cf. Goffman 1951), but Goffman’s essays on deference and demeanor make clear that even symmetrical relationships are driven by status (Collins 1975, 2000, 2004) or reputation. For our purposes, reputation rests on the objective beliefs or assumptions about a “micro-level position such as follower, leader, star, supporting character” (or what Clark [1990:306 calls place) and the subjective history of deference between two or more people. Just as Goffman (1961b:127) preferred to move easily “back and forth” between the self and the situational structure, reputation allows for a flexible understanding of the interplay between structure and agency, with some situations imposing rigid reputational claims and others allowing leeway for people to produce their reputation actively. As such, the difference in tempo, scale, and size of Goffman’s units of analysis (Wynn 2016) allows us to imagine both asymmetrical and symmetrical relationships and encounters between people occupying different standing or places because reputation is far more “situational, overlapping, and changeable” than status (Clark 1990:306). For instance, diffuse characteristics, like race or gender, are most salient in initial encounters with new people but can change over repeated exposure (Ridgeway 2019). Ultimately, if self and interaction order is predicated on reputation, as a stand-in for status and honor, then it makes sense to see reputation as the moral currency of the chain of interaction rituals. This moral currency is experienced directly by affective responses that provide, in turn, the form and content of the self.

Additionally, Goffman’s emphasis on reputation allows us to incorporate the insight from evolutionary science that monitoring our reputations and others is a fundamental human activity (Tomasello 2020). We deliberately strive to be seen as a person who meets others’ expectations (Tracy 2016), remaining highly conscious of what sorts of action might be deemed transgressive (Boehm 2012). Because reputation has evolved as such a core human motivator, an affectually motivated self cannot simply be a product of situational demands but, rather, must be complicit in their creation. Such rules are ceremonial, and thus moral, because reputation taking and making is (typically but not always) a moral and, especially, affectual endeavor. Subsequently, the affectual nature of the self in our model allows us to resolve the conscious/unconscious, deliberate/habitual binary because affect motivates action regardless of cognition (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017; Frijda 2007). Importantly, the moral nature of our affective motivations stems from the fact that reputation taking and making depends on the internalization and affectual attachment not to people but to rules (Boehm 2012). ⁶ Goffman describes these rules as ceremonial, which only substantiates the argument that the self is continuously plunged into a moral world of recurring encounters (Collins 2004) palpably experienced in our affective response to the feeling of self.

Ceremonial rules and the self

Tracing Durkheim’s interaction ritual theory through Radcliffe-Brown and his student, Lloyd Warner, Goffman adopted a structuralist perspective that emphasized ritual along with a materialist and corporeal (practice-based) sociology that saw objects as imbued with the residue of collectivized emotion (Wynn 2016)—a fact we will circle back to shortly. Less obviously, Goffman also borrowed heavily from Herbert Spencer. The first clue can be found in one of Goffman’s “minor” works, Relations in Public (Goffman 1971), which draws its opening epigraph from the first paragraph of Spencer’s chapter on ceremonial institutions in Principles of Sociology (Spencer 1897, Vol. 2). Spencer’s argument provides some foundational assumptions for better understanding the moral nature of self implicit in Goffman’s work.

First, ceremonial rules—manifest in customs, etiquette, and manners (see Goffman 1963a) and avoidance and approach norms (see Goffman 1967:15)—were the first form of governance of human conduct, and they continue to be the most frequent form of control exerted on most people most of their lives. Notably, rules of etiquette and manners are all reputational, serving as guides for signaling to others that you are, as Goffman (1967) would say, “that type of person” rather than the type who cares little for what others think. Second, even as other sources of control (e.g., politics or religion) differentiate, ceremonial rules shape the exercise of power in mundane and spectacular routines (Spencer 1897:25–35). For example, for kings to lay claim to autonomous power over a population, they must also adapt existing ceremonial rules for context and growing social distance, allowing the everyday governance of interactions within and between status groups. The avoidance norms surrounding joking observed by Radcliffe-Brown (1965:90–104; e.g., whom one can joke with and what one can joke about) are transposed onto avoidance norms around the king and others in the ruling elite. Third, ceremonial rules further draw us into the Weberian notion of status and honor because ceremonial rules increasingly govern access to and use of honorific preferences like titles, trophies and gifts, badges and costumes, deference, and other distinctions. Ultimately, Spencer sees the superstructure of institutional life as eternally undergirded by a web of ceremonial rules that govern the nitty-gritty of everyday life, where reputation and place are embodied and essential to claiming deference and demeanor and honor and dignity and signaling membership (or nonmembership) in specific social groups.

Moral emotions and the self

Understanding Goffman’s use of Spencer, however, cannot be detached from his indebtedness to Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, and Warner. For Spencer, beyond the use of the term ceremonial, his macro-orientation makes these rules feel perfunctory and lifeless, whereas Goffman inserts them into a moral universe that invigorates the rules governing an expressive order. At the level of the encounter, Goffman (1967:6, emphasis added) observes ceremonial rules as palpably felt: We “experience an immediate emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him; he cathects his face; his ‘feelings’ become attached to it.” And Goffman (1967:9–10, emphasis added) is clear about what it is we actually feel:

When a person manifests these compunctions primarily from duty to himself, one speaks in our society of pride; when he does so because of duty to wider social units, and receives support from these units in doing so, one speaks of honor. When these compunctions have to do with postural things, with expressive events derived from the way in which the person handles his body, his emotions, and the things which he has physical contact, one speaks of dignity.

In short, moral emotions—like pride (Tangney, Steuwig, and Mashek 2007)—are the effervescent quality of encounters that sacralize ordinary rules and sanctify mundane performance (Goffman 1967:19).

Unsurprisingly, emotions, as Clark (1990:308) suggests, provide “the glue” for individuals to manage their place. In fact, “emotions relate people to place” through strategies of marking place and claiming place (Clark 1990:309; see also Goffman 1967:6–7). Specifically, emotions are information about one’s relative place as well as interaction cues used purposefully to evoke emotions in others. Self-targeted emotions of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation mark someone’s place as inferior; other-targeted emotions of awe, respect, and admiration mark the other’s place as superior, and others place a person through “their attention, esteem, deference, honor—or lack thereof” (Clark 1990:307). In short, ceremonial rules constitute the grounds of life because the self is motivated to take and make reputation. Moral emotions represent the communication channel that ties the self to the situation, the situation to the self, and in true Durkheimian fashion, make sacred ingredients of a moral interaction order.

Nowhere is this more obvious than where ceremonial rules are tightly patterned and severely sanctioned, such as highly formalized ritual occasions (Collins 2004). Yet Goffman’s theory extends beyond these solemn occasions because everyday life always invites seemingly innocuous transgressions. Goffman (1971:97) warns that “deviation on any one occasion when the rule is supposed to apply can give the impression that the actor may be delinquent with respect to the whole class of events [whereas] any compliance can carry assurance regarding the actor’s handling of all other events that come under the rule.” The more evidence of following or breaking the rules, Goffman (1971:97, emphasis added) adds, the more evidence others have for an “appraisal of the actor’s moral character.” Even in impersonal, unfocused encounters, reputation is at stake. For instance, Rawls (1987:142) argues that

a commitment to the orderliness of the line [is] the most human, most moral of all social encounters [because it] requires the most pure commitment to order for its own sake [and thereby underscores] a source of self and order which transcends situations: commitment to the enabling conventions of interaction.

As such, ceremonial rules must be understood as constitutive and not regulatory rules: They “create realities” as much, if not more so, than they constrain or order behavior (D’Andrade 1984:94).

Transgression, Negative Affect, and Contamination

Goffman, like most sociologists, did not follow these arguments to their explicit conclusion. Positive emotions like pride, honor, and dignity are usually spoken of in passing, if at all; for Goffman, their negative counterparts were significantly more interesting (e.g., shame/stigma-dishonor/embarrassment). True to our argument, it is in his exploration of these negative emotions and their relation to contaminative sources that the moral and affectual nature of our alternative self comes into clearer focus. The theoretical logic is simple. If reputation is moral and depends on the internalization of ceremonial rules that are also moral, then the self can be contaminated by contact with “dirty” things and can also be the source of contamination (Douglas [1966] 2002). ⁷ Thus, the positive side of reputation making and taking is about the proactive pursuit of the things we want and like, whereas the negative side is about protecting against and avoiding pollution.

Indeed, for Goffman, avoiding being contaminated or contaminating others is tantamount to reputation making and taking, appearing as the central moral directive that leads to an exchange of pride for shame, honor for stigma, and dignity for embarrassment or, worse, humiliation. In Asylums, inmates are processed through admissions procedures that erode control over protecting the sacred self from being profaned: “[B]eginning with admission a kind of contaminative exposure occurs [such that inmates] cannot prevent their visitors from seeing them in humiliating circumstances” (Goffman 1961a:24). Inmates cannot control their clothing, must interact with people they may find revolting, come into contact with disgusting substances and objects, and, ultimately, find themselves infantilized. In a word, they are no longer “that type of person,” and they have no recourse to managing others’ impressions of them. Furthermore, extreme conditions demonstrate how the situation itself is necessary for the self. A look at individuals in solitary confinements is clarifying. In the words of a prisoner (Piché and Major 2015:19),

Banishment to isolation is like flaking off the end of the earth. You become an inanimate object and are treated like garbage rotting at the dump. I spent five months on the fourth tier by myself, never seeing other prisoners. . . . Guards strictly enforce the silent treatment. . . . The months pile up and you begin to lose touch with reality. All you know is the hole.

Goffman referred to this process as mortification, suggesting social death. ⁸ SI and practice theory would see solitary confinement as problematic, but only Goffman can clearly elucidate that the co-constitutive nature of self and situation can be destroyed such that the self feels like it is dying and, presumably with enough time, does in fact die. The self is first degraded and then vehemently denied. At the extreme, institutionalization is designed to protect the outside world from the worst contaminants, whether the individuals are believed to be acting intentionally (e.g., criminals) or unintentionally (e.g., mental patients or convalescents). In so doing, however, institutions expose inmates to contamination, leaving a stigma marker that is hard to shake when they are released (Ebaugh 1988). Setting aside the extremely important discussion surrounding the sources of stigma or institutionalization and the power dynamics undergirding these sources, the point is that contamination is an outcome of sullied reputations and transgressed ceremonial rules. Indeed, the latter become sui generis recipes for preventing the former as rules about social distance reinforce and reproduce stigma.

For Goffman, these extreme cases always teach us lessons about everyday life. For instance, anyone, in a fit of anger, can “destroy objects, himself, and other people. He can profane himself, insult and contaminate others, and interfere with their free passage” (Goffman 1967:169). A couple hosting a dinner party, for example, may begin to gossip after the guests have left but are then caught when one guest unexpectedly returns to get a forgotten item. This calls into question the veracity of the hosts’ performance, requiring conscious effort to repair. Likewise, guests must consciously resist entering certain unauthorized places or at least conceal their invasion of those preserves. Guests must also avoid prying questions, fingering certain objects, and revealing too much information about the host or other guests (Goffman 1971:10).

To be described as contaminative or polluting is central to understanding the role of three negative emotions in an affectually motivated self: shame (when one feels they have personally polluted their self, others, and the encounter), stigma (when one feels their membership in a group pollutes the self, others, and the encounter), and embarrassment (when one fails to handle their expressive techniques). ⁹ Each of these negative moral emotions has multifunctional effects: Anticipating and fearing them compels conformity (Scheff 1988), experiencing them compels corrective (Goffman 1967:19–23) and reintegrative (Braithwaite 1989) rituals, and chronically experiencing them motivates deliberate, strategic management of self (Goffman 1963b), including the adoption of defensive mechanisms designed to protect self (Summers-Effler 2004).

Of the three, Goffman spoke least often of shame, instead emphasizing embarrassment. Yet Goffman uses embarrassment in two distinct ways: one that refers to the loss of poise in a situation and the other that spoils or, worse, mortifies a person’s self—or, what we might call shame (Lewis 1971; Scheff 1988). Although he did not draw precise boundaries between the two, empirical research does identify these two as discrete (Tangney et al. 1996). Moreover, shame appears to have evolved as a response to violating or anticipating violating a community’s standards (Boehm 2012), and thus it goes without saying that the social self self-regulates via shame out of “genuine concern for the good opinion of witnesses” (Goffman 1967:46). Elsewhere, Goffman (1967:106) points out how purposefully shaming another person risks causing shame to oneself: While the “discredited individual ought to feel ashamed . . . by the standards of the little social system maintained through the interaction the discreditor is just as guilty as the person he discredits [such that by] destroying another’s image he destroys his own.” It is a signal the person has failed to uphold the sacredness of self of others and thereby of one’s own: They are, in a word, a social contaminant.

Stigma may be thought of as the opposite of honor. Whereas shame refers to one’s own contemptible deficits (Lewis 1971), stigma is always tied to membership in a dishonored status group considered less than human by “normals.” That taint is considered either biological—and therefore passed through the family (Goffman 1963b:7)—or acquired, such as with a felon or con artist. The groups Weber (1946) considered negatively privileged could not mobilize the same amount of honor as their positively privileged counterparts; in some cases, they suffered an “honor deficit.” Stigma signals an extreme reputational deficit; nonelite groups that are not stigmatized per se may still suffer lower levels of influence, performance, and rewards (Ridgeway 2019). As an affectual response to being devalued and contaminated (or being associated with a stigmatized individual), stigma implores actors to manage their behavior actively—for example, to work to be seen as “normal” or “relatively uncontaminated” (Goffman 1963b:150). The stigmatized may try to conceal or destroy the stigmatizing mark, spend more time in groups of similars, enlist confederates, and so forth. (The problem with contact is that the “normal” risks being discredited. For example, a normal seen with a criminal not only raises questions about the “type of person” they represent, but they may also risk legal entanglements that further threaten stigmatization.) Many common instances demand deliberate action to move us away from stigma, either because an actor has been contaminated by contact or threatens to contaminate others.

Finally, embarrassment comes from “the perception of a fumbled or botched performance,” whether or not proportional to the actual hiccup of the interaction flow (Silver, Sabini, and Parrott 1987:48). Embarrassment signals unfavorable qualities like “weakness, inferiority, low-status, moral guilt, defeat” (Goffman 1967:102). The desire to avoid these demoralizing sentiments pushes us to constantly maintain our expressive capacity—both physical and verbal. Others, including the audience, are likewise often motivated to show tact lest they themselves are shamed for humiliating the embarrassed individual. Interaction orders are thus governed by ceremonial rules designed to allow us to maintain each other’s worthiness, reputation, and esteem—in other words, to preserve our selves.

In short, the self we propose is not only moral but also affectually embodied, which returns to Rawls’s (1989) point that being committed to the interaction order, even at its most mundane, is a moral and affectual act. Pure habitual action, in the truest sense of the word, invites transgression and contamination because it would leave us running on autopilot, aloof, and overly reliant on muscle memory when so much of everyday life is governed by ceremonial rules. Our performance, however, generates the collective effervescence necessary to ward off such profanation and generate sacredness. This close relationship between a threatened social order and negative affect suggests the fundamentally moral nature of the self. This shared morality lies at the core of human nature.

The theory sketched here presents an interaction order morally underpinned by our deep affectual attachment to the ceremonial rules that determine how we evaluate self and other, feelings and practices (Goffman 1967:45). These rules are crystallized in the sacralized self and other external representations of the interaction order. Profaning the self compromises a person’s ability to demand and receive trust and respect and, therefore, to feel positive affect and a sense of sacredness. Instead, the individual becomes a threat to others and the situation, motivating others to protect themselves (Douglas [1966] 2002). They are a social contaminant, and, in another penetrating Goffmanian phrase, they are “mortified,” implying social death.

Potential Contributions of an Affectually Motivated Self

Monitoring and Managing Reputation

This alternative take on self clearly specifies what we should be looking for when we study a morally and affectually grounded self: emotions and reputational processes. Given microsociology’s established interest in studying emotions, the theory sketched previously should feel natural. Our self, then, suggests some important advances.

Goffman sensitizes us to the near-continuous pressure to enhance, monitor, and manage our reputations. Evolutionary sciences teach us that certain affective systems motivate us to do the work to get better at activities and skills that meet others’ expectations and get us closer to the objects we desire (Tracy 2016). The system that continuously drives mammals to seek out desired objects (Panksepp 1998) fuels our search for positive moral emotions such as pride. There is always the possibility of hubristic pride, but the point stands: We are always actively monitoring and managing our own and others’ reputations (Boehm 2012). This proactive desirous self pushes back against the usual suspects in sociology by reminding us that even in situations where selfing appears automatic or unconscious, deliberate management is often front-loaded in “rehearsal,” and the careful selection of our expressive kits and the arrangement of space come to the fore when we reflect on events and how they unfolded. How often do people wish they had acted differently in a situation and swear to themselves that if the opportunity presented itself again, they would? We may not always be aware of it, but all our actions are cultivated. For instance, we may not be deliberate about our clothing on a given day because we have carefully curated our wardrobe to ensure reputation taking with ease. Likewise, for a highly trained academic, delivering a talk at a conference may, in the moment, feel like second nature, but it is usually the product of deliberate work.

In line with recent calls to return to taking socialization seriously, an affectually motivated self raises a series of interesting empirical questions about the morality of children and how they are taught to recognize, categorize, and label affectual signals related to reputation. Indeed, the study of morality represents a major gap in the sociology of youth (Abrutyn and Goldman-Hasbun 2023), despite a significant body of research on what is innate and learned in developmental and cognitive sciences (Tomasello and Vaish 2013). Unsurprisingly, our parents and other role models spend inordinate amounts of conscious and unconscious time teaching us the ceremonial rules and actions of a person deserving of respect, yet we know little about how and when this happens beyond the cultivation of class-based educational strategies (Calarco 2018; Lareau 2003). Bringing a gift to a dinner party, giving a loved one a card on a special day, listening to a friend’s heart-wrenching story, bringing food to a person who has lost a loved one; these are reputational claims that have nothing to do with interestedness, economic gain, or other instrumental outcomes. Just as waiting one’s turn is reputational, using a space appropriately, showing proper deference—even to our equals—and using the right forms of talk are deliberate, morally saturated actions. We are uniquely attuned, through affectual signals and culturally constructed emotional labels, to feel our place (Clark 1990): We feel pride when we perform the way we should, upholding the honor and dignity required of a person from our group, class, or station. Equally, we know when we are out of place. Falling short of situational standards provokes shame. Falling short of the demands and obligations of a person from our group, class, or station creates dishonor and stigma, and our failures to present our best selves create intense embarrassment.

With its close attention to the interplay between unconscious and conscious perception and regulation, this alternative vision of social self joins a growing chorus of sociologists of emotion advocating for supplementing standard self-reports (Summers-Effler, Van Ness, and Hausmann 2015). A great deal of research shows that preconscious or unconscious affectual responses are more easily discerned in language (Scheff 1990) and body language (Witkower and Tracy 2018). This requires training ethnographers to look for affect and emotion as much as to ask naively about what a person feels or felt (see Zhang 2023). Other instruments, like the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (Montag, Elhai, and Davis 2021), may add nuance to the experimental and quantitative study of various social-psychological processes tied to self, including affect and trust (or identity verification). Finally, we suggest looking closer at reputation making and taking and their affectual counterparts.

The affectually motivated self’s main sources of pride or shame are illuminated by Goffman’s focus on dispossession; that is, the things we take for granted are purposively stripped during the admissions process into total institutions for the express goal of disculturation and, subsequently, remolding the individual into an institutionalized self. First, total institutions strip us of property, most painfully the “identity kits” that are extensions of the self into physical and social space (Goffman 1961a:16). Without control over our property, barriers to affirming our sacred self and experiencing pride or honor are severely curtailed. Second, total institutions dispossess us of control over poise and the production of our bodily idiom, coercing us into “certain movements, postures, and stances [that] convey lowly images of the individual [otherwise] avoided as demeaning” (Goffman 1961a:21). Such recurring, ritualized poise dispossession is not simply embarrassment but, rather, a source of ritual humiliation—for example, think about the ritualized debasement bullied kids experience on a playground.

Third, actors exert effort to control what Goffman (1971:28–61) calls territories of self, or the “preserves” of private spaces. Territories of self include managing interpersonal autonomy or the control of social objects as extensions of self. Informational preserves also protect (potentially) discreditable facts from being discovered, like a child psychologist having trouble with their own child or an editor being constantly chided for grammatical mistakes in their own work. According to Goffman, territorial preserves are the principal defense against being contaminated or being a contaminant. Our living room may be meticulously cultivated while our in-suite bathroom may be haphazard and messy. By not exposing our guests to discrediting information or substances, we protect our own reputational claims as well as those of our guests, who risk being discredited by association.

We noted earlier that people actively avoid guilt by association, but there are other culturally constructed sources of contamination. In the most extreme cases, certain classes or castes are not to be approached or touched. This may be an intense prohibition or simply a cultural preference rooted in a stigma claim, status beliefs, or general ignorance. For instance, whereas the Hindu caste system ritually prohibits contact, a white supremacist forced to share a prison cell with a Black inmate need not adhere to a rigid religious prohibition against contact to risk pollution. By cultivating appropriate relationships, we signal our membership in specific groups, our social acumen, and thus what “type of person” we are.

Dynamics of Attachment and Embracement

A second set of potential advances that help us think about how to operationalize self in meaningful and empirically useful ways stems from the affectually motivated self’s emphasis on the wide range of ways people make and take their reputation. Understanding the making and taking of reputation requires a set of theoretical considerations: How much commitment does the structure demand, how much are we affectually and cognitively attached to an identity or role, and—something unique to our theory of self—how much does our real self merge with and embrace our virtual self? By putting reputation at the center of motivation, we can incorporate recent evolutionary science that suggests an interplay between internalization and free will. Yes, we internalize rules and become affectually attached, and sometimes we unconsciously conform, but most of the time,

Internalization doesn’t mean that our best citizens become so deeply involved with society’s rules that they follow them automatically without thinking about alternatives . . . what internalized moral values and rules do is slow us down sufficiently that we are able, to a considerable intent, to pick and choose which behaviors we care to exhibit before our peers. (Boehm 2012:30)

Put differently, an affectually driven self is empirically closer to current explanations of altruism and social solidarity, helping us understand collective solutions to the free-rider problem. This idea of self threads the needle between oversocialized and undersocialized alternatives in the discipline (Granovetter 1985; Wrong 1962).

The mismatches between situational/structural demands, our own feelings about the self, and our own immersion or engrossment in performances introduce a wide range of possibilities and empirical puzzles. Adding a second layer of dynamism is the fact that our theory of self compels us to revisit Hughes’s (1958) advocation for “a perspective of incongruity” because many of these mismatches are most observable in surprising, often ignored places—like Goffman’s conman. Ultimately, the self hinges on degrees of distance: on the one hand, between one’s self and the virtual self or role one is expected to play and, on the other hand, between one’s attachment to the role and one’s expected commitment to institutional rules. Fascinating tensions arise in and between both cases, producing three theoretically rich and empirically salient questions: How do persons manage impressions when they are not strongly attached to a role? What happens when a person embraces a role but is not attached? And what happens when there are mismatches between attachment and commitment?

Attachment increases, situationally, as the actor “become[s] affectively and cognitively enamored, desiring and expecting to see himself in terms of the enactment of the role and the self-identification emerging from this enactment” (Goffman 1961b:89). Attachment to a role, in other words, is about one’s feelings toward it: Disdain toward the role generates less attachment (or greater role distance), and affection generates more attachment (or greater role-person merger; Turner 1978). Attachment is not only social psychological but also embodied. Pride, shame, honor, and stigma signal the stakes of different distances:

[As] we get close to the moment-to-moment conduct of the individual we find that [actors cannot] remain passive [but must] actively participate in sustaining a definition of the situation that is stable and consistent with [their own] image. . . . [They must] keep command of [themselves] both as a person capable of executing physical movements and as one capable of receiving and transmitting communications. (Goffman 1961b:104–105)

Those who express excessive distance are treated as cynical, and perhaps even dangerous, because they continuously call into question the moral nature of social order. Notably, expressions of role distance do not always correspond to one’s actual attachment but are used for managing impressions of selves. In asymmetrical relationships, expressions of role distance preserve esteem and dignity in two ways. When, for example, a high-status actor, such as a senior professor, points out a subordinate’s mistake in a joking manner, this role distance works as a strategy to elicit dignity and high performance from subordinates despite one’s secure attachment to the role. For the low-status person, such as an intern, displays of role distance are a means of preserving pride and dignity, this time avoiding the contamination of inferiority imputed by a subordinate role (Goffman 1961b:122–30).

If attachment closes the distance between self and role, embracement occurs when the self disappears: “To embrace a role is to disappear completely into the virtual self available in the situation, to be fully seen in terms of the image, and to confirm expressively one’s acceptance of it” (Goffman 1961b:106). Embracement and attachment may overlap. For example, a professor may feel such strong love for their role that any sense of non-professor-ness disappears in their performance. In fact, embracement builds on attachment: In addition to “admitted or expressed attachment,” one needs the capacity to perform the role (Goffman 1961b:106). No matter how strong one’s attachment, one cannot embrace the role of a fiction writer if one is illiterate. Whereas attachment is psychological and embodied, embracement by definition is physical and expressive, requiring “a visible investment of attention and muscular effort” (Goffman 1961b:106).

Attachment and embracement may also be in contradiction. In particular, the work to remain attached and embraced for the sake of reputation making implies the potential for false embracement. Because attachment can be feigned or authentic, performing embracement becomes a viable tool for individuals to make their reputation desirable for the role regardless of their feelings toward the role. Indeed, performative embracement makes it challenging to discern whether an individual cathects their role or not (Goffman 1961a:176, 1961b:107). In turn, when other performers or audience members show acceptance of the implied self, one can make reputational claims that establish false place or receive undeservedly enhanced reputation. To conceal one’s attachment to a prestigious executive position right out of college (e.g., implying entitlement and laziness), the heir to a family firm can vehemently withdraw embracement by rejecting the offer.

In “On Cooling the Mark out,” Goffman (1952) lays out the complexity of this chicanery. Indeed, to gain the confidence of the mark, the actor must come off as credible and authentic, which means displaying signs of embracement. Little research, to our knowledge, has examined how distant a con artist is from their role performance, yet the con artist is not as rare as we might suspect. Some roles (like undercover police) demand false embracement, as do many service-based jobs where one must pretend to be something they are not, and other situations raise complex questions of embracement (e.g., a graduate student deeply invested in an ethnographic study yet trying to resist “going native”). In any case, two roles are under consideration. One could view the con artist as playing at a role for the mark and playing the role of a con artist, similar to an actor playing at a role of a doctor and playing the role of an actor. The con artist’s embracement of being a con artist relies on the success of their very false embracement of the played-at role; the lines between the two roles and their bonds to them may get fuzzy for the con artists themselves.

Actors sometimes go beyond attachment to a role and merge with the self in true embracement of the played-at role (Turner 1978). The tension between false embracement and attachment in these cases, we argue, is a temporal tension. In the moment, the con artist becomes deeply attached to the encounter, and their perfectly played role sustains the sacred nature of the situation. When the encounter ends, though, and they return to their lair, the performance is bracketed into a different category of reality. This sort of temporal differentiation is also found in less criminal or deviant activities: Some corporate positions are predicated on managing employees and firing them, professors must manage the mentor–mentee relationship as it shifts from parent–child or colleague–colleague forms to moments with greater critical distance, and parents often go to great lengths to hide the backstage from children. Thus, the line between cynic, con artist, sociopath, and truly embraced performer is blurrier than meets the eye, especially when we consider the temporal boundaries of the situation, once again pointing to the deliberate nature of a moral, embodied self.

These fascinating dynamics require consideration of the situational forces that further complicate the notion of a habitual or automatic self, namely, the variability of commitment. In most cases, our willingness or motivation to meet situational demands is neither guaranteed nor complete. Commitment is one of those sociological concepts that are central but highly contested in conceptual and operational definition (Becker 1960; Stryker 1980). For Goffman (1961b:88), individuals become committed to something when the “fixed and interdependent character of many institutional arrangements” lock them into particular courses of action, promises, and sacrifices: “Built right into the social arrangements of [a collective entity] is a thoroughly embracing conception of the member—and it is not merely a conception of him qua member, but behind this a conception of him qua human being” (Goffman 1961a:180, emphasis added).

However, commitment varies. First, institutions or groups vary in how much undivided loyalty they demand (Coser 1974). Some may expect high levels of attachment, and others may tolerate high commitment with moderate to low attachment. The military or a family may demand embracement from a soldier or traditional housewife (Coser 1974; Goffman 1961a:173), and individuals may comply by feigning attachment. In other settings, like a corporate office, it may be appropriate that employees simply fulfill their formal duties efficaciously and punctually. Second, commitment may be primarily incentive-based and cognitive, or more cohesive and affectual, or coercive (Goffman 1961a:177–79; see also Kanter 1968). These different bases of commitment create varied capacity to induce certain modes of attachment and, indeed, set up potential conflict with certain types of attachment or embracement.

An interesting tension occurs when ceremonial rules are contested with regard to the demands of a social order. As noted earlier, fulfilling an entity’s demands, regardless of one’s private thoughts, does not just “grant . . . legitimacy of the other’s line of action”; it also underwrites “the legitimacy of his conception of oneself” (Goffman 1961a:181). To cooperate, in other words, is to tacitly accept the implied conceptions of self. The stakes are high. In an extreme example, how does order work when a homeless population becomes so unmanageable that trains become bathrooms, bedrooms, or flop houses? The contamination of space and person remains very real for many people, but the tension between what an entity can or should demand of its members can change and, in “unsettled” times, foster discrepancies over shared meaning. Put differently, entities can either contribute to managing contamination or facilitate danger and risk. We need not search long and hard for more mundane examples. Disputes in the academy over its nature or mission create these same sorts of tensions, and where certain factions emerge and boundaries harden, fears of pollution—although rarely expressed in these terms—may become key to interpersonal dynamics. People and groups become characterized as potentially contaminative of the purity of the entity, in this case, academia, with each side stereotyped into a caricature.

In short, this tension between self and situation is what makes a theory of an affectually motivated self so powerful. An already affectively motivated and morally grounded person faced with situational obligatory pressures develops a dynamic self that rarely acts out of either mere habit or strategic self-interest. We recognize it is possible to enhance one’s place purposively, sometimes for instrumental, economic gain, but often as part of the social game itself, whose rules may be formalized but often hinge on just obeying the dynamics of small groups (see e.g., Anderson 1999; Whyte 1969). Clark (1990) highlights several such strategies, such as using negative emotions to knock people down a peg (and in so doing, make oneself look better) or overassessing a person’s reputation to raise one’s own standing. Enhancement comes with risks but remains core to our theory of self.

Two points are worth noting here. Whereas reputation taking is common, reputation making is a strategic aspect that is more common in some sorts of interaction orders than others. In Whyte’s (1969) observations of a street corner gang, reputation taking was the expected mode of ceremonial rule following. Reputation making, in contrast, was reserved for bowling competitions, where the struggle was channeled into a ritualized event. In other settings, like a competitive graduate program, students may jockey for place in classrooms, graduate lounges, private interactions with professors, and so forth. Reputation making, in both cases, remains contingent on the ceremonial rules. Second, although reputation making may sound instrumental and interested, as noted previously, it is usually not strategic in the traditional sense of economic action. If the goal is reputation, esteem, pride, honor, and dignity, then we have already shown this is noneconomic, substantively driven action. Of course, purely self-interested actors, sociopaths, con artists, and other scheming individuals indeed use subterfuge to hide their motives and disguise their interest, but what makes these cases so interesting to Goffman is that they are rare and excessive.

Consequently, the theory offers important correctives for how we think of the self, its genesis, and its operation in a variety of settings. These contributions extend, for instance, to microsociologies indebted to both SI and Goffmanian sociology, like Collins’s (2004) interaction ritual chains (IRC) approach or Fine’s (2010) small-groups studies. On the one hand, a self is attached to the interaction, but on the other hand, like the conventional Goffmanian self, this self is not where the action really is. The self we are proposing here pushes both perspectives to go further. For IRC, emotions are resources to be sought after rationally, acquired, hoarded, and used. To be sure, people feel good when they are mutually aroused and certainly when they get the emotional energy payoff at the end of a successful ritual. Yet a more moral and deliberate self may smooth some of the edges of IRC’s rational actor, allowing emotions to continue to be resources but affect to be a motivating force in ways that may have little to do with getting more emotional energy. This argument grafts on neatly to Summers-Effler’s (2004) work on defensive strategies as deliberate attempts to protect against absorbing others’ negative emotions and preserving what little emotional reserves people have. For Fine (2019), affect seems far in the background despite the reflexive notion of affective attachment cultivated between researcher and the people in their fieldsite. Given the strong link between affect and self, we believe our version of self offers tantalizing research directions related to Fine’s theory of cultural change—shocks likely trigger intense affective responses, and new cultural solutions are likely felt as prideful, honorable, and dignified, maintaining idioculture and boundaries. Furthermore, the logic of deference and asymmetrical relationships and the possibility of strategic, deliberate attachment and embracement offer a unique corrective to the tendency to emphasize cooperation and harmony and less so conflict, contestation, and subterfuge.

Final Thoughts

The problem of self has long been considered a hallmark of American sociology, and yet we argue that symbolic interactionism and its cousins are decidedly less interested in the self than in other social units like situations, interactions, and groups. Mead’s self, overly cognitive, discursive, and (re)active only in the face of dilemmas or discomforts, cannot explain most action or desire; that is, it is an unmotivated self. Alternatives, like practice theory or dual-process models, also tend to take the self for granted, offering equally oversocialized theories of motivation as our class dispositions or deeply internalized schema that do the “thinking” for us. Arguably, the time is ripe for a fresh take on the social self. We sketched out the outlines of just such a theory by excavating the affectual and moral dimensions of self Goffman took for granted across many of his works.

To that end, we made the following claims. First, Goffman’s works offer clues to another conception of the self that defies the conventional sociological take on Goffman’s theory of self and offers an alternative to the common microsociological theories of self. The alternative centers an affectually motivated self whose actions are moral to the extent they care about their reputation and others’, which, in turn, crystallizes in a set of ceremonial rules that become as important to their sense of self as the people who impart those rules through interactions. As we showed, an affectually motivated self makes the best sense of extreme situations that other theories do not deal well with (e.g., solitary confinement) and handles strategic, deliberate, and habitual forms of action through attention to key dimensions like commitment, attachment, and what Goffman called embracement.

Second, our alternative self is shaped by and complicit in shaping ceremonial rules that organize how we conduct, express, and do self. To be sure, we internalize through enculturation many of the requisite bits of knowledge for navigating ceremonial rules. Good parenting includes drilling “please” and “thank you” into children’s heads until it is automatic. Yet Goffman’s corporeal vision of self means we are not simply confronted by metaphorical “looking glasses” but, rather, by real mirrors that motivate us to care for and carefully cultivate the self. Moreover, we are motivated to rehearse our lines and actions, not because it gets us celebrity but because this ensures the self, the other’s self, and the situation remain sacred—that is, morally infused and affectually saturated. Third, the affectually motivated self is embodied in self-conscious, moral emotions that indicate one’s “place” in the situation through the respect, reputation, and esteem of others. These moral emotions equally indicate the success of the performance—something we will flesh out in greater detail shortly. Fourth, consequently, the efforts of the self, whether unconscious and habitual or deliberate and strategic, are rarely instrumental but are moral. It is pride, honor, and dignity that motivate us to rehearse often, deliberately stage spaces, manage the impressions we produce, and continuously check the impressions given by others. Fifth, we therefore work to avoid contaminating ourselves, others, and the situation and to avoid being contaminated by others or elements of the situation. Consequently, our more immediate drive to receive embodied pleasures of positive reputational rewards (and to avoid negative emotions) is always embedded in the complex social project to become or remain “that type of person.”

In short, our theory relies heavily on a set of specific moral emotions driving us, regardless of whether we are surface or deep acting. This causal relationship more closely approaches what we know about the link between environmental stimuli, affect, cognition, and behavior (Frijda 2007). It also suggests we take more seriously the role affect plays in memory and learning. An affectually motivated self thus complements cultural sociology’s move to incorporate the cognitive science surrounding socialization and enculturation (Lizardo 2017; Vaisey 2009). In addition, when we scale down to the encounter and the sequencing of action, this self shows us deliberate action—that is, intentioned, guided, controlled responses (Miller Tate 2021). Incongruence and discomfort still represent important motivating forces, but Goffman sees people as positively affectually attached to their self, others, and the encounter, motivated by the pleasures of fulfilling obligations, taking reputation, and marking place. People want to feel pride and honor (Clark 1990; Hochschild 1983), and these positive moral emotions reinforce the interaction order’s ceremonial rules. This perspective aligns neatly with current science on motivation and reward (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016) and resonates with many traditions in sociology usually precluded from theories of self (e.g., Weber 1946).

In the end, although we are confident this theory of self agrees with Goffman’s own take and that it is a useful alternative to the other theories of self sociology offers, it is by no means a complete theory. Notably missing from Goffman’s sociology is a more extended examination of reputation making and taking in encounters shaped by distant but no less impactful stratification systems. Too often, Goffman drew his most important conclusions from inhabiting, navigating, and observing the polite White middle-class world of the 1950s and 1960s. Those halcyon days are long since passed, if they were ever real in the first place. Our theory here is a starting point for empirically advancing—and modifying where necessary—Goffman’s insights on shame, stigma, and embarrassment. What happens when roles or encounters are contested? What happens when moral certitude disappears and people feel more autonomy from ceremonial rules they deem oppressive? Today, ceremonial rules are so contested that profanation is the more common mode of encounter than sacralization (Abrutyn 2022). This last point stretches us beyond the aims of the current article, but it is worth considering in future work. Indeed, explorations of these questions and many more will be necessary to build our revised theory of self into a robust explanatory frame fit for twenty-first-century realities.