June 5, 2025 • 54 mins
We all in some way care about what other people think of us. At our core we all have a fear of saying something dumb or embarrassing ourselves somehow. One sociological theory says that our effort to prevent those embarrassments is the basis of society.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and we're putting on our best
faces in this episode of Stuff you.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Should Know right our front stage self.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, and speaking of stage check, I have a great
intro to this. I believe it was Rush who first
said all the world's is stage, and the men and
women on it are merely players or something like that.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, performers and portrayers. Yeah, each another's audience.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Is that what he says? I never knew, and I've
never bothered to look up the lyrics because there's definitely
some words in there. I'm like, I don't know what
Geddy Leek just said.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It's a great, great song, Limelight, very well written, what
very original stuff. Yeah, so we're talking about impression management today, right, Yes, sir,
And what do you think about it?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well? I think that I just the more I've done
this show over the years, the more I realized that
I could have been a sociologist. Oh yeah, yeah, man,
this stuff fascinates me to no end. I took one
sociology class in college, and that's it. And I remember
at the time, you know, when very little outside of
English major classes interested me. I was like, man, this
(01:27):
is super interesting to me, but not enough to pursue it.
But human behaviors is endlessly fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. And one of the things, sociology gets beat up
and edged out and elbowed in the face by psychology
a lot unfairly, I think too.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, I'm not talking about social psychology, no, be clear, sociology.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah. And if sociology started out, we should say basically
examining massive institutions. It was macro sociology religion, like economics, politics,
that kind of stuff, and just how people behaved and
interacted or how people came together to form these institutions.
(02:12):
And then the guy we're going to talk about today
came along and he's like, let's kind of zoom in
a little more. And like you were saying, he kicked
off this this type of sociology that examines like people,
just interactions, very small interactions that sometimes we don't even
know what we're doing. And apparently you're very interested in that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I am, And you know what, it seems like the
more I've learned about Irving Goffman through today's research, and
you know, researching him a little further. Like he's a
Canadian American sociologist, and this is like the mid twentieth century,
nineteen fifties ish when he started doing a lot of
this work. He seems to me like someone who was
just fascinated by human behavior, even more even in a
(02:55):
way that like other sociologists weren't, especially at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, for sure, he yeah, And he also I read
that he developed like a real sympathy for the people
who were pushed to the fringes of society unfairly, basically
across the board. So he was not only like a
really good sociologist and very intuitive, and apparently had a
really interesting writing style too. He loves a good like
(03:20):
turn of phrase. He was also like a very empathetic,
good person. That's what I can tell.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Oh, man, I'm so glad I didn't hook my wagon do.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
The wrong dude, right, But no, you hooked his to
the right guy.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
And when it's somebody from the nineteen fifties, you never
know what's going to happen there. We should probably say
we're talking about though, impression management or self presentation or
perception management is basically these are terms that he all
came up. He came up with all of these essentially,
and it's it's just how you present to others. And
you know, we'll get into the nuts and bolts of it.
(03:54):
But how much you might think about that, how much
is automatic, how much is intuition, how much of it
is authenticity. It's super fascinating to me. I just I
love this stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, and a lot of it. I mean, when we
start talking about it too, it'll just seem very common sense, like, yeah,
of course you're going to you know, mind your p's
and cues and sit up straight and be friendly in
a job interview. And that is a type of impression management.
But it is way more granular than that, to the
point where like, if you're into language linguistics that kind
(04:28):
of thing, the entire purpose of a conversation is to
exchange information like I know this now I'm sharing it
with you. The other person says, thank you very much,
And that's what a conversations for as far as impression
management goes. And Irvin Goffman and his Milk conversations are
essentially performances that two people share and do for one another.
(04:50):
That helps create a version of ourselves that we kind
of walk around with, and that that changes. And there's
very little point to a conversation other than that it's
a radically different view of things.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, I also think it's interesting, and this is you know,
this is all just precursor stuff that we're babbling on about.
But when you said it just seems like instinct or whatever,
would you say, common sense to do these things? Not everybody,
my friend, And that is something that I've gotten better
about over the years. It used to be something that
(05:28):
really bothered me, and I would you know, leave an
interaction with somebody or something and with Emily and be
like god, like just social cluelessness is such a turn
off for me, like read the room, buddy, that kind
of thing. But then the more I've gotten older and
the more we've all learned about different neurodiversities, I've definitely
found myself in a place where i'd try to be like, hey,
(05:51):
I don't know what this person's deal is, Like they
may be struggling just to present themselves as you know,
passing or masking, and you know, we're going to talk
about all this stuff in a situation just to sort
of get by. So I try to really keep that
stuff in mind these days.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
For sure. And I feel like there's different tranches. Yeah,
there's the one you just describe. There's people who this
is so effortless too, they don't even have to think
about it, and they're just great basically across the board.
Then there's everybody else in the middle. Some people in
the middle are better at it than others. Some people
think too hard about it and they become obvious and
clumsy and essentially though no one can escape it, I
(06:29):
think is my point. There's nobody out there who doesn't
engage in some sort of impression management essentially their entire lives.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah, and neurodiversity society again, which we'll talk about. There
are also people who aren't neurodiversity who were just glueless
a holes. And I have found too in my life
that I believe narcissism plays a part. I think narcissists
have a much harder time because they're generally just have
their heads up, their own buttson or so about the
(06:58):
self that they are off. And the ones that I found,
if they don't have some sort of you know, nerdivergence.
That's the reason why they are like they are, maybe
because of narcissism, because you know, usually the reply after
someone is like read the room, buddy, they're like, what.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
What, I'm perfect, what do you mean read the room?
You read the room exactly. So let's get into it
and we'll start with Goffman and where he got his
start again, this is Irving Goffman, groundbreaking sociologist. He started
off doing field work in a Scottish village and rather
than figuring out how the city council worked for that
(07:35):
or the village elders basically kept everybody in line, he
just ameshed himself in the village and just paid attention
to how people interacted with one another. And really like,
that's a very anthropological way of studying. Is very not
how they did it at the time among sociologists. So
(07:55):
here's groundbreaking. He essentially went like, I'm going to take
this field and just put it, take it in a
different direction. So let's go.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, for sure. He wrote a book in nineteen fifty
six called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. What
a great title, No Colon's it's exactly what it says.
It is a very big book in the world of sociology,
and the International Sociological Association named it as a tenth
most important sociology book of the twentieth century. And in
this book is where he touched on what you talked
(08:26):
about with this sort of performance aspect of our everyday
lives with He didn't invent it, you know, it was
an existing concept, but dramaturgical theory, which is what you said,
like we're all sort of operating on a social script,
sort of like the terminator, Like it's pretty limited. You
don't have endless options, like maybe you should say one
(08:46):
of these four things at this dinner party when someone
brings up a thing. And even if it's a brand
news situation, you're drawing on the scripts that you've used
over and over in your life to work out how
to inner act in the scene.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Right. Yeah, And it's also, yeah, it's been shaped by
interactions with other people. It's shaped by what you've seen
on TV, which can be very dangerous because stuff that's
like hilarious on a sitcom does not necessarily translate well
into real life. It's like you're being a huge jerk
or you're not really that funny. You know, in the
case of somebody who models themselves after friends.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, like, pull my finger doesn't always break the ice.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, pull my finger always works. Okay, great, but yeah,
so what his point was in the dramaturgical theory, And
like you said, he didn't invent it, but if you
if you look into it, he's basically like he's the
guy who took it and ran with it. Yeah, no
matter where you are, you're performing, and depending on where
you are you're going, your performance is going to be different. Right,
(09:50):
So if you're sitting there at school, you're gonna act
different than you do at a bar.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, right, sure, ideally, yeah, you wo hope for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
And then if you're at work, you know you're going
to act a little different from that too. And it's
essentially even when you're hanging out with your closest friends,
sociologists believe that you're still performing in some way, shape
or form, just probably less than you normally do.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, and some think even when you're by yourself that
that still informs how you talk to your little person
on your shoulder, right, which is really interesting. He talked
about appearance and like clothing even and how they will convey.
And when we say actor, we're just talking about a person,
but in his context of it all being a performance,
(10:39):
he'd called them actors. But you know, your your costume
that you put on is going to convey like maybe
your social status, maybe what kind of job you have.
There's you know, there's that outward appearance, and then there's
the manner in which you deal with someone. And obeying
the sort of societal rules in a social situation is
(11:00):
a big time thing. And if you start to do
things that don't comply with what people generally expect in
you know, at a dinner party or on an elevator
or something like that, it can upset people around you.
I think the interesting thing that I took from that is,
I mean, that's kind of common sense, but when you're writing,
like a screenplay or something like dramatic writing or a play,
(11:23):
the most interesting characters are usually people that do things
that surprise you, or that fly in the face of
maybe a social norm, or make a decision that's unexpected.
So I think it's interesting that in drama it makes
for very compelling characters, but in real life we kind
of don't want that generally.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, like the Manic Pixie dream Girl.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, I don't know what you mean by that. I mean,
I know what that term means, but I don't know
how it relates to this.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Oh they're always doing like crazy stuff that like makes
the protagon or fall in love with them or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotcha. So in terms of a script,
that might be engaging even within the world of the script,
whereas in real life, I don't know, a man at
Pixie dream Girl might go over, but the person saying
pull my finger the dinner party may not.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, it's funny that you say drama too, because to me,
where in my mind was comedy, Like almost all comedy
is a person behaving in a way that is violates
the situation that they're in, violates the scene and the
script that they're supposed to be saying. That's all from
Adam Sandler to late Adam Sandler, right, it's all basically that.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I mean, that's the basis of joke telling. Really
is the unexpected thing happens super interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And then one other thing too. He made a really
good point. He said that the characters or the people
who are interacting and again just essentially performing that they're
trying to come to a common definition of the situation
is what he called it.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, that expected norm.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, and so like if you see, say, a scene
on TV, it's just such a perfect analogy because that's
essentially what he's talking about. And there's just one dude
standing at a bus stop and it's a businessman. Say
that scene is in a superposition. It hasn't been defined
yet because there's only one person, and by the entrance
(13:16):
of the next person, that's when the scene will start
to be defined. If it's that guy's boss, he's gonna
act totally different than if it's a pickpocket or something
like that. So the scene hasn't been defined yet. But
regardless of how it ends up, like what scene it is,
both are playing their role essentially that we just innately
know almost not innately because it's learned, but it becomes
(13:40):
just second nature for most people.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, for sure. He also thought that, you know, there's
obviously verbal and nonverbal parts to this, with body language
and how you dress and all that stuff. But Goffman
himself thought that the non verbal part did I say
non purple?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
If you did? It was lost on me. But I
like non purple more Okay.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I think I might have said non purple anyway, which
is basically every other color but purple. Yeah. He thought
the non verbal part was the most significant because it's
harder to fake, which I think is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And that also, like, while you're performing quote unquote again,
do we need to keep saying that, like people know
what you mean?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Right, Yeah, I mean we could just say interacting with
another person.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, while you're interacting as the actor, right, you may
be aware that you have like a goal in mind,
like I got a you know, I met this thing,
I got a present really well, or you may not.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, you may not have a goal. It may be,
as we'll see, you're just trying to keep from freaking
the other person out, you know, like you're not trying
to get anywhere. You're not trying to advance or get
something from the person or make somebody think that you're great,
but just being engaged, forced into a social interaction like
(14:59):
that you have to perform a certain way or else
the other person is going to be weirded out, is
going to want to get away from you. Sometimes people
get really upset when somebody violates norms. And I think
you can, really you can. This explains it a lot,
because it's like someone is expecting somebody to behave in
(15:21):
a certain way. That person purposefully doesn't behave in that way.
Then the people around them might get angry at that person,
even though they might just be being themselves.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, or get scared. Like you know, when you get
on an elevator by yourself and there's only one person
on there, you act in a certain way as an
almost way to say you're safe right now. You don't
need to worry about me. I'm just going to my room.
I'm not gonna I'm not that guy that's going to
be some weirdo on the elevator. I promise you're okay.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yeah, or even like try to strike up a conversation
like that that's unnerving and disarming.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean I think definitely not as much for
me as for some people. Because I was raised in
the South, I'm more used to that. And definitely also
in an enclosed space like an elevator, the norms are
much different than like walking down the street or something.
For sure, you know you're trapped basically in that little.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Box, right, Yeah, you have a captive audience.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
And now I'm panicking.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So, just to kind of wrap up the whole dramaturgical
theory part, Goffman said, we have our front stage selves,
which I think you referred to earlier.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Right, that's us right now, and that's what we do
on our job every day.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Okay, Yeah, but I feel like we're not that much
different in real life. No.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I think you're right. I mean, that's one of the
reasons this show works, I think, and why a lot
of podcasts work is because people are their more true selves.
But it's also sort of the best version of our
true selves, Like we're not the jerks that we can
be in real life.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, and that's a really great point that we'll see later. Like,
just because you're doing this doesn't mean you're a phony
or inauthentic. You're just drawing on the parts of yourself
that are already there that apply to the situation best
in presenting those.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, totally. And I said we I meant me you're
not a jerk. And so I'm just speaking for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Hey man, I'm always happy to be included with you.
I'm along for the ride.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, everybody compete like that here and there. That's all
I'm saying, right right, I know what you're saying. You
don't have to explain it to me, all right, I
was explaining to everyone else. Didn't think I was just
dragging you down with me.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
So you've got front stage selves. This is when you're
you're on stage, you're really out there. There's backstage when
you're hanging with your homies. Yeah, homeboys, homegirls, Yeah yeah,
and just general homies, maybe your family. If you get
along with your family, and you might feel comfortable and
calm around them, So that would be your backstage self.
(17:44):
But note this, he's not saying front stage self, and
then yourself, it's still a backstage self. You're still attached
to the stage. You're still in the theater. Yeah, even
when you're hanging out with your homies.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yeah, that's true. And then there's the off stage, and
that's when it's just one on one this is the best,
and that's still a kind of performance.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah. This example is just so it just nails it.
When you're a teacher and you see your student at
the grocery store, yeah, see him, ir L, that's like
that's just such a jarring thing to see as a kid.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Oh man, I think it's thrilling, it's exciting because they
don't exist outside of that role.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
No exactly. So now you see them and they're not
dressed like they normally are. Oh, they're friendly to your
mom or something like that. There, and then they're buying
olives too, and they look like they're really into the
figuring out which all ofs they want, right, So, yeah,
that's just for the kid. For the teacher, you still
have to comport yourself in a way that's like, you know,
I'm not going to just start cussing in front of
(18:49):
the student and just talk like I might normally talk.
I still have to pretend or act like I do
when I'm this kid's teacher. But that's still it's like
a it's it doesn't necessarily fit the grocery store stage,
so that teachers in a really weird position, right then, Yeah,
that would be off stage interactions.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
I love that. One time for a break, Yes, all.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Right, we're just getting cooking, everybody, So come back more
if you want to learn more about yourself, right for.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
This learning stuff from Josh Chimes stuff you shun all right.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
So one of the keys to Goffman's theory is how
important it is to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others.
He talked about face work like saving face or losing face,
not wanting to be embarrassed, but also he wrote about
just the your facial expressions, especially in intern of how
you disagree with somebody, even if you say the words
(20:04):
that you think are the right way to disagree with someone,
but your face as WTF like that conveys a confusing message.
So even the facial expressions you make have to be considered.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, it's that speech plus nonverbal that equals your performance, right, Yeah. Yeah,
It's funny to see people who are trying to say
something but their facial expression just something matchup.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah. I mean that's a problem I've had to work
on in my own marriage with not being the best communicator,
which you know, which is Emily being like, well, you're
saying one thing, but that's not what I'm getting.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
I'm right. Ah, yeah, No, I don't want to play
red dead redemption.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
That's always true the opposite, that is right.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So the other point of that, in addition to that
nonverbal use of face, you said, also you're trying to
help people save face, right, So I said earlier that
you might be forced into a social to act in
a social situation a certain way just because you don't
want to freak out your friend's mom who you saw
at the mall by acting bizarrely or you know, in
(21:06):
a different way than you should. Similarly, if your friend's
mom at the mall falls like slips and falls in
the middle of the mall and is embarrassed, you are
going to do something that your performance calls for you
to do something to help her save face as well.
That's part of face work.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Too, Yeah, for sure. And face work is another dramatic term.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Oh is it? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, I think face work and body work that's all
a drama thing.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
That makes sense. Is there a thing how to move.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Within your space? Yeah, private parts work, so to Goffman,
it's you know, it could be an obvious thing, like
if you're you know, on a first date or something
like that, or like you mentioned earlier job interview, like
that's the super obvious situation, but a lot a lot
of times it's you know, it's really everyday interactions still count.
(21:59):
H And there's a philosopher name Lucy McDonald who was
writing about like when somebody falls down in public, almost always,
the very first thing that will happen is that person
will look around to see if anyone saw them, and
based on that, it's going to change their reaction. And
it reminded me of that story up told before about
in college when I saw the guy bust bust his
(22:21):
butt on a bike in Athens and the books went
spilling all over the sidewalk, and this dude just opened
one of the books, laying on his side with his
bike will spinning, act like he was reading it. And
It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. And
then the other day, on my new bike, I tried
to do a wheel slide in a gravel parking lot
and I busted my butt and fell. I didn't go,
(22:44):
you know, ass over apple cart, but I hit the dirt.
And the first thing I did, as a fifty four
year old was look up and see if anybody saw me.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
You didn't jump up and say I meant to do that.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Well, if somebody had been had seen me, I would have,
but nobody saw me, so I just sat there and
was like, no one nuts.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Right, So if you do that, like say, if people
do see you, you might like look back, like closely
at the ground, like what did I strung over?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
What's wrong with this bike?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Or you might say like I hate Mondays or something
like that. And what you're doing is something you mentioned earlier.
You're reassuring people like I'm not a threat to you
or to the social order. That was just a total accident. Yeah,
And it might seem like that person is overly self
conscious or something like that, or they might be a
little neurotic. I feel like they have to do that, Yeah,
(23:32):
But the philosopher Lucy McDonald that you mentioned also points
out that that's actually not what's going on. That everybody
feels like they need to do that, and that it's
a rational response to the social expectations that we have
of one another. So it just kind of reveals this
social intelligence that most people have that is you don't
(23:56):
even know that you're doing in a lot of cases,
and that you feel even compelled to do internally. Like
when I do that, if I'm so embarrassed, I will
blurt something out like oops, or I hate Mondays, and
it feels like it's coming up from you know, my
guy yea, and then out of my mouth like it's
not something where I'm like, I better say something really quick,
(24:18):
just an involuntary reaction essentially, because it's so ingrained.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, because you're not a sociopath.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I like to think so.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, I like to think so too. It's funny thinking
about that guy in Athens it fell. He didn't even
look around because it wasn't like, oh did someone see me?
Because hundreds of people for sure saw him.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
It was like a crowded campus. So I felt bad
for the guy, but it was hysterical. And one day
I'm gonna meet that person, I think.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, I wonder what he's doing now.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Can you imagine if I was at a party one
day and somebody was telling that story, like one time
in college, I wrecked my bike, and after I was reading.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
A book, what would you do? Would you buy him something?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
I would hug him immediately and be like I saw that,
and I've been telling that story for forty years.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Forty No, not even thirty.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, thirty's about right. Yeah, and you would be like,
I'm not a hugger.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, then I've screwed up yet again. Uh.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So I said that when people fall in there, they're
saying like oops, or I hate mondays, they're looking at
the crack or they're going through their book whatever. They're
reassuring people that that they're actually normal. And the norm
in countries like the US, say in the West, is
(25:33):
what's called civil and attention to where you ideally you
acknowledge the presence the existence of another person so that
you're you're on a subway with and then yeah it
ends there. Right. Something that I find dismaying is I
see more and more that acknowledgment doesn't even happen. It's
(25:55):
just totally ignoring one another. And that, man, that gets me,
especially if you not at somebody else and they just
ignore you. I think that is awful.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah. I mean not to be old man here, but
cell phones and smartphones have definitely played a part in that,
I think because people escape into the comfort of like, well,
I'll just look at this instead.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, yeah, and they're just like, oh, what's on my phone?
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah. I mean, if you were raised in the South
or have lived in the South, then you're more comfortable
with more acknowledgment and maybe even a brief conversation with
a stranger. Sure, that can be very off putting for
people that aren't used to that. So I try to
remember that when I am going to maybe have had
a drink or two and I struck up a conversation.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
With someone I don't know on an elevator.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I've done that too. I did it last week in fact.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So speaking of elevators, Chuck, you've mentioned going into an
elevator and turning around, and what a violation of the
social order that is the elevator Is this perfect little
encapsulation for sociolists, no man to study, because we just
know what to do. When somebody gets on an elevator
(27:06):
and there's already people on there, everybody spreads out, rearranges
himself to make room for this person in their personal space.
And it's not like we're like, Okay, I'm going to
go over here. You go here, and then when somebody
the next person comes on, you get off, and then
this person's going to go where you were. It just happens,
and it's a beautiful synchronized effort, right.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But when sociologists get on elevators and they turn around,
there's apocryphal story about Irvin Goffman doing that and studying
and people just flipping out by it.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Now they don't turn around. They just go straight in
and stand there looking at the rear.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, yes, exactly, Yeah right, not well put So that's
actually not just what sociologists like to do. It was
like a big one on Candid Camera back in the
day for a while. Yeah, and there was one Candid
Camera episode where they did the opposite where the elevator
was already had a bunch of people on it, but
(28:04):
they were facing the rear when the door's opened and
the person who was being I guess pranked came on.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I wouldn't get on that elevator car.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
So this person they got on, and they kind of
looked like they didn't know what to do for a second,
and then they turned and they faced.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I knew it. Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah. It was almost like they thought that they hadn't
gotten the revised pages that day and everybody else did,
so they just needed to go along with it because
they didn't want to upset the apple cart. Things had changed.
This is not what they expected, but they weren't about
to be the one who just stuck to the original
Norman upset everybody else.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Wow did they yell out, can I have the new sides.
Please take someone to fly those in line. That's really
funny and that doesn't surprise me. And I bet the
live audience at Cannon Cambridge just got a big old hoo.
Do you laugh on that?
Speaker 2 (28:53):
One man?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
So there was a guy named Harold Garfinkel and others
socioists that would I mean, he called them breaching experiments,
but it's really messing with people. And he did things
like that like sit down on the escalator or just
like point at somebody. And I'm not a big fan
of those kind of experiments.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
No, but they're all over YouTube people doing that. I
bet it's pretty funny. But yeah, if you're ever in
a mall and somebody sits down on an escalator or whatever,
it's probably a sociologist. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
If not just politely go in any other direction.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Well no, that's why you carry a water gun around
with you. You just scored them in the house a
few times and say stand.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Up, super soaker.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So there's ways that we figure out how to perform because,
like I said, a lot of it just seems ingrained.
A lot of it requires thought too, especially if you're
trying if you have a goal, like you're trying to
become a member of a country club, which everybody's been
through that, yeah, Yeah. And these two researchers, they were
psychologists back in nineteen ninety nineteen ninety, Mark Leary and
(30:01):
Robin Kowalski. They basically figured out how we do this
kind of stuff, and they broke it into two things.
There was impression motivation, why you're doing this? An impression
construction how you're doing this?
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, And as far as motivation, it's based on a
few factors. One is how relevant a person thinks their
images to achieve this goal. So, in other words, does
it really matter here how I'm acting to get what
I want? How valuable the goal is, which is do
I this is something I really want? Am I trying
to get a job or just whatever? Something a little
less stakes? And then finally, the extent to which they
(30:36):
believe they're not currently being perceived in the most useful way.
In other words, how much do I need to pour
it on here to get what I want?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Like, how am I being perceived? And what do I
need to do to change that?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right? Exactly? So you put all those together and that's
your motivation for figuring out some impression management. Again, This
is the ones where you're like actually giving thought to it, right,
Impression construction, how you actually care this stuff out. They
broke into five little parts. One is your self concept, right,
(31:08):
So you're going to base how you carry this out
on how you feel you are. So you're trying you're
starting with your authentic self ideally, right, because people value authenticity.
People don't want to just keep up a lie. Again,
that's a half hour sitcom right there, because it always crumbles.
It always crumbles everybody in real life and on sitcoms.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
In twenty two minutes and then it gets resolved.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Right exactly. So your self concept is where you're going
to start, and you're going to kind of draw from that.
Imagine a big steamer trunk on stage that carrot tops
going through, just pulling a bunch of props out of.
That's what you're doing when you first start to figure
this out. That's going through the steamer trunk of your
(31:55):
self concept.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Wait a minute, are you saying right now we are
a carrot.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
The entire world is yeah, all the world to stage,
and we are merely carot carrot tops.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Then there's the desired identity. So you're trying to protect
an identity, and you base that on what like what
you what you want people to think you like and
don't like, or what you want to be or don't
want to.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Be, right, So you might really try to distance yourself
from something you don't want to identify with.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, like, oh boy, how about that John Legend that
was random and all that immense talent, Like, get over it, buddy.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
You want to be very careful with this. This is
one of those things that shows what a tightrope you
can be walking when you're purposefully constructing impression management. If
you're in that case yucking someone's yam, that can turn
people off and ruin all of the other stuff that
you just did. So it can backfire.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Someone opens up their jacket and they're wearing the John Legend.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Right, or you accidentally say it to John Legend because
you didn't recognize him.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, I don't know why I pulled him out. I
know nothing much about him other than La La land
in the fact that he's super talented.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah. No, he was perfect, I mean totally neutral. Everybody
loves him like it was just that was great, non
controversial in almost any way. Yeah, right, he's managed to
distance himself from his wife's public persona. So yeah, non controversial.
Who is she Chrissy Teagan?
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Oh? I know that name, but I don't know much
about her either.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That's fine, all right, moving on. Yeah, So the next
one is target value, and it's basically saying, like, you're
just going to take those things from your steamer trunk
of your authentic self and you're going to adorn yourself
with the ones that make the most sense for this
identity that you're trying to be viewed with.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, but based on what you think they want, right.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Yeah, But again, this is not where you're just like,
you know, stealing stuff from other people and making it
your own. You're going ideally, you're going into your own
authentic self and saying this one makes the most sense
to what this person's going to expect or want.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, exactly, Like aligning yourself with someone else's value is
ideally stopping short of, like, you know, doing something that's
not an authentic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
And there's one thing I think we should say at
this point, because it's really easy to just assume like
this is what everybody should be doing, and I think
it's worth questioning. It's not inherently a good thing to
change yourself or to rearrange yourself. It can be a
bad thing, but it can also be a good thing too.
So just know, we're not saying like you should be
(34:42):
out doing Yeah, it should really be thinking about what
you have inside yourself that you can impress other people with.
That's not what we're saying. But people do do that,
and that's falls under the umbrella of impression management.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah, we're saying, this is what Leary and Kowalski have
noticed happens.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Yeah, blame it on them and the rain.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
And then there's current Oh I'm sorry, I skipped one,
didn't I roll constraints presenting yourself in a way that's well,
that's kind of the same thing as target value, except
target values a little less that I want to align
myself with what you may be into, yeah, and a
little more of just like the general expectations of a social.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Role, right, Like you would wear a top hat in
a monocle to a meeting with a bunch of bankers
because that's what they would expect.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
You to do, exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And then there's current social image, which is what you
perceive of yourself and if other people, if you think
other people perceive you in a way you don't like.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, there are some other techniques that they've you know
that people can use flattery, of course, we'll get you everywhere, ingratiation,
stuff like that. Conforming to expectations. That's kind of like
you know, the other stuff I think, like role constraints
and stuff like that. And then a big one is
like suppressing your emotion and maintaining your self control. Like again,
(36:00):
that doesn't mean to be anauthentic, but that just means like,
read the room. Is it time for me to be
overly emotional about something or is it not? Do I
need to kind of put a little net for now?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, if you're triggered and you have a temper because
people are taking too long in the grocery store line,
don't push a whole load of groceries back into an
aisle and shout a curse word and storm out. Oh
I've seen it in real life. Actually, Oh I'm sure. Yeah,
it's like what is going on? Buddy?
Speaker 1 (36:30):
It's hard to not think just constantly what's wrong with people?
But you know what the fact is, again, as I
get older, there's a lot wrong with a lot of people.
So I try to keep that in mind.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, everybody's got some sort of burden they're carrying, and
some people are more vocal about it than others. I
guess that's a very nice way to say some people
misproject it in the wrong way more loudly than others.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
That's another way to say it.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
There's also one called basking and reflect a glory, which
is basically like hanging out with somebody who's a great
example of the kind of self you want to be
identified as. Yeah, not necessarily good. It's much better to
blaze your own trail, make your own version. But I
kind of I get it. The one that's just not
(37:15):
good at all is the downward comparison, which is putting
someone down to show that you're not like them at all.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, that's not a good thing to do. And again,
all of this convey Like, to convey all this stuff,
you got to have a pretty good cognitive empathy and
pretty good self monitoring. You got to be able to
read the room, read social cues, regulate your emotions. And again,
I think this is why people with like a narcissistic
personality disorder may have a harder time, may have more
(37:43):
difficulty doing stuff like this for sure, another break.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Have forty minutes in, let's take our second break.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
All right, we'll be back. This is going to be
a little beefy, guys, but we're into it, you.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Okay, Chuck, So just real quick before we keep going on,
it's worth mentioning that forming an online identity is essentially
it's like a whole new can of worms. Yeah, as
far as sociology is concerned, we just couldn't do it before,
and it allows you to do things, try on new
things and ways that we it was just impossible to previously.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, for sure. But that yeah, that's that could be
a shorty or something on its own.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Huh h for sure.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Should we talk about authenticity though a little.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
More, Yeah, because again this is everybody wants to be
viewed as authentic, and just the fact that you've realized
now that you're performing at all times can make you
feel like you're not authentic. But we're here to tell
you you're still authentic.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah, for sure. There have been researchers that, I mean,
it kind of depends you can there are a lot
of ways to I don't like saying skin a cat anymore.
To tackle the cat. Now, there's a lot of ways
to pet the cat.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
We're not saying skin the cat anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I don't know. I mean, it just occurred to me.
That's a pretty horrific thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, I don't know where that came from, but sure either,
I guess I can get on board with that.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
All right, there's a lot of ways to pet a cat.
Actually there's only one way, and that's with the grain.
But anyway, how about skin your knee? Sure, there's a
lot of ways to skin your knee, Like fifty four
year old wrecking is new BMX bike exactly. Some people
say there's a real distinct distinction between self presentation, which
(39:38):
is like the influence that you're feeling by pressure and
the effort that you're putting out, and then self expression,
which is your authentic self. But there are psychologists or
I'm sorry, yeah, I guess psychologists in this case a
guy named Barry R. Schlinker, who says that actually self
presentation is everyone does it in all social interactions, like
(39:59):
even if you're married, you're influencing each other and behaving
in a certain way. It may not even require like attention,
and probably doesn't if you're married, but it doesn't mean
you're being an authentic if you're still doing that kind
of within your marriage.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
No, and even like within yourself, Like when we did
the Inner Dialogue episode, we talked at some point about
how even when you're talking to yourself, that inner voice
is often shaped by external forces. And some sociologists say, yeah,
even it goes even that far. That's how far the
(40:36):
self is shaped by these scripts and these performances and everything,
that even when you're alone, you still might find yourself
engaging in some performance or another.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, and the stuff that we feel like is automatic
and you kind of touched on this earlier is maybe
not automatic. You may not even realize that this is
stuff that you've been practicing your whole life. I think
anyone who's ever had a kid has seen that kid
like practicing faces in the mirror. There's some I mean
a very tropy movie scene is someone who practices a
(41:07):
scene in the mirror of like interacting with someone like, oh,
let me get that chair for you, and practicing a smile.
I mean, Nathan Fielder has a whole show about this
called The Rehearsal. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, I love that guy.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Are you watching the new season yet.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
No, no, is that the one that's an actual like
it's fiction?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No? No, no, that was the one he did with
Emma Stone. This is the rehearsal season two, which is
he sets up these elaborate rehearsals for everyday live stuff. Okay,
you should check out season one and then just steamroll
into season two. It's fascinating sociological stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Nice. I definitely will. Yeah, do you ever rehearse what
you're going to say? I know you rehearse like what
you're doing next, like if you're cooking something, You've said that, right,
But do you ever like practice in your head what
you're going to say, like even mundane stuff like what
am I going to say to this venience store clerk
when I go to check out?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Now, all that stuff is pretty innate for me.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
That's very lucky.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
But again, maybe innate from years and years of practice.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, that's possible, or maybe you were just born with it.
Maybe it's maybe Lane. So you mentioned the automatic stuff
that is essentially breathing, Like if you look at how
it's how Schlinker describes it. He's describing the same thing
as breathing, like it's just that automatic and that automatic
mode can be in a like high gear or low gear.
(42:33):
And typically if you're backstage hanging out with your friends, embarrassment. Again,
the driver here is preventing embarrassment, preventing from embarrassing yourself,
preventing embarrassing other people or making them feel embarrassed by association,
Like you're preventing embarrassment. And one of the reasons why
(42:55):
it's easier to hang out with people in your backstage
mode is because the stakes are low. Embarrass yourself, it
doesn't matter nearly as much as if you embarrass yourself,
you know, if you pee your pants into job interview.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Yeah. Although the funny ironic thing for us is, and
I believe anyone that performs on stage literally backstage sometimes
can be some of the most anxious when people are
sent back there, like you know, oh, the company wants
to send back these strangers you don't know like that.
That's the almost the height for me of like a
boy here, I got to turn and turn on the chuck,
(43:28):
you know.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Yeah, And I just want to apologize for the group
of City Bank cardholders from like ten years ago and
we had a meet and greet with and it was
very awkward so sorry, guys, you never really got me.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Sorry, that's why we don't do meet and greet anymore.
It's just, yeah, we just want to be backstage with
our homies exactly.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah. So there's also we can also automatically go into
a much more performative mode when the sticks get a
little higher. Yeah, but either way it's still automatic. So
Schlinker is like, Nope, we're really kind of performing almost
at all times. And then there was a scholar of
(44:09):
gender named Judith Butler and by what was I mean is?
And Judith Butler said, everything about you is shaped by
sociological forces, including gender. That people learn how to behave
according to what society says it's their gender is, or
(44:30):
what's expected of that gender, and that that's just how
we learn to behave certain ways according to gender.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of grown
men who have a story where they're like when I
was in the third grade, I played with dolls and
I got made fun of and because that wasn't the
socially acceptable, you know, masculine construct And from that day forward,
I started doing things to where I fit in a
little more on the playground, and that shapes how they are,
(45:01):
you know, decades later sometimes.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Right, Yeah, carried over from the playground into the rest
of their life.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, and this stuff is all changing for the better,
I think, but it's still it's not like it's been eradicated,
you know.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Yeah. And speaking of gender too, I wondered if you
know how some people are just deeply offended by people
who are gender fluid, like to the point where you're like, what,
you don't even know this person, why do you hate
this so much? It may be wonder like if the
person who's so offended by it is upset because that
other person is flagrantly violating a social script and it's
(45:34):
making them and other people uncomfortable. And that brings up
a further point too, Who's which is more valuable that
person's authentic self that they're gender fluid or the comfort
of everybody else, the strangers around them, which one is
more valuable? Who should win out in that case? If
there's a conflict like.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
That, absolutely, I mean sadly stuff like that is being
literally litigated. But also the idea of changing social norms,
and you know, if you're not rolling with the changes
that are happening in society, you may find yourself on
an island of in acceptance and loneliness, but that may
(46:14):
be fine with you because you may want to be like, no,
things were better the old way.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
At the same time, too, you can't change social norms
without violating them. They tend to just kind of stay static,
and to make them dynamic, they have to be violated.
And anyone who's seen the movie Pleasantville knows that that
can turn out pretty good.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
You may end up in color one day.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Man, that was a good movie.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, that was pretty good. I haven't seen that in
a while.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Yeah, I saw it a couple of years ago. I've
watched it every example years.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Oh okay, I've only seen it once.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Oh you should keep waking. Just buy the DVD. Go
old school, all right.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
I mean there's a lot of movies that kind of
dance around this stuff, like The Truman Show and just
you know, I feel like this is just ripe ground
for comedy and drama.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
I agree, Chuck Rife, ripe right purple.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
So you know, I mentioned Neurodiversiens earlier and just sort
of my and I, you know, when I was doing
this research, I had that awakening of like, yeah, I've
been much more cognizant of that kind of stuff as
I've gotten older, and that stuff is more in the
forefront and diagnose more and more about like understanding that, Hey,
that person that I think is like men read the room,
(47:27):
why are you acting like that? They may have something
going on neurodivergently, there may be a genuine mental illness there.
Goffman argued that if you have a mental illness or
any sort of thing a disability, or if you are
in housed, or you're obese or a drug user, that
all just lumps you in as a as a as
(47:49):
a thing I mean a stigma, which we're going to
talk more about in a second, basically, but and ends
up sort of creating the symptom of that thing just
because you're put in that box.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah. And so anybody who's who has a social stigma
like you just mentioned, you rattle off that list. They're
what Goffman called discredited. They don't have they're not they
have less value according to society if you this is
where he developed that empathy from researching this stuff. I bet,
especially based on something like someone's ethnicity or whether they're handicapped,
(48:23):
or whether they're homeless or whatever, that the idea that
they have less value socially speaking in this in this
sense is totally unfair because the social norms that we
create are generally arbitrary.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, and in not all cases. But you,
impression management is a is a tool that people can
use to get over or hide those stigmatized features. I mean,
we can't get super into code switching, but that could
be a pretty interesting short stuff to accompany this. I
(48:59):
think that is the idea, and it's not specific to
the African American community, but it is. If you talk
to a group of African Americans in the United States
today or you know, for many years now, they will say, no,
code switching is how we get by in white America basically.
(49:20):
And that's the idea that you may change the way
you talk when you're around white people, or change the
way you act then you normally would when you're in
you know, around your family and friends or your own community.
And that's a that's a big, big thing.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Yeah, And that's a great example of it. You could
also be like, my last name sounds pretty ethnic, and
I want to change it so that people call me
back for job interviews. There's a lot of stuff you
can do, so you're not you're covering your stigma, so
you're not an automatically discredited person. But according to Golfman,
you're discreditabull. If you're found out, you will be stigmatized.
(49:54):
So sure, it's a terrible situation all around, just to
stigmatize groups based on our betray you social norms. I
hate it.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Yeah. I remember in elementary school. I'm not going to
name her name name because I don't know if she
would want this out there, but there was a girl
from you know, an Indian American girl in our school
that came back after a summer with an Americanized first name.
And so she was that from fourth grade till SENI
year in high school when we graduated together and I
(50:23):
lost touch with her, and like five or six years ago,
my good friend in Boston said, oh, well, so and
so is in town. I said, oh, is she going
by that name now again? And she went back to
her you know, she grew up a little bit and
was like, no, that is that's my name, That's my
Indian name. And it just made me feel really good
that she reached that point, you know, good. Yeah, it
was great. So at you know, the furthest end of this,
(50:46):
I guess spectrum as autism. And we've talked about autism
here and there, but a lot of times, if you
have autism, you might have difficulty responding in what people
might consider an appropriate way in a social situation. And
masking is a big can be a big part of
self presentation when it comes to people with autism.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yes, but there's autism researchers Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose,
and they make they go to great pains to basically
say masking is different than impression management, right. Impression management
is something everyone has to do. Masking is specific to
typically neurodivergent people to where they are protecting themselves by
(51:30):
pushing down their actual identities and hiding it at all
costs because they're afraid of being stigmatized because they've been
taught over the years that that's not they're not acceptable
as they are. And so those are those are two
really different things, even though they seem pretty like they
have a lot in common.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Yeah, for sure. And masking, you know, there are all
kinds of people who mask. We talked about that in
the sociopath episode once again and got emails from people.
They're like, I'm a sociopath and I put on a
big performance, so people don't know that.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
Yeah. Yeah, they're just always walking around like I love
you man. Right, Yeah, just one note about autism, which
obviously deserves its own episodes still coming down the pike
one day. Don't worry about that. But you were talking
about just kind of learning. As you get older, you
know that you can't just you can't just make assumptions
(52:23):
about people based on their ability to interact socially. Yeah,
if you want to develop a familiarity and empathy for
people with autism, I think you could do a lot
worse than starting with Love on the Spectrum all seasons,
Australian version and American version.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
I think that is very sweet because that is like
the fifth time you've recommended that show to people.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
People need to watch the show. It's so great. This
season in America deserves an Emmy. It's a masterpiece.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
I've still never seen it.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
You really should. I think you'd love it. All right,
So I guess, Chuck, since I did my every tenth
episode mention of Love on the Spectrum, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Hey guys, I love the show is about popcorn. By
the way, Okay, just finished the podcast on popcorn. It
reminds me of a segment I saw years ago on
Alton Brown's Good Eats Alton Brown at Lanton and I
did a little work on that show back in the day.
It's a prop Scott Nice while not directly related to popcorn,
and Alton was a good due to work with. By
the way, nice, while not directly related to popcorn. In
(53:34):
this particular episode, the show's resident food anthropologists related to
a factoid on Montezuma's revenge. They thought mona Zuma's real
revenge was allowing the conquering Spaniards to return to Spain
with maize without the knowledge of nixtimalization, which resulted in
widespread pelligra or palagra, causing dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and eventual
(53:55):
death due to a lack of essential nutrients. Nyssen and
trip to Fan in their diets. Nixt to molization is
a traditional Mesoamerican process used to prepare maize and other
grains for consumption, involving cooking the grain and an alkaline solution,
typically limewater, which then allows for the outer paracarp the
skin to be easily removed. The process significantly improves the
(54:16):
digestibility and nutritional value of the grain. And that is
from Bob.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Bob, that was a great email. Yeah, well a top
notch one. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it.
Speaker 1 (54:27):
I agreed.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
If you want to be like Bob and send us
a really interesting, top notch email, we love that kind
of thing, you can send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradioy.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and we're putting on our best
faces in this episode of Stuff you.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Should Know right our front stage self.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, and speaking of stage check, I have a great
intro to this. I believe it was Rush who first
said all the world's is stage, and the men and
women on it are merely players or something like that.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, performers and portrayers. Yeah, each another's audience.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Is that what he says? I never knew, and I've
never bothered to look up the lyrics because there's definitely
some words in there. I'm like, I don't know what
Geddy Leek just said.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure that's right.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It's a great, great song, Limelight, very well written, what
very original stuff. Yeah, so we're talking about impression management today, right, Yes, sir,
And what do you think about it?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Well? I think that I just the more I've done
this show over the years, the more I realized that
I could have been a sociologist. Oh yeah, yeah, man,
this stuff fascinates me to no end. I took one
sociology class in college, and that's it. And I remember
at the time, you know, when very little outside of
English major classes interested me. I was like, man, this
(01:27):
is super interesting to me, but not enough to pursue it.
But human behaviors is endlessly fascinating to me.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. And one of the things, sociology gets beat up
and edged out and elbowed in the face by psychology
a lot unfairly, I think too.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, I'm not talking about social psychology, no, be clear, sociology.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah. And if sociology started out, we should say basically
examining massive institutions. It was macro sociology religion, like economics, politics,
that kind of stuff, and just how people behaved and
interacted or how people came together to form these institutions.
(02:12):
And then the guy we're going to talk about today
came along and he's like, let's kind of zoom in
a little more. And like you were saying, he kicked
off this this type of sociology that examines like people,
just interactions, very small interactions that sometimes we don't even
know what we're doing. And apparently you're very interested in that.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I am, And you know what, it seems like the
more I've learned about Irving Goffman through today's research, and
you know, researching him a little further. Like he's a
Canadian American sociologist, and this is like the mid twentieth century,
nineteen fifties ish when he started doing a lot of
this work. He seems to me like someone who was
just fascinated by human behavior, even more even in a
(02:55):
way that like other sociologists weren't, especially at the time.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, for sure, he yeah, And he also I read
that he developed like a real sympathy for the people
who were pushed to the fringes of society unfairly, basically
across the board. So he was not only like a
really good sociologist and very intuitive, and apparently had a
really interesting writing style too. He loves a good like
(03:20):
turn of phrase. He was also like a very empathetic,
good person. That's what I can tell.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Oh, man, I'm so glad I didn't hook my wagon do.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
The wrong dude, right, But no, you hooked his to
the right guy.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
And when it's somebody from the nineteen fifties, you never
know what's going to happen there. We should probably say
we're talking about though, impression management or self presentation or
perception management is basically these are terms that he all
came up. He came up with all of these essentially,
and it's it's just how you present to others. And
you know, we'll get into the nuts and bolts of it.
(03:54):
But how much you might think about that, how much
is automatic, how much is intuition, how much of it
is authenticity. It's super fascinating to me. I just I
love this stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, and a lot of it. I mean, when we
start talking about it too, it'll just seem very common sense, like, yeah,
of course you're going to you know, mind your p's
and cues and sit up straight and be friendly in
a job interview. And that is a type of impression management.
But it is way more granular than that, to the
point where like, if you're into language linguistics that kind
(04:28):
of thing, the entire purpose of a conversation is to
exchange information like I know this now I'm sharing it
with you. The other person says, thank you very much,
And that's what a conversations for as far as impression
management goes. And Irvin Goffman and his Milk conversations are
essentially performances that two people share and do for one another.
(04:50):
That helps create a version of ourselves that we kind
of walk around with, and that that changes. And there's
very little point to a conversation other than that it's
a radically different view of things.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, I also think it's interesting, and this is you know,
this is all just precursor stuff that we're babbling on about.
But when you said it just seems like instinct or whatever,
would you say, common sense to do these things? Not everybody,
my friend, And that is something that I've gotten better
about over the years. It used to be something that
(05:28):
really bothered me, and I would you know, leave an
interaction with somebody or something and with Emily and be
like god, like just social cluelessness is such a turn
off for me, like read the room, buddy, that kind
of thing. But then the more I've gotten older and
the more we've all learned about different neurodiversities, I've definitely
found myself in a place where i'd try to be like, hey,
(05:51):
I don't know what this person's deal is, Like they
may be struggling just to present themselves as you know,
passing or masking, and you know, we're going to talk
about all this stuff in a situation just to sort
of get by. So I try to really keep that
stuff in mind these days.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
For sure. And I feel like there's different tranches. Yeah,
there's the one you just describe. There's people who this
is so effortless too, they don't even have to think
about it, and they're just great basically across the board.
Then there's everybody else in the middle. Some people in
the middle are better at it than others. Some people
think too hard about it and they become obvious and
clumsy and essentially though no one can escape it, I
(06:29):
think is my point. There's nobody out there who doesn't
engage in some sort of impression management essentially their entire lives.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yeah, and neurodiversity society again, which we'll talk about. There
are also people who aren't neurodiversity who were just glueless
a holes. And I have found too in my life
that I believe narcissism plays a part. I think narcissists
have a much harder time because they're generally just have
their heads up, their own buttson or so about the
(06:58):
self that they are off. And the ones that I found,
if they don't have some sort of you know, nerdivergence.
That's the reason why they are like they are, maybe
because of narcissism, because you know, usually the reply after
someone is like read the room, buddy, they're like, what.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
What, I'm perfect, what do you mean read the room?
You read the room exactly. So let's get into it
and we'll start with Goffman and where he got his
start again, this is Irving Goffman, groundbreaking sociologist. He started
off doing field work in a Scottish village and rather
than figuring out how the city council worked for that
(07:35):
or the village elders basically kept everybody in line, he
just ameshed himself in the village and just paid attention
to how people interacted with one another. And really like,
that's a very anthropological way of studying. Is very not
how they did it at the time among sociologists. So
(07:55):
here's groundbreaking. He essentially went like, I'm going to take
this field and just put it, take it in a
different direction. So let's go.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, for sure. He wrote a book in nineteen fifty
six called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. What
a great title, No Colon's it's exactly what it says.
It is a very big book in the world of sociology,
and the International Sociological Association named it as a tenth
most important sociology book of the twentieth century. And in
this book is where he touched on what you talked
(08:26):
about with this sort of performance aspect of our everyday
lives with He didn't invent it, you know, it was
an existing concept, but dramaturgical theory, which is what you said,
like we're all sort of operating on a social script,
sort of like the terminator, Like it's pretty limited. You
don't have endless options, like maybe you should say one
(08:46):
of these four things at this dinner party when someone
brings up a thing. And even if it's a brand
news situation, you're drawing on the scripts that you've used
over and over in your life to work out how
to inner act in the scene.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Right. Yeah, And it's also, yeah, it's been shaped by
interactions with other people. It's shaped by what you've seen
on TV, which can be very dangerous because stuff that's
like hilarious on a sitcom does not necessarily translate well
into real life. It's like you're being a huge jerk
or you're not really that funny. You know, in the
case of somebody who models themselves after friends.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, like, pull my finger doesn't always break the ice.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, pull my finger always works. Okay, great, but yeah,
so what his point was in the dramaturgical theory, And
like you said, he didn't invent it, but if you
if you look into it, he's basically like he's the
guy who took it and ran with it. Yeah, no
matter where you are, you're performing, and depending on where
you are you're going, your performance is going to be different. Right,
(09:50):
So if you're sitting there at school, you're gonna act
different than you do at a bar.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, right, sure, ideally, yeah, you wo hope for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
And then if you're at work, you know you're going
to act a little different from that too. And it's
essentially even when you're hanging out with your closest friends,
sociologists believe that you're still performing in some way, shape
or form, just probably less than you normally do.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, and some think even when you're by yourself that
that still informs how you talk to your little person
on your shoulder, right, which is really interesting. He talked
about appearance and like clothing even and how they will convey.
And when we say actor, we're just talking about a person,
but in his context of it all being a performance,
(10:39):
he'd called them actors. But you know, your your costume
that you put on is going to convey like maybe
your social status, maybe what kind of job you have.
There's you know, there's that outward appearance, and then there's
the manner in which you deal with someone. And obeying
the sort of societal rules in a social situation is
(11:00):
a big time thing. And if you start to do
things that don't comply with what people generally expect in
you know, at a dinner party or on an elevator
or something like that, it can upset people around you.
I think the interesting thing that I took from that is,
I mean, that's kind of common sense, but when you're writing,
like a screenplay or something like dramatic writing or a play,
(11:23):
the most interesting characters are usually people that do things
that surprise you, or that fly in the face of
maybe a social norm, or make a decision that's unexpected.
So I think it's interesting that in drama it makes
for very compelling characters, but in real life we kind
of don't want that generally.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, like the Manic Pixie dream Girl.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Right, I don't know what you mean by that. I mean,
I know what that term means, but I don't know
how it relates to this.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Oh they're always doing like crazy stuff that like makes
the protagon or fall in love with them or whatever.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotcha. So in terms of a script,
that might be engaging even within the world of the script,
whereas in real life, I don't know, a man at
Pixie dream Girl might go over, but the person saying
pull my finger the dinner party may not.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, it's funny that you say drama too, because to me,
where in my mind was comedy, Like almost all comedy
is a person behaving in a way that is violates
the situation that they're in, violates the scene and the
script that they're supposed to be saying. That's all from
Adam Sandler to late Adam Sandler, right, it's all basically that.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, I mean, that's the basis of joke telling. Really
is the unexpected thing happens super interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
And then one other thing too. He made a really
good point. He said that the characters or the people
who are interacting and again just essentially performing that they're
trying to come to a common definition of the situation
is what he called it.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah, that expected norm.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, and so like if you see, say, a scene
on TV, it's just such a perfect analogy because that's
essentially what he's talking about. And there's just one dude
standing at a bus stop and it's a businessman. Say
that scene is in a superposition. It hasn't been defined
yet because there's only one person, and by the entrance
(13:16):
of the next person, that's when the scene will start
to be defined. If it's that guy's boss, he's gonna
act totally different than if it's a pickpocket or something
like that. So the scene hasn't been defined yet. But
regardless of how it ends up, like what scene it is,
both are playing their role essentially that we just innately
know almost not innately because it's learned, but it becomes
(13:40):
just second nature for most people.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Yeah, for sure. He also thought that, you know, there's
obviously verbal and nonverbal parts to this, with body language
and how you dress and all that stuff. But Goffman
himself thought that the non verbal part did I say
non purple?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
If you did? It was lost on me. But I
like non purple more Okay.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I think I might have said non purple anyway, which
is basically every other color but purple. Yeah. He thought
the non verbal part was the most significant because it's
harder to fake, which I think is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And that also, like, while you're performing quote unquote again,
do we need to keep saying that, like people know
what you mean?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Right, Yeah, I mean we could just say interacting with
another person.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, while you're interacting as the actor, right, you may
be aware that you have like a goal in mind,
like I got a you know, I met this thing,
I got a present really well, or you may not.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, you may not have a goal. It may be,
as we'll see, you're just trying to keep from freaking
the other person out, you know, like you're not trying
to get anywhere. You're not trying to advance or get
something from the person or make somebody think that you're great,
but just being engaged, forced into a social interaction like
(14:59):
that you have to perform a certain way or else
the other person is going to be weirded out, is
going to want to get away from you. Sometimes people
get really upset when somebody violates norms. And I think
you can, really you can. This explains it a lot,
because it's like someone is expecting somebody to behave in
(15:21):
a certain way. That person purposefully doesn't behave in that way.
Then the people around them might get angry at that person,
even though they might just be being themselves.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, or get scared. Like you know, when you get
on an elevator by yourself and there's only one person
on there, you act in a certain way as an
almost way to say you're safe right now. You don't
need to worry about me. I'm just going to my room.
I'm not gonna I'm not that guy that's going to
be some weirdo on the elevator. I promise you're okay.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yeah, or even like try to strike up a conversation
like that that's unnerving and disarming.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean I think definitely not as much for
me as for some people. Because I was raised in
the South, I'm more used to that. And definitely also
in an enclosed space like an elevator, the norms are
much different than like walking down the street or something.
For sure, you know you're trapped basically in that little.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Box, right, Yeah, you have a captive audience.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
And now I'm panicking.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So, just to kind of wrap up the whole dramaturgical
theory part, Goffman said, we have our front stage selves,
which I think you referred to earlier.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Right, that's us right now, and that's what we do
on our job every day.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Okay, Yeah, but I feel like we're not that much
different in real life. No.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
I think you're right. I mean, that's one of the
reasons this show works, I think, and why a lot
of podcasts work is because people are their more true selves.
But it's also sort of the best version of our
true selves, Like we're not the jerks that we can
be in real life.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, and that's a really great point that we'll see later. Like,
just because you're doing this doesn't mean you're a phony
or inauthentic. You're just drawing on the parts of yourself
that are already there that apply to the situation best
in presenting those.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, totally. And I said we I meant me you're
not a jerk. And so I'm just speaking for myself.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Hey man, I'm always happy to be included with you.
I'm along for the ride.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, everybody compete like that here and there. That's all
I'm saying, right right, I know what you're saying. You
don't have to explain it to me, all right, I
was explaining to everyone else. Didn't think I was just
dragging you down with me.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
So you've got front stage selves. This is when you're
you're on stage, you're really out there. There's backstage when
you're hanging with your homies. Yeah, homeboys, homegirls, Yeah yeah,
and just general homies, maybe your family. If you get
along with your family, and you might feel comfortable and
calm around them, So that would be your backstage self.
(17:44):
But note this, he's not saying front stage self, and
then yourself, it's still a backstage self. You're still attached
to the stage. You're still in the theater. Yeah, even
when you're hanging out with your homies.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yeah, that's true. And then there's the off stage, and
that's when it's just one on one this is the best,
and that's still a kind of performance.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah. This example is just so it just nails it.
When you're a teacher and you see your student at
the grocery store, yeah, see him, ir L, that's like
that's just such a jarring thing to see as a kid.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Oh man, I think it's thrilling, it's exciting because they
don't exist outside of that role.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
No exactly. So now you see them and they're not
dressed like they normally are. Oh, they're friendly to your
mom or something like that. There, and then they're buying
olives too, and they look like they're really into the
figuring out which all ofs they want, right, So, yeah,
that's just for the kid. For the teacher, you still
have to comport yourself in a way that's like, you know,
I'm not going to just start cussing in front of
(18:49):
the student and just talk like I might normally talk.
I still have to pretend or act like I do
when I'm this kid's teacher. But that's still it's like
a it's it doesn't necessarily fit the grocery store stage,
so that teachers in a really weird position, right then, Yeah,
that would be off stage interactions.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
I love that. One time for a break, Yes, all.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Right, we're just getting cooking, everybody, So come back more
if you want to learn more about yourself, right for.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
This learning stuff from Josh Chimes stuff you shun all right.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
So one of the keys to Goffman's theory is how
important it is to avoid being embarrassed or embarrassing others.
He talked about face work like saving face or losing face,
not wanting to be embarrassed, but also he wrote about
just the your facial expressions, especially in intern of how
you disagree with somebody, even if you say the words
(20:04):
that you think are the right way to disagree with someone,
but your face as WTF like that conveys a confusing message.
So even the facial expressions you make have to be considered.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, it's that speech plus nonverbal that equals your performance, right, Yeah. Yeah,
It's funny to see people who are trying to say
something but their facial expression just something matchup.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah. I mean that's a problem I've had to work
on in my own marriage with not being the best communicator,
which you know, which is Emily being like, well, you're
saying one thing, but that's not what I'm getting.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
I'm right. Ah, yeah, No, I don't want to play
red dead redemption.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
That's always true the opposite, that is right.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So the other point of that, in addition to that
nonverbal use of face, you said, also you're trying to
help people save face, right, So I said earlier that
you might be forced into a social to act in
a social situation a certain way just because you don't
want to freak out your friend's mom who you saw
at the mall by acting bizarrely or you know, in
(21:06):
a different way than you should. Similarly, if your friend's
mom at the mall falls like slips and falls in
the middle of the mall and is embarrassed, you are
going to do something that your performance calls for you
to do something to help her save face as well.
That's part of face work.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Too, Yeah, for sure. And face work is another dramatic term.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Oh is it? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Yeah, I think face work and body work that's all
a drama thing.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
That makes sense. Is there a thing how to move.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Within your space? Yeah, private parts work, so to Goffman,
it's you know, it could be an obvious thing, like
if you're you know, on a first date or something
like that, or like you mentioned earlier job interview, like
that's the super obvious situation, but a lot a lot
of times it's you know, it's really everyday interactions still count.
(21:59):
H And there's a philosopher name Lucy McDonald who was
writing about like when somebody falls down in public, almost always,
the very first thing that will happen is that person
will look around to see if anyone saw them, and
based on that, it's going to change their reaction. And
it reminded me of that story up told before about
in college when I saw the guy bust bust his
(22:21):
butt on a bike in Athens and the books went
spilling all over the sidewalk, and this dude just opened
one of the books, laying on his side with his
bike will spinning, act like he was reading it. And
It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. And
then the other day, on my new bike, I tried
to do a wheel slide in a gravel parking lot
and I busted my butt and fell. I didn't go,
(22:44):
you know, ass over apple cart, but I hit the dirt.
And the first thing I did, as a fifty four
year old was look up and see if anybody saw me.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
You didn't jump up and say I meant to do that.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Well, if somebody had been had seen me, I would have,
but nobody saw me, so I just sat there and
was like, no one nuts.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Right, So if you do that, like say, if people
do see you, you might like look back, like closely
at the ground, like what did I strung over?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
What's wrong with this bike?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Or you might say like I hate Mondays or something
like that. And what you're doing is something you mentioned earlier.
You're reassuring people like I'm not a threat to you
or to the social order. That was just a total accident. Yeah,
And it might seem like that person is overly self
conscious or something like that, or they might be a
little neurotic. I feel like they have to do that, Yeah,
(23:32):
But the philosopher Lucy McDonald that you mentioned also points
out that that's actually not what's going on. That everybody
feels like they need to do that, and that it's
a rational response to the social expectations that we have
of one another. So it just kind of reveals this
social intelligence that most people have that is you don't
(23:56):
even know that you're doing in a lot of cases,
and that you feel even compelled to do internally. Like
when I do that, if I'm so embarrassed, I will
blurt something out like oops, or I hate Mondays, and
it feels like it's coming up from you know, my
guy yea, and then out of my mouth like it's
not something where I'm like, I better say something really quick,
(24:18):
just an involuntary reaction essentially, because it's so ingrained.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, because you're not a sociopath.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, I like to think so.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah, I like to think so too. It's funny thinking
about that guy in Athens it fell. He didn't even
look around because it wasn't like, oh did someone see me?
Because hundreds of people for sure saw him.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
It was like a crowded campus. So I felt bad
for the guy, but it was hysterical. And one day
I'm gonna meet that person, I think.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, I wonder what he's doing now.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Can you imagine if I was at a party one
day and somebody was telling that story, like one time
in college, I wrecked my bike, and after I was reading.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
A book, what would you do? Would you buy him something?
Speaker 1 (24:55):
I would hug him immediately and be like I saw that,
and I've been telling that story for forty years.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Forty No, not even thirty.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Yeah, thirty's about right. Yeah, and you would be like,
I'm not a hugger.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, then I've screwed up yet again. Uh.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So I said that when people fall in there, they're
saying like oops, or I hate mondays, they're looking at
the crack or they're going through their book whatever. They're
reassuring people that that they're actually normal. And the norm
in countries like the US, say in the West, is
(25:33):
what's called civil and attention to where you ideally you
acknowledge the presence the existence of another person so that
you're you're on a subway with and then yeah it
ends there. Right. Something that I find dismaying is I
see more and more that acknowledgment doesn't even happen. It's
(25:55):
just totally ignoring one another. And that, man, that gets me,
especially if you not at somebody else and they just
ignore you. I think that is awful.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah. I mean not to be old man here, but
cell phones and smartphones have definitely played a part in that,
I think because people escape into the comfort of like, well,
I'll just look at this instead.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, yeah, and they're just like, oh, what's on my phone?
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah. I mean, if you were raised in the South
or have lived in the South, then you're more comfortable
with more acknowledgment and maybe even a brief conversation with
a stranger. Sure, that can be very off putting for
people that aren't used to that. So I try to
remember that when I am going to maybe have had
a drink or two and I struck up a conversation.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
With someone I don't know on an elevator.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I've done that too. I did it last week in fact.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So speaking of elevators, Chuck, you've mentioned going into an
elevator and turning around, and what a violation of the
social order that is the elevator Is this perfect little
encapsulation for sociolists, no man to study, because we just
know what to do. When somebody gets on an elevator
(27:06):
and there's already people on there, everybody spreads out, rearranges
himself to make room for this person in their personal space.
And it's not like we're like, Okay, I'm going to
go over here. You go here, and then when somebody
the next person comes on, you get off, and then
this person's going to go where you were. It just happens,
and it's a beautiful synchronized effort, right.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
But when sociologists get on elevators and they turn around,
there's apocryphal story about Irvin Goffman doing that and studying
and people just flipping out by it.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Now they don't turn around. They just go straight in
and stand there looking at the rear.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, yes, exactly, Yeah right, not well put So that's
actually not just what sociologists like to do. It was
like a big one on Candid Camera back in the
day for a while. Yeah, and there was one Candid
Camera episode where they did the opposite where the elevator
was already had a bunch of people on it, but
(28:04):
they were facing the rear when the door's opened and
the person who was being I guess pranked came on.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I wouldn't get on that elevator car.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
So this person they got on, and they kind of
looked like they didn't know what to do for a second,
and then they turned and they faced.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I knew it. Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah. It was almost like they thought that they hadn't
gotten the revised pages that day and everybody else did,
so they just needed to go along with it because
they didn't want to upset the apple cart. Things had changed.
This is not what they expected, but they weren't about
to be the one who just stuck to the original
Norman upset everybody else.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Wow did they yell out, can I have the new sides.
Please take someone to fly those in line. That's really
funny and that doesn't surprise me. And I bet the
live audience at Cannon Cambridge just got a big old hoo.
Do you laugh on that?
Speaker 2 (28:53):
One man?
Speaker 1 (28:57):
So there was a guy named Harold Garfinkel and others
socioists that would I mean, he called them breaching experiments,
but it's really messing with people. And he did things
like that like sit down on the escalator or just
like point at somebody. And I'm not a big fan
of those kind of experiments.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
No, but they're all over YouTube people doing that. I
bet it's pretty funny. But yeah, if you're ever in
a mall and somebody sits down on an escalator or whatever,
it's probably a sociologist. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
If not just politely go in any other direction.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Well no, that's why you carry a water gun around
with you. You just scored them in the house a
few times and say stand.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Up, super soaker.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So there's ways that we figure out how to perform because,
like I said, a lot of it just seems ingrained.
A lot of it requires thought too, especially if you're
trying if you have a goal, like you're trying to
become a member of a country club, which everybody's been
through that, yeah, Yeah. And these two researchers, they were
psychologists back in nineteen ninety nineteen ninety, Mark Leary and
(30:01):
Robin Kowalski. They basically figured out how we do this
kind of stuff, and they broke it into two things.
There was impression motivation, why you're doing this? An impression
construction how you're doing this?
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, And as far as motivation, it's based on a
few factors. One is how relevant a person thinks their
images to achieve this goal. So, in other words, does
it really matter here how I'm acting to get what
I want? How valuable the goal is, which is do
I this is something I really want? Am I trying
to get a job or just whatever? Something a little
less stakes? And then finally, the extent to which they
(30:36):
believe they're not currently being perceived in the most useful way.
In other words, how much do I need to pour
it on here to get what I want?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Like, how am I being perceived? And what do I
need to do to change that?
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right? Exactly? So you put all those together and that's
your motivation for figuring out some impression management. Again, This
is the ones where you're like actually giving thought to it, right,
Impression construction, how you actually care this stuff out. They
broke into five little parts. One is your self concept, right,
(31:08):
So you're going to base how you carry this out
on how you feel you are. So you're trying you're
starting with your authentic self ideally, right, because people value authenticity.
People don't want to just keep up a lie. Again,
that's a half hour sitcom right there, because it always crumbles.
It always crumbles everybody in real life and on sitcoms.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
In twenty two minutes and then it gets resolved.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Right exactly. So your self concept is where you're going
to start, and you're going to kind of draw from that.
Imagine a big steamer trunk on stage that carrot tops
going through, just pulling a bunch of props out of.
That's what you're doing when you first start to figure
this out. That's going through the steamer trunk of your
(31:55):
self concept.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Wait a minute, are you saying right now we are
a carrot.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
The entire world is yeah, all the world to stage,
and we are merely carot carrot tops.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Then there's the desired identity. So you're trying to protect
an identity, and you base that on what like what
you what you want people to think you like and
don't like, or what you want to be or don't
want to.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Be, right, So you might really try to distance yourself
from something you don't want to identify with.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, like, oh boy, how about that John Legend that
was random and all that immense talent, Like, get over it, buddy.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
You want to be very careful with this. This is
one of those things that shows what a tightrope you
can be walking when you're purposefully constructing impression management. If
you're in that case yucking someone's yam, that can turn
people off and ruin all of the other stuff that
you just did. So it can backfire.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Someone opens up their jacket and they're wearing the John Legend.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Right, or you accidentally say it to John Legend because
you didn't recognize him.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, I don't know why I pulled him out. I
know nothing much about him other than La La land
in the fact that he's super talented.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yeah. No, he was perfect, I mean totally neutral. Everybody
loves him like it was just that was great, non
controversial in almost any way. Yeah, right, he's managed to
distance himself from his wife's public persona. So yeah, non controversial.
Who is she Chrissy Teagan?
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Oh? I know that name, but I don't know much
about her either.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
That's fine, all right, moving on. Yeah, So the next
one is target value, and it's basically saying, like, you're
just going to take those things from your steamer trunk
of your authentic self and you're going to adorn yourself
with the ones that make the most sense for this
identity that you're trying to be viewed with.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, but based on what you think they want, right.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Yeah, But again, this is not where you're just like,
you know, stealing stuff from other people and making it
your own. You're going ideally, you're going into your own
authentic self and saying this one makes the most sense
to what this person's going to expect or want.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, exactly, Like aligning yourself with someone else's value is
ideally stopping short of, like, you know, doing something that's
not an authentic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
And there's one thing I think we should say at
this point, because it's really easy to just assume like
this is what everybody should be doing, and I think
it's worth questioning. It's not inherently a good thing to
change yourself or to rearrange yourself. It can be a
bad thing, but it can also be a good thing too.
So just know, we're not saying like you should be
(34:42):
out doing Yeah, it should really be thinking about what
you have inside yourself that you can impress other people with.
That's not what we're saying. But people do do that,
and that's falls under the umbrella of impression management.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah, we're saying, this is what Leary and Kowalski have
noticed happens.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Yeah, blame it on them and the rain.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
And then there's current Oh I'm sorry, I skipped one,
didn't I roll constraints presenting yourself in a way that's well,
that's kind of the same thing as target value, except
target values a little less that I want to align
myself with what you may be into, yeah, and a
little more of just like the general expectations of a social.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Role, right, Like you would wear a top hat in
a monocle to a meeting with a bunch of bankers
because that's what they would expect.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
You to do, exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And then there's current social image, which is what you
perceive of yourself and if other people, if you think
other people perceive you in a way you don't like.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, there are some other techniques that they've you know
that people can use flattery, of course, we'll get you everywhere, ingratiation,
stuff like that. Conforming to expectations. That's kind of like
you know, the other stuff I think, like role constraints
and stuff like that. And then a big one is
like suppressing your emotion and maintaining your self control. Like again,
(36:00):
that doesn't mean to be anauthentic, but that just means like,
read the room. Is it time for me to be
overly emotional about something or is it not? Do I
need to kind of put a little net for now?
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, if you're triggered and you have a temper because
people are taking too long in the grocery store line,
don't push a whole load of groceries back into an
aisle and shout a curse word and storm out. Oh
I've seen it in real life. Actually, Oh I'm sure. Yeah,
it's like what is going on? Buddy?
Speaker 1 (36:30):
It's hard to not think just constantly what's wrong with people?
But you know what the fact is, again, as I
get older, there's a lot wrong with a lot of people.
So I try to keep that in mind.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, everybody's got some sort of burden they're carrying, and
some people are more vocal about it than others. I
guess that's a very nice way to say some people
misproject it in the wrong way more loudly than others.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
That's another way to say it.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
There's also one called basking and reflect a glory, which
is basically like hanging out with somebody who's a great
example of the kind of self you want to be
identified as. Yeah, not necessarily good. It's much better to
blaze your own trail, make your own version. But I
kind of I get it. The one that's just not
(37:15):
good at all is the downward comparison, which is putting
someone down to show that you're not like them at all.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, that's not a good thing to do. And again,
all of this convey Like, to convey all this stuff,
you got to have a pretty good cognitive empathy and
pretty good self monitoring. You got to be able to
read the room, read social cues, regulate your emotions. And again,
I think this is why people with like a narcissistic
personality disorder may have a harder time, may have more
(37:43):
difficulty doing stuff like this for sure, another break.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Have forty minutes in, let's take our second break.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
All right, we'll be back. This is going to be
a little beefy, guys, but we're into it, you.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Okay, Chuck, So just real quick before we keep going on,
it's worth mentioning that forming an online identity is essentially
it's like a whole new can of worms. Yeah, as
far as sociology is concerned, we just couldn't do it before,
and it allows you to do things, try on new
things and ways that we it was just impossible to previously.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, for sure. But that yeah, that's that could be
a shorty or something on its own.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Huh h for sure.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Should we talk about authenticity though a little.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
More, Yeah, because again this is everybody wants to be
viewed as authentic, and just the fact that you've realized
now that you're performing at all times can make you
feel like you're not authentic. But we're here to tell
you you're still authentic.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah, for sure. There have been researchers that, I mean,
it kind of depends you can there are a lot
of ways to I don't like saying skin a cat anymore.
To tackle the cat. Now, there's a lot of ways
to pet the cat.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
We're not saying skin the cat anymore.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
I don't know. I mean, it just occurred to me.
That's a pretty horrific thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Yeah, I don't know where that came from, but sure either,
I guess I can get on board with that.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
All right, there's a lot of ways to pet a cat.
Actually there's only one way, and that's with the grain.
But anyway, how about skin your knee? Sure, there's a
lot of ways to skin your knee, Like fifty four
year old wrecking is new BMX bike exactly. Some people
say there's a real distinct distinction between self presentation, which
(39:38):
is like the influence that you're feeling by pressure and
the effort that you're putting out, and then self expression,
which is your authentic self. But there are psychologists or
I'm sorry, yeah, I guess psychologists in this case a
guy named Barry R. Schlinker, who says that actually self
presentation is everyone does it in all social interactions, like
(39:59):
even if you're married, you're influencing each other and behaving
in a certain way. It may not even require like attention,
and probably doesn't if you're married, but it doesn't mean
you're being an authentic if you're still doing that kind
of within your marriage.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
No, and even like within yourself, Like when we did
the Inner Dialogue episode, we talked at some point about
how even when you're talking to yourself, that inner voice
is often shaped by external forces. And some sociologists say, yeah,
even it goes even that far. That's how far the
(40:36):
self is shaped by these scripts and these performances and everything,
that even when you're alone, you still might find yourself
engaging in some performance or another.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, and the stuff that we feel like is automatic
and you kind of touched on this earlier is maybe
not automatic. You may not even realize that this is
stuff that you've been practicing your whole life. I think
anyone who's ever had a kid has seen that kid
like practicing faces in the mirror. There's some I mean
a very tropy movie scene is someone who practices a
(41:07):
scene in the mirror of like interacting with someone like, oh,
let me get that chair for you, and practicing a smile.
I mean, Nathan Fielder has a whole show about this
called The Rehearsal. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, I love that guy.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Are you watching the new season yet.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
No, no, is that the one that's an actual like
it's fiction?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No? No, no, that was the one he did with
Emma Stone. This is the rehearsal season two, which is
he sets up these elaborate rehearsals for everyday live stuff. Okay,
you should check out season one and then just steamroll
into season two. It's fascinating sociological stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Nice. I definitely will. Yeah, do you ever rehearse what
you're going to say? I know you rehearse like what
you're doing next, like if you're cooking something, You've said that, right,
But do you ever like practice in your head what
you're going to say, like even mundane stuff like what
am I going to say to this venience store clerk
when I go to check out?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Now, all that stuff is pretty innate for me.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
That's very lucky.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
But again, maybe innate from years and years of practice.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Yeah, that's possible, or maybe you were just born with it.
Maybe it's maybe Lane. So you mentioned the automatic stuff
that is essentially breathing, Like if you look at how
it's how Schlinker describes it. He's describing the same thing
as breathing, like it's just that automatic and that automatic
mode can be in a like high gear or low gear.
(42:33):
And typically if you're backstage hanging out with your friends, embarrassment. Again,
the driver here is preventing embarrassment, preventing from embarrassing yourself,
preventing embarrassing other people or making them feel embarrassed by association,
Like you're preventing embarrassment. And one of the reasons why
(42:55):
it's easier to hang out with people in your backstage
mode is because the stakes are low. Embarrass yourself, it
doesn't matter nearly as much as if you embarrass yourself,
you know, if you pee your pants into job interview.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Yeah. Although the funny ironic thing for us is, and
I believe anyone that performs on stage literally backstage sometimes
can be some of the most anxious when people are
sent back there, like you know, oh, the company wants
to send back these strangers you don't know like that.
That's the almost the height for me of like a
boy here, I got to turn and turn on the chuck,
(43:28):
you know.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Yeah, And I just want to apologize for the group
of City Bank cardholders from like ten years ago and
we had a meet and greet with and it was
very awkward so sorry, guys, you never really got me.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Sorry, that's why we don't do meet and greet anymore.
It's just, yeah, we just want to be backstage with
our homies exactly.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah. So there's also we can also automatically go into
a much more performative mode when the sticks get a
little higher. Yeah, but either way it's still automatic. So
Schlinker is like, Nope, we're really kind of performing almost
at all times. And then there was a scholar of
(44:09):
gender named Judith Butler and by what was I mean is?
And Judith Butler said, everything about you is shaped by
sociological forces, including gender. That people learn how to behave
according to what society says it's their gender is, or
(44:30):
what's expected of that gender, and that that's just how
we learn to behave certain ways according to gender.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of grown
men who have a story where they're like when I
was in the third grade, I played with dolls and
I got made fun of and because that wasn't the
socially acceptable, you know, masculine construct And from that day forward,
I started doing things to where I fit in a
little more on the playground, and that shapes how they are,
(45:01):
you know, decades later sometimes.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Right, Yeah, carried over from the playground into the rest
of their life.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah, and this stuff is all changing for the better,
I think, but it's still it's not like it's been eradicated,
you know.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Yeah. And speaking of gender too, I wondered if you
know how some people are just deeply offended by people
who are gender fluid, like to the point where you're like, what,
you don't even know this person, why do you hate
this so much? It may be wonder like if the
person who's so offended by it is upset because that
other person is flagrantly violating a social script and it's
(45:34):
making them and other people uncomfortable. And that brings up
a further point too, Who's which is more valuable that
person's authentic self that they're gender fluid or the comfort
of everybody else, the strangers around them, which one is
more valuable? Who should win out in that case? If
there's a conflict like.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
That, absolutely, I mean sadly stuff like that is being
literally litigated. But also the idea of changing social norms,
and you know, if you're not rolling with the changes
that are happening in society, you may find yourself on
an island of in acceptance and loneliness, but that may
(46:14):
be fine with you because you may want to be like, no,
things were better the old way.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
At the same time, too, you can't change social norms
without violating them. They tend to just kind of stay static,
and to make them dynamic, they have to be violated.
And anyone who's seen the movie Pleasantville knows that that
can turn out pretty good.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
You may end up in color one day.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Man, that was a good movie.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, that was pretty good. I haven't seen that in
a while.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Yeah, I saw it a couple of years ago. I've
watched it every example years.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Oh okay, I've only seen it once.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Oh you should keep waking. Just buy the DVD. Go
old school, all right.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
I mean there's a lot of movies that kind of
dance around this stuff, like The Truman Show and just
you know, I feel like this is just ripe ground
for comedy and drama.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
I agree, Chuck Rife, ripe right purple.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
So you know, I mentioned Neurodiversiens earlier and just sort
of my and I, you know, when I was doing
this research, I had that awakening of like, yeah, I've
been much more cognizant of that kind of stuff as
I've gotten older, and that stuff is more in the
forefront and diagnose more and more about like understanding that, Hey,
that person that I think is like men read the room,
(47:27):
why are you acting like that? They may have something
going on neurodivergently, there may be a genuine mental illness there.
Goffman argued that if you have a mental illness or
any sort of thing a disability, or if you are
in housed, or you're obese or a drug user, that
all just lumps you in as a as a as
(47:49):
a thing I mean a stigma, which we're going to
talk more about in a second, basically, but and ends
up sort of creating the symptom of that thing just
because you're put in that box.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah. And so anybody who's who has a social stigma
like you just mentioned, you rattle off that list. They're
what Goffman called discredited. They don't have they're not they
have less value according to society if you this is
where he developed that empathy from researching this stuff. I bet,
especially based on something like someone's ethnicity or whether they're handicapped,
(48:23):
or whether they're homeless or whatever, that the idea that
they have less value socially speaking in this in this
sense is totally unfair because the social norms that we
create are generally arbitrary.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, and in not all cases. But you,
impression management is a is a tool that people can
use to get over or hide those stigmatized features. I mean,
we can't get super into code switching, but that could
be a pretty interesting short stuff to accompany this. I
(48:59):
think that is the idea, and it's not specific to
the African American community, but it is. If you talk
to a group of African Americans in the United States
today or you know, for many years now, they will say, no,
code switching is how we get by in white America basically.
(49:20):
And that's the idea that you may change the way
you talk when you're around white people, or change the
way you act then you normally would when you're in
you know, around your family and friends or your own community.
And that's a that's a big, big thing.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Yeah, And that's a great example of it. You could
also be like, my last name sounds pretty ethnic, and
I want to change it so that people call me
back for job interviews. There's a lot of stuff you
can do, so you're not you're covering your stigma, so
you're not an automatically discredited person. But according to Golfman,
you're discreditabull. If you're found out, you will be stigmatized.
(49:54):
So sure, it's a terrible situation all around, just to
stigmatize groups based on our betray you social norms. I
hate it.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Yeah. I remember in elementary school. I'm not going to
name her name name because I don't know if she
would want this out there, but there was a girl
from you know, an Indian American girl in our school
that came back after a summer with an Americanized first name.
And so she was that from fourth grade till SENI
year in high school when we graduated together and I
(50:23):
lost touch with her, and like five or six years ago,
my good friend in Boston said, oh, well, so and
so is in town. I said, oh, is she going
by that name now again? And she went back to
her you know, she grew up a little bit and
was like, no, that is that's my name, That's my
Indian name. And it just made me feel really good
that she reached that point, you know, good. Yeah, it
was great. So at you know, the furthest end of this,
(50:46):
I guess spectrum as autism. And we've talked about autism
here and there, but a lot of times, if you
have autism, you might have difficulty responding in what people
might consider an appropriate way in a social situation. And
masking is a big can be a big part of
self presentation when it comes to people with autism.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yes, but there's autism researchers Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose,
and they make they go to great pains to basically
say masking is different than impression management, right. Impression management
is something everyone has to do. Masking is specific to
typically neurodivergent people to where they are protecting themselves by
(51:30):
pushing down their actual identities and hiding it at all
costs because they're afraid of being stigmatized because they've been
taught over the years that that's not they're not acceptable
as they are. And so those are those are two
really different things, even though they seem pretty like they
have a lot in common.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Yeah, for sure. And masking, you know, there are all
kinds of people who mask. We talked about that in
the sociopath episode once again and got emails from people.
They're like, I'm a sociopath and I put on a
big performance, so people don't know that.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
Yeah. Yeah, they're just always walking around like I love
you man. Right, Yeah, just one note about autism, which
obviously deserves its own episodes still coming down the pike
one day. Don't worry about that. But you were talking
about just kind of learning. As you get older, you
know that you can't just you can't just make assumptions
(52:23):
about people based on their ability to interact socially. Yeah,
if you want to develop a familiarity and empathy for
people with autism, I think you could do a lot
worse than starting with Love on the Spectrum all seasons,
Australian version and American version.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
I think that is very sweet because that is like
the fifth time you've recommended that show to people.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
People need to watch the show. It's so great. This
season in America deserves an Emmy. It's a masterpiece.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
I've still never seen it.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
You really should. I think you'd love it. All right,
So I guess, Chuck, since I did my every tenth
episode mention of Love on the Spectrum, it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
Hey guys, I love the show is about popcorn. By
the way, Okay, just finished the podcast on popcorn. It
reminds me of a segment I saw years ago on
Alton Brown's Good Eats Alton Brown at Lanton and I
did a little work on that show back in the day.
It's a prop Scott Nice while not directly related to popcorn,
and Alton was a good due to work with. By
the way, nice, while not directly related to popcorn. In
(53:34):
this particular episode, the show's resident food anthropologists related to
a factoid on Montezuma's revenge. They thought mona Zuma's real
revenge was allowing the conquering Spaniards to return to Spain
with maize without the knowledge of nixtimalization, which resulted in
widespread pelligra or palagra, causing dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and eventual
(53:55):
death due to a lack of essential nutrients. Nyssen and
trip to Fan in their diets. Nixt to molization is
a traditional Mesoamerican process used to prepare maize and other
grains for consumption, involving cooking the grain and an alkaline solution,
typically limewater, which then allows for the outer paracarp the
skin to be easily removed. The process significantly improves the
(54:16):
digestibility and nutritional value of the grain. And that is
from Bob.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Bob, that was a great email. Yeah, well a top
notch one. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it.
Speaker 1 (54:27):
I agreed.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
If you want to be like Bob and send us
a really interesting, top notch email, we love that kind
of thing, you can send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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