Figure 4.1 Flow chart of interaction ritual.
INTERACTION MARKETS AND MATERIAL MARKETS
INDIVIDUALS MOVE through their everyday lives encountering other people with whom they carry out some degree of interaction ritual, ranging from the barest utilitarian encounters and failed rituals to intensely engaging ritual solidarity. Who each person will interact with and at what degree of ritual intensity depends on who he or she has the opportunity to encounter and what they have to offer each other that would attract them into carrying out an interaction ritual. Not everyone is going to be attracted to everyone else, and these patterns thus take on the character of a market for interaction rituals. Sociologists have long made use of particular versions of interpersonal markets: the marriage market; the dating market; in recent history, the evolution of the latter into a market for various kinds of shorter or longer-term sexual liasons—or set of markets, subdivided for example into heterosexual, gay, bisexual, etc. (Waller 1937; Laumann et al. 1994; Ellingson and Schroeder 2000). By extension, we can conceive of a friendship market, which among other things accounts for the tendency for people to find their friends in the same social class and culture group (Allan 1979; McPherson and Smith-Lovin 1987). With a further generalization, we arrive at a view of the entire macro-distribution of social encounters across time and space as a market for interaction rituals of varying degrees of intensity.
The market for interaction rituals provides a way of conceptualizing the connection between micro and macro. As critics of radical microsociology have pointed out, situations do not stand alone: any particular situation is surrounded by other situations that the participants have already been in; they may look ahead to other situations in the future, some of which are alternatives to interacting with the person one happens to have in front of him or her at the moment, like people at a cocktail party looking over the shoulder of their boring conversation partner to see who else they might talk to. This is just what makes interactions market-like. It also explains the quality that situations have: a degree of emergence, where things can happen that have not happened before and that an individual could not anticipate from his or her own experience alone; but also a degree of constraint or even coercion, such as in the feeling of being trapped because there are only certain people available whom one can talk with (or be friends with, have sex with, marry, etc.) and only certain ways of carrying out the talk (the sex, etc.) that will work.
Because of such emergence, it is sometimes claimed that situations are entirely unpredictable. Anyone who has ever been to a reception at a professional meeting, or struck up an acquaintance while traveling, or attended a party or a job interview, knows that this is far from true, down to the details of what people are going to say. But these are situations in which the individuals involved have a relatively limited stock of similar social symbols and therefore things to talk about, and so that is what comes out of their mouths—what do you do, where are you from, what are the differences between east coast and west coast, do you know so-and-so. If the situations are more wide open, and you as a participant do not know in advance much about what kind of people are going to be there—that is, you know nothing about their previous IR chains—the possibilities for what might happen appear to be an immense blank horizon. That is only to say, situations are sometimes very unpredictable from a single participant’s viewpoint. Situational action is predictable to a sociological observer who knows the individuals’ IR chains, and hence what emotional energy and stock of membership symbols each has coming into the interaction. In a rough way, this is just what an old-fashioned dinner hostess did in deciding who to seat next to whom. With more analytical refinement, a sociologist can examine the ingredients for making rituals that individuals have accumulated, and thereby predict what their combination of ingredients will bring about.
The market for interaction rituals gives us several insights. It gives us a theoretical model of how individuals will be motivated, not just in a single situation, but in the longer-run trajectories of their lives; and it shows how cultural symbols are passed along in chains, sometimes acquiring greater emotional resonance, sometimes losing it. Interactional markets might appear to be something that operate in people’s private, leisure lives, their times of sociability but not in the serious realm of work; sociological market models, after all, started out with marriage, dating, and sex. But a major extension is possible. In addition to interaction markets in the sense that we have been considering them, there are also material markets, by which I mean just those markets for goods and services that economists have traditionally studied. The two kinds of markets can be connected: we do this conceptually by seeing material markets as providing some of the conditions, the material underpinnings, that are among the ingredients for IRs to be initiated. Material conditions for interaction rituals are necessary but not sufficient, of course, since the main ingredients of IRs are emotions and symbols largely recycled from other IRs. But without the material conditions, even the most successful IRs must come to an end. Thus we can connect the two kinds of markets, for interactions per se and for material goods and services, as one flowing into the other; not only do material markets flow into the ingredients for IR markets, but IR markets also provide the crucial social components of material markets. As we shall see in more detail, there are several such components: the motivation to work and invest, and the so-called “human capital” of relationships and trust within which material markets are embedded.
I will start the analysis with the market for motivation, which is to say the market for emotional energy. This strategy of presenting the argument is useful because it points directly at a crucial aspect of the debate over the application of market models to sociology, and conversely at the underpinnings of mainstream economic analysis provided by economic sociology. I will begin by entering the terrain of rational choice theory, which is the most explicit attempt to apply economic models to social phenomena. Those familiar with the history of mid-twentieth-century sociology will remember that before this movement was called “rational choice” it existed indigeneously in sociology as “exchange theory,” and it was developed by sociologists such as Willard Waller, analyzing marriage markets, George Homans studying solidarity in small groups, and Peter Blau researching bureaucratic employees trading advice and conversational ploys at cocktail parties.1 My argument will be that market models of social interaction come up against some basic paradoxes, and that it is necessary to invoke the market for IRs in order to resolve them.
PROBLEMS OF THE RATIONAL COST-BENEFIT MODEL
The rational actor perspective has several appealing qualities for a sociological theory dedicated to building all explanations from micro-interaction. It begins with a motivated actor and avoids reifying macroentitites such as culture or structure; these are valid concepts only to the extent that they can be derived from the action of individuals. And it has a general explanatory strategy: all social action is explainable in terms of individuals attempting to optimize their expected benefits relative to the costs of their actions.
There are also a number of difficulties. First, there are classes of behavior that seem to escape from cost / benefit analysis. These include emotional behavior, altruism, and morally or value-motivated behavior generally. Persons will override material interests when these nonmaterial ends become salient. There is a related argument, going back to Durkheim’s “precontractual solidarity,” that exchanges based on rational self-interest cannot even take place unless there is a prior framework of values that established the rules within which such exchanges occur. Thus rational action might seem to be only a portion of human social action, indeed a subordinate part.
Second, there is no common metric that would make it possible for actors to compare costs and benefits among different spheres of action. Within the sphere of material goods and services, money can be used as a standard of value. With some stretching, one can also attempt to measure with money the value of personal health, safety, and life itself. But although such equivalences are made after the fact in insurance settlements and law suits, it is not clear that individuals themselves typically plan their actions by comparing, for example, danger to life and limb against a monetary equivalent. More widely, how do individuals choose between money, life, and honor? Is there a common metric for comparing power with these other goods? How much status or how much vengeance is equivalent to how much effort or physical risk or leisure, and can one assume such equivalences are stable across all times and all persons? To define all such goods as components of an abstract utility function of goods and services that individuals maximize is to beg the question of how individuals actually make a decision to pursue one good rather than another. To posit a preference schedule is merely ad hoc unless we can explain what forms it will take. And if persons do not have a common denominator, they may be rational in each sphere separately, but unpredictable in the way they jump from one sphere of action to another.
Third, there is a good deal of evidence that individuals in natural situations do very little calculating. The concept of “rational choice” may be more of a metaphor than an actuality. Goffman’s (1967) studies of naturalistic interaction show persons engaging predominantly in ritualized behavior. Garfinkel (1967) and his school of micro-researchers find that the most important “ethnomethods” are to avoid raising questions as to the rationale for behavior, in order to stay out of infinite regresses of contextual explanation. Garfinkel describes the usual procedures of social interaction as conservative with interactants assuming the normalcy of appearances, and engaging in ritual repairs to paste over episodes where interaction breaks down. The ethnomethodological findings are broadly similar to the “bounded rationality” school of organizational analysis, which ascribes to actors a limited cognitive capacity in the face of complexity. March and Simon’s (1958) “satisficing” and “troubleshooting” behavior parallels on the organizational level the preference for assuming background normalcy, which Garfinkel finds in everyday interactions—we might call this the “Simon and Garfinkel principle.” And finally, there is the evidence of psychological experiments (Kahneman et al. 1982; Frey and Eichenberger 1989) that show that actors presented with problems of calculation are biased toward nonoptimizing heuristics.
Evidence that individuals do not calculate very much in micro-situations, or that they calculate badly, need not undermine the rational actor theory more generally. The theory’s main proposition is that behavior moves toward those courses of action that give the greatest return of benefit over cost; individual’s behavior should be “rational” in this sense in the medium run, but it is not necessarily given how they arrive at this line of behavior. It could occur by trial and error. It may occur by sheer pressure of costs, so that certain lines of behavior are not possible to sustain. Action may well take place unconsciously, without conscious calculation, and still be constrained by rewards and costs. Unconscious behavior could come out at the same place as consciously calculated behavior. This is not to say that behavior must always be unconscious; but if an unconscious mechanism exists that leads toward medium-run optimizing outcomes, then individuals who rise to the level of conscious calculation would tend to come to the same conclusions as those exhibiting the non-conscious behavior.
In what follows, I will argue that all three of these problems may be solved in the same way. First, emotional, symbolic, and value-oriented behavior is determined by the dynamics of interaction rituals (IRs). Emotional energy generated by experience of group solidarity is the primary good in social interaction, and all such value-oriented behaviors are rationally motivated toward optimizing this good. Since IRs vary in the amount of solidarity they provide, and in their costs of participating, there is a market for ritual participation that shapes the distribution of individual behavior.
Second, IRs generate a variable level of emotional energy (EE) in each individual over time, and that EE operates as the common denominator in terms of which choices are made among alternative courses of action and disparate arenas of behavior. The valuation of money and of work occurs because of the way in which these fit into the market for IRs. Individuals apportion their time to these various activities to maximize their overall flow of EE. The economy of participation in interaction rituals is an integral component of the economy of goods and services.
Third, I invoke the model of micro-situational cognition, such that individual thinking is determined by the emotional energy and the cognitive symbols generated by interaction rituals. This is congruent with micro-situational evidence of noncalculating behavior; while the aggregation of micro-situations (interaction ritual chains) is subject to interactional markets that bring about rational tendencies in the medium-run drift of behavior.
THE RATIONALITY OF PARTICIPATING IN INTERACTION RITUALS
Figure 2.1 presented the IR model in the form of a flowchart of ritual ingredients and ritual outcomes. Here I will put this model to use, showing how the emotional energy outcome (EE) is the key to individual long-term motivation. Let us look at the IR model again, now given in figure 4.1 with greater detail on feedback processes.
There are two kinds of feedbacks—short term and long term. The first we have already considered, as the intitiating ingredients (physical density and barriers to outside involvement) that feed into mutual focus and emotional entrainment, which in turn reciprocally builds up to the situational engrossment that Durkheim called collective effervescence.
Long-term feedbacks occur when the outcomes of one IR feed back into the conditions that make it possible to carry out a subsequent IR. Persons who have gone through an IR experience giving them a feeling of group solidarity want to do the ritual again, especially when they are feeling that the solidarity is beginning to dissipate. Hence the long feedback loop (the dotted line in figure 4.1) from group solidarity back to reassembling the group. Emotional energy also facilitates further IRs, in part because persons with high EE have the enthusiasm to set off a new emotional stimulus and pump up other people (an obvious example is the charismatic politician or evangelical religious leader; in the private sphere, an enthusiastic individual who initiates a conversation); in part because persons with high EE have the energy to make strong efforts to reassemble the group, or to collect a new group. And finally, when people have membership symbols pumped up with significance from past IRs, they possess cognitive devices for reminding themselves of past rituals, and also a repetoire of emblems and emblematic actions that they can use as a visible focus of attention or a shared activity to get an interaction focused again. This is how a single IR becomes an IR chain.2
Interaction rituals operating at high levels produce all of the values that are usually thought to evade explanation by rational choice theory. Religious commitment originates in ritual assemblies, and is intense to the degree that high levels of mutual entrainment are sustained by members of a group. Conflict situations produce dedication and willingness to sacrifice oneself when the experience of mobilization or combat is a high-density interaction ritual with the extremely salient initiating emotions of fear and anger, which are experienced collectively by a group and transformed into solidarity. Dedication to political ideals is anchored in rituals of large-scale group assembly. Similarly, there are small-scale, more personal interactions that produce altruistic behavior: friendship that reaches high degrees of solidarity from successful interaction rituals in relatively scarce, intimate conversations; sexual love resulting from high-intensity erotic IRs; parentchild love deriving from the rhythmic cuddling and playing that parents do with infants and small children and that both sides find so delightful. All of these experiences are regarded by the individuals involved as extremely rewarding. Successful IRs, either in large or intimate groups, are regarded by most people as the most significant events of their lives.
How does one apply a rationality model to IR-based emotional solidarity? Solidarity is a good; and individuals are motivated to maximize the amount of solidarity they can receive, relative to costs of producing it. Solidarity, however, is a collective good; it can only be produced cooperatively. But it is a fairly simple type of collective structure. Interaction rituals are not subject to the free rider problem. A solidarity game has a structure like that in figure 4.2:
Both A and B get solidarity payoffs only if both contribute to maintaining a mutual focus of attention and allow themselves to be drawn into the common emotional buildup; and the higher levels of payoff depend upon each sustaining the focus to equal lengths. Given a taste for solidarity (or for its correlate, emotional energy), it is highly rational for individuals to join in an interaction ritual when they can.
Complexities could be added. Larger groups reduce dependence upon any particular individual. An individual who does not participate in the ritual carried out among other persons, but only passively observes it, reaps a much lower level of solidarity from it, and so the overall structure of incentives remains similar to the two-person group. Figure 4.2 includes no cost of participating in a ritual. In actuality there is at least some cost of effort; but since successful IRs generate emotional energy, individuals feel invigorated and feel that they have more than recouped the cost. An interaction ritual is costly only if one or a minority of participants put a great deal of effort into it unsuccessfully. Whether this happens depends on conditions outside a single ritual situation, especially the emotional motivation and the repertoire of emotionally charged symbols that the whole array of individuals bring to the situation, which in turn depend upon their opportunities in the ritual marketplace as a whole. I will introduce such cost conditions as we broaden the analysis from the single situation to an array of alternative situations.
THE MARKET FOR RITUAL SOLIDARITY
If it is always rational within the immediate situation to take part in an interaction ritual, what limits an individual’s participation? Why should high-intensity rituals ever end, and why should people spend any part of their lives doing anything else? In the short run, interaction rituals come to an end because of emotional satiation. There is a diminishing marginal utility, in that emotional arousal plateaus at some point; beyond this point solidarity remains high for some period but mutual emotional arousal fades. This is a physiological characteristic of emotions.3 This short-run satiation, however, does not eliminate the tendency to medium-run repetition of these rewarding situations. We will examine this point in more detail. Successful IRs give individuals both emotional energy and membership symbols, which are resources easily reinvested in producing further IRs. The result, one can foresee, is that there will be an intermittent chain of IRs of the same kind, repeating as soon as the short-term satiation periods are over.4
This pattern of intermittent ritual assemblies is empirically realistic to a degree; people do develop a taste for church services, for parties with their friends, or for political rallies. But can we explain how such propensities wax and wane? What determines which IRs an individual will join rather than some other rituals, and why some individuals develop more of a taste for ritual solidarity than other persons? To answer this we will consider the positions of individuals in the overarching market for ritual interactions.
Reinvestment of Emotional Energy and Membership Symbols
Interaction rituals are cumulative not only in the short run but also in the medium run. That is, individuals who have taken part in successful IRs develop a taste for more ritual solidarity of the same sort, and are motivated to repeat the IR. This happens through the production of emotional energy (EE) in individuals, and the creation of symbols representing group membership.
The emotional energy of individuals goes up and down depending upon the intensity of the IRs in which they have taken part. EE is transitory. It is highest at the peak intensity of an interaction ritual itself, and leaves an energetic afterglow that gradually decreases over time. The time-decay of EE has not been measured; a reasonable approximation may be that it has a “half-life” between a few hours and a few days, although it may well be modified by experience in further IRs within that period. EE is not solely determined by IRs; we should not rule out the possibility that low EE (depression) is influenced by physiological conditions; similarly high EE can be pumped up at least briefly by alcohol, drugs, and other bodily inputs. This is indicated in figure 4.1 by the arrow from other physiological conditions to emotional energy in individuals. What I would insist upon, though, is that any such physiological inputs flow through the full set of IR processes, and thus are amplified or diminished by them (and vice versa).5 Some IRs use these kinds of physiological pump-primers (e.g., alcohol at a party) as part of the technology of ritual production.
A person’s fund of EE is one of the key resources that determines his or her ability to produce further interaction rituals. Individuals who have stored up a high level of EE can create a focus of attention around themselves, and stir up common emotions among others. Such high-EE persons are sociometric stars; at the extreme they are charismatic leaders. Lacking such unusually high levels of EE, the emotional energy generated in prior IRs facilitates subsequent IRs of moderate intensity. At the other extreme, individuals whose prior experience in IRs has given them little emotional energy, lack one of the key resources to become initiators of subsequent high-intensity interactions. Their depressed mood can even depress others, so that they are avoided in the market for interactional partners.
EE is one key resource in a market for IRs. Some individuals have more EE resources than others to invest in IRs; we can expect accordingly that some individuals will demand more return for their EE investment than others. And some individuals will have a greater range of opportunities to invest their EE successfully, whereas others will have few situations in which they can successfully be admitted as participants. Accordingly we expect that EE-rich individuals will be less committed to a particular region of the market, whereas others are tied to the only groups that will accept them.
The other key resource in the market of interactions is membership symbols, the items upon which a group has focused attention during an interaction ritual. All items of culture lie somewhere in this continuum of symbolic arousal; they are loaded in varying degrees with membership significance, ranging from low to high, in relation to particular groups. The possession of highly charged membership symbols facilitates subsequent IRs. When several individuals value the same collective symbol, it is easy for them to evoke it in an interaction and achieve a high degree of focus around it. It provides a content to talk about or a focus for action. Collective symbols tend to be used repeatedly in IRs of a well-established group, and hence to be recharged with feelings of solidarity; the symbols and the interactions are chained together over time.
Match-Ups of Symbols and Complementarity of Emotions
At any moment in time, a population of individuals have varying degrees of EE and varying stocks of collective symbols, charged up with membership commitments by their previous experience in IRs. Their behavior can be predicted through a market process. Individuals move toward those interaction that feel like the highest intensity interaction rituals currently available; that is to say, they move toward the highest EE payoffs that they can get, relative to their current resources. Since membership symbols are specific to particular groups, some forms of cultural capital do not match up well in some interactions: the interaction ritual does not reach a high level of intensity, and the EE payoff is low. Individuals are motivated to move away from such interactions. Where membership symbols of the participants match up well, IRs are successful, and the EE payoff attracts them toward such situations.
In the micro-situations of everyday life, the process of matching up symbols takes place largely as a conversational marketplace: who talks to whom, and at what length and with what degree of enthusiasm. Talking is determined by participants matching up things they have to talk about. The extent to which they are willing to talk to each other depends also on the comparisons each makes, implicitly or explicitly, to other conversations they could be having with other people in their network, who have varying stocks of symbols. Each conversationalist compares the topics possible in the match-ups offered according to how much they find them interesting, important, entertaining, or culturally prestigious. Each conversation takes place in the context of a market for possible conversations; choices are spread out in time, but sometimes the situation presents a visibly market-like character as in a cocktail party where there are many possible conversational matchups and any conversation can be broken off to take up another.
Persons with more resources can demand more in exchange from those they interact with; the symbol-rich and the EE-rich more easily get bored and dissatisfied with a conversation. There is a tendency for unequals in symbolic possessions to exchange little with each other and move on to find a more equal matchup. Whether this happens or not in a particular situation depends on additional conditions: whether there are opportunities to shift to someone else, and who is available—the interesting persons to talk to at the cocktail party may be already tied up, much like the belle of the ball who had her dance card fully filled (in an earlier era, to be sure, when there were such things as dance cards). The degree of constraint on staying with or moving away from the current conversation depends not only on the local match-up but also on the extent to which tight match-ups prevail in the surrounding conversational marketplace. Conversations between unequals are also affected by the relative EE levels of the participants, which can sometimes motivate one to defer to the other and the other to accept the deference rather than breaking off the conversation.
The chain of IRs over time is given schematically in figure 4.3. Person A and Person B encounter each other, each possessing a level of EE and stock of symbols as of time 1. The degree of success or failure of whatever IR takes place now transforms the EE and symbol stock for each; EE is increased, decreased, or recharged at the same level at which it came in. Symbols are charged with greater significance, or are drained of it by their failure in the IR, and, in addition, new stocks of symbols might be acquired. A and B now leave the encounter, primed with levels of EE and symbol stocks that they can use in their next encounter, which schematically might take place with C, D, or again with each other.
The stock of symbols an individual can use during an encounter comes to a considerable extent from their prior IR chain. New symbols can also be created, if the IR is at least moderately successful, and in two ways. This could happen unilaterally, as one person passes new symbols to the other; this could be regarded as symbolic learning during an encounter, the transfer of symbolic capital through a network, but with one proviso: this is not simply cognitive learning by filling one’s memory banks, but acquiring symbols that have a membership significance and an EE charge. What an individual can “learn” from an encounter that is socially significant is what symbols mean for membership in a particular group; this might take place by experiencing the social use of some symbol that one already has some acquaintance with but up until now had not felt its significance. Acquiring symbols from other people is a process that builds up over time, as one comes to feel the membership resonances more deeply. To be naïve is not just to have never heard of something significant, but perhaps, more embarrassingly, to have heard of it but have no sense of what it means, and thus to refer or react to it inappropriately.
New symbols are also sometimes created collectively within a conversational interaction. This usually comes from a very successful IR, reaching a high level of mutual focus and emotional entrainment. Here the converation may generate new ideas and insights, or coin a new phrase and launch a buzzword, a witticism worth remembering, jokes worth recirculating. The events of the encounter itself may become symbolic resources as well, if the encounter creates a new level of reflection about other people or the participants’ understanding of each other. It becomes memorable—and an object of further reflection and symbolic recirculation—when it brings a dramatic change in relationships, such as forging or breaking an alliance or setting off an antagonism between the participants. In this respect there is a parallel between love affairs and business or professional relationships: in the heightened excitement of the flirtation and negotiation period, the creation of emotionally loaded symbolic stocks is facilitated.
I have illustrated the process of matchups from the natural rituals of conversations. The pattern is similar with other kinds of natural rituals. These include collective participation in events such as games and entertainment. Some of these gatherings are commercial, and it might seem that one needs no prior cultural capital to gain entrée, but only the price of a ticket. But without some degree of symbolic stock, you are not likely to be a very deeply involved participant, capturing little of the emotional resonances of the entertainment ritual that give it the sense of a collective membership symbol. Typically you need to have acquired some of the symbols from one’s prior experience in a network of encounters, or to be accompanied by someone who explains what is going on and inducts you into the proper frame of experiencing it. Such transfer of symbolic stocks is all the more necessary where entertainment is put on privately: traditionally in such social pastimes as music-making, singing, dancing, or card-playing; contemporarily in music listening or sports. The forms of leisure rituals historically change but their significance as membership symbols does not (even though during the late twentieth century sociable gatherings generally eliminated most participatory rituals except conversation and television-watching).
Such activities create palpable boundaries or rankings among those who are more accomplished than others. All these activities involve gradations of skill, which are typically remarked upon by those present and recycled afterward in converations and thus become part of individuals’ social reputations; some persons are better dancers, better singers, better players at a game whether it be bridge, nineteenth-century English cricket, or twentieth-century American pickup basketball games. Skill in such activities is part of the stock of membership symbols, reminding us that symbols are not things or even merely cognitions, but ways of communicating membership. Talking is the process of using verbal symbols with greater or lesser effect on the focus of attention and emotional entrainment, and thus includes the style and rhythm of talk as much as the sheer abstract stock of symbols that persons remember. Dancing is a bodily symbol, an enactment of a degree of membership, whether it was done (in a prior historical era) by proper performance of a stately minuet or by inability to perform anything but a peasant dance, or by displaying no dancing skills at all (a nineteenth-century hostess would have said “having no social graces”). Transposed into a different time and arena, there are similar inclusions and exclusions in knowing or not knowing the manners of the mosh pit. These are bodily enacted symbols, directly performing membership with the persons danced with or played with in a game; and the same is true of the behavior of persons listening collectively to music and displaying or failing to display enjoyment at the appropriate moments through such rituals as applause. All such natural rituals, then, even without passing along conversational symbols, buildup from the ingredients of symbolic stocks that participants bring to the interaction, and at their conclusion leave those participants with a renewed or altered stock of membership symbols.
The process of reinvesting and recycling symbol stocks occurs by participation in formal rituals as well as informal ones. The individual needs to be in the flow of prior symbols, or opportunities to be introduced to them, to take part successfully in the ritual of an aristocratic court, in church ceremonial, in the formalities of political institutions. The sum of one’s symbolic membership stock is made up of symbols used in conversational IRs, in other natural rituals, and in formal rituals; while the relative value of formal and informal rituals has changed historically, some such overall stocks of symbols remain crucial for negotiating the chain of situations that makes up everyone’s lives.
The simplest version of IR markets are static and self-reproducing; this is the model that Bourdieu posits as omnipresent. Those who know formal rituals best go on carrying them out, keeping up a round of membership in these elite circles of public attention; those without symbolic knowledge remain excluded, and never have the opportunity to acquire the most prestigious membership symbols. Similarly in informal rituals of conversations, the popular stars of sociability go on reproducing their own conversational capital, and the symbol-poor and the unpopular remain excluded, and must be satisfied with their own low-intensity, low-prestige conversations.
This simple model of the reproduction of market dominance in IR markets, however, does not yet take account of the place that EE plays in the process of negotiating encounters. For a successful IR to take place, it is not simply a matter of person A and person B matching up their membership symbols, and similarly matching up their EE levels. Two high-EE persons do not necessarily get along with each other well. Each is used to being in the center of attention, taking the initiative, dominating the conversation, controlling the ritual. In politics, charismatic leaders are not close associates of each other but are usually quite separate; they might even be rivals, each surrounded by their distinct social circles.6 And so it goes with popular hostesses, leaders of street gangs, ebullient jokers who are the life of the party. There is room in any gathering for only a limited amount of attention space, and for some to be in the center means others must be more passive or peripheral.
The theory of IR chains implies that persons who already have very high EE, and thus are good at charging up a gathering as its emotional leader, will choose gatherings in which they are most likely to be in the center of attention, and to avoid gatherings where they have to share the spotlight with others of equal emotional dominance. At the opposite end of the spectrum, very low-EE persons may be consigned to each other’s company by the IR market, but that does not mean they will seek each other out. One generally observes that low-status, marginal persons at the fringe of a cocktail party do not create countercircles with their own effervescence rivaling those at the center of the party, but remain relatively dispersed.
The typical pattern is for high-EE persons to interact with those of moderate EE.7 Moderate levels of EE provide entrée into a potentially successful IR. A collection of such persons will have the energy to initiate a focused encounter, and if they also share symbols to generate a strong mutual focus, their mutual entrainment and buildup of effervescence will increase the EE level for everyone. Another pathway is that the person who is already an energy star, highly pumped up by the previous IR chain, acts as a unique catalyst, getting the encounter going focused around him or herself, with the result of further reinforcing his / her EE. Thus particular combinations of EE may result in shifts in the distribution of symbolic capital, and result in more dynamic patterns than a simple reproduction of stratification by the recycling of cultural capital.
Because individuals with high-EE levels do not generally want to match up with other similar individuals on the EE dimension—even though there is a tendency to match up on the symbolic dimension—there arise occasions for trade-offs. High-EE individuals generally have opportunities to accumulate a lot of symbolic capital; but if they interact with a group of followers, EE-poorer as well as symbol-poorer, some of the latter can acquire symbols that they did not already have. This is done by being willing to be subordinate, to give deference, to be part of the supporting cast and not vie for the center of attention. The willingness to do so is the result of emotional complementarities. Persons with high emotional energy are by definition full of confidence, and subjectively full of pride; they expect to dominate encounters, and expect their symbolic capital to be appreciated. An individual whose EE is very high compared to his or her relative symbolic resources in that situation (i.e., the person is used to dominating interactions but is currently overmatched by being unfamiliar with the local membership symbols being used) is unlikely to act humbly enough to learn the new symbols by paying deference to those who can impart them. High-EE persons thus tend to stay within their own orbits of cultural exchange; if the IR market moves away from them, they may have difficulty adjusting, becoming embittered and angry at the loss of their centrality. Very low-EE persons, at the other extreme, are not very good at acquiring new cultural stocks situationally either; they are too depressed to get into the group, too likely to repel others with their depression, or too likely to become the butt of their jokes and occasions for in-group entertainment by the more popular.
Between these extremes, persons in the shifting mid-range of EE may often find themselves in interactional matchups where they feel over-matched but not debilitatingly so. Their moderate level of EE leaves them emotionally willing to defer to others at least locally and situationally, and in return to get infusions of new symbolic capital from other persons whose previous IR chains have left them better stocked. In this way, changes in the distribution of symbolic resources can occur; the result is symbolic mobility, and as the enriched stock of symbols is successfully reinvested, EE mobility as well. The EE-rich and the symbol-rich can fall, and the EE-moderate (if not the EE-poor) and the symbol-deprived can rise. Thus there is volubility in IR markets.
In sum, the circulation of symbols takes place generally by matching up similar symbols among persons who are already primed to give them similar membership significance. EE also circulates and is reproduced, but via a pattern of complementarity rather than in direct matchups among persons of identical EE. Thus IR markets have a local stratification: circles with their EE leaders in the center of attention, surrounded by EE followers, with a penumbra of the EE-poor or EE-outcasts. But symbols can be composed of many different things, and collective focus on these different symbols sustains many different groups and many different kinds of gatherings or milieux: those focusing on specific realms of professional or business affairs, leisure-time specialists in carousing, followers of various arenas of entertainment, devotées of religious practices, political enthusiasts, intellectual circles.
This poses a theoretical problem: if individuals are EE-seekers, but there are many different arenas of interaction, and thus many different ways they could get EE, how do they choose among them? These are disparate realms of symbol circulation, which often stand in a “horizontal” relationship to one another; they are not a homogeneous currency of cultural capital marked along the single dimension of high and low.
The answer is that individual “choices” come about, not by comparing symbols along a scale of their objective value, but purely from the viewpoint of the individual actor in the flow of situations in which those symbols are used. Individuals feel their way toward those situations in which, through the local combination of ingredients for making an IR happen, the EE payoff is highest. EE operates as a common denominator for choosing among symbolic currencies. The world is symbolically heterogeneous, full of different pockets of meaning; individuals negotiate their paths through their world, simple or chaotic as it may be, on the flow of emotional energy. And that is to say, on the relative success or failure of IRs in producing EE for their participants, situation by situation.
Attraction toward or repulsion from particular situations often happens automatically, without much self-awareness, as individuals simply feel their energies pulled into certain interactions and away from others. Under certain circumstances, individuals may plan ahead, deliberately thinking through possible interactions. The key component of such “imaginative rehearsal” (in symbolic interactionist terminology) is the EE loading of the concepts with which they carry out the thinking; thus IR chains indirectly affect conscious reflection over courses of action.
From an economic point of view, there are numerous imperfections in the market for IRs. Many or most individuals are prevented from trying out a wide range of alternative interactions, by ecological or social barriers. There is no implication that IR markets produce a social optimum or a market-clearing price. The market for social interactions is best described as a series of local barter markets, shaped by the ecological conditions of the society. It remains the case that individuals, confronted with interactional situations, move toward those that give the highest payoff in emotional energy. Individuals’ behavior in regard to interaction rituals is rational behavior.
EMOTIONAL ENERGY AS THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF RATIONAL CHOICE
Emotional energy is the common denominator in terms of which individuals decide among alternative IRs. Whether one is most attracted to a church service, a political rally, or an intimate conversation is determined by each individual’s expectations of the magnitude of EE flowing from that situation. Since EE is highest during an intense IR in progress, but decays with time after the IR is ended, recency is an important feature of which IR has the strongest emotional attraction at a given time.
But how do individuals decide between emotional payoffs from IRs and other kinds of goods? Does this model imply that individuals are social solidarity junkies, who will always choose in favor of a church ritual or a sociable encounter (whichever has highest EE), and against going to work or saving one’s money? Let us broaden the analysis of the market for IRs. As figure 4.4 indicates, IRs have costs in addition to the reinvestment of emotional energy and of membership symbols, which we have just considered. Thus at the left side of the IR model there is the market for material goods and services (for short, “material market”), which flows into the IR market. The two markets can be analyzed as a single, unitary market if one is willing to begin with the IR market side as the ultimate determinant of valuation of goods in both markets. That is to say, the IR market producing emotional energy can be used to generate the valuation by individuals of material goods and services, but not vice versa: we cannot get a preference schedule for EE from the preference schedule for money or any other good within the material goods market.
Figure 4.4 Interaction ritual and production of material resources.
I am not contending that individuals always value social solidarity more highly than material goods. What I will attempt to show, however, is that we can predict under what circumstances individuals spend relative amounts of effort in each particular sphere. I will attempt to show that EE operates as a common denominator facilitating choice.
There are three ways in which material production becomes part of a unitary process of motivational choice. (I) Material conditions are part of the resources necessary for carrying out IRs; hence to maximize EE, individuals will have to put some energy into producing these material conditions for IRs. As the market for IRs becomes both more expansive and expensive, it generates motivation for expanding material production as well. One may recognize here a twist on the Weberian theme that religion (more generally, IRs) motivates capitalism (material markets). (II) In addition, material production itself takes place in situations that generate their own levels of EE. There are naturally occuring IRs within people’s work lives, which determines that some persons will get most of their EE from working. In this way we can explain why some persons become “workaholics” and money fetishists, persons who value these activities and goods more than would be predicted merely from the material market alone. Both (I) and (II) integrate the market for material production with the market for IRs. We will also discuss a third pathway integrating the two kinds of markets: (III) how the social embedding that makes material markets possible is provided by the flow of IRs among market participants.
(I) Material Production Is Motivated by the Need for Resources for Producing IRs
If we grant that individuals pursue EE payoffs of participating in interaction rituals, it is also true that individuals need material goods and that they will spend a certain amount of time and effort in working to procure them. How then do they calculate whether to work or to seek the best available payoff in EE? My suggestion is that people rarely find it necessary to make such choices. The conditions for a successful IR include assembling the group, focusing attention, excluding extraneous activities and nonparticipants. Where such conditions do not occur naturally, by ecological or organizational accident, work must be put into making them happen. Group members have to put effort into assembling. Homes, church buildings or convention halls are important for staging an IR by setting boundaries and facilitating a focus of attention; highly institutionalized rituals invest in special costumes or props. There are costs of transportation, real property, and other material means for the production of rituals. The cost of entering a ritual that has an ongoing history, is familiarity with the stock of symbols that participants use as a medium of attention. To achieve ritual solidarity at a scientific convention requires the investment of many years of education and experience; to get the solidarity payoff as popularity leader in a round of parties requires another type of investment, in the accoutrements, skills, and transient fads of sociability. Any kind of IR typically has some level of material costs that went into producing the current level of cultural capital of its participants.
As indicated in figure 4.4, the market for ritual participation is constrained by the material resources of would-be participants. If this is the case, the motivation of individuals for work is affected by the market for ritual participation. Suppose someone prefers to spend all of their time in religious, political, or sociable rituals, and never do any work for material rewards. Unless this individual has previously accumulated sufficient property, she or he will eventually be unable to participate in IRs for lack of material resources to attend or take part. At the extreme, this individual will be unable to feed or shelter him or herself, and become physically incapable of any action at all. The market for materially nonproductive IRs is self-correcting in this respect. If individuals spend so much time in IRs that their material resources dry up, the rituals break down, and participants have to return to materially productive work until they have accumulated enough resources to stage another ritual.
This is empirically the case. High-intensity rituals (church services, political rallies, parties) are scheduled only intermittently, to make time for work. When conditions for IR mobilization are extremely high—such as a time of revolutionary upheaval, which generates very strong emotions and a collective focus of attention around the fight for political control—work grinds to a halt. Nevertheless, such high levels of mobilization dissipate over a matter of days or weeks because it becomes materially impossible to sustain mass participation without break.
Starting from the assumption that individuals care about nothing but maximizing their EE, we arrive at the conclusion that materially productive work will also take place, precisely to the degree that there are material expenses for taking part in IRs. The assumption of EE primacy may seem extreme, but nevertheless it is in keeping with major sociological themes: that humans find life meaningful only if they are integrated into a social group (Durkheim’s analysis of suicide); that social definitions determine the value of objects and activities; that status-ranking within groups is a powerful motivational force. What the model of a market for IRs does is give a predictive mechanism for the variations in EE-seeking within a population; and it links this to the material costs of producing IRs.
The motivational links between the IR market and the material production market takes place at two points: motivation to invest in production, and motivation to take part in the market for consumer goods. The motivation to seek material goods can be manifested through investing either labor or capital; here IR market theory meshes with conventional economics, in that individuals’ availability of these resources and their relative opportunities for returns affect the particular mix of investment. The theory of IR markets leaves intact much of existing economic analysis of the movement of prices, production, and finances. What IR theory adds is an empirically determinative mechanism for the flow of motivation to work and to invest, from the realm of social interactions into the realm of economic quantitites. EE-seeking affects not only production but consumption. IR market theory implies that the market for consumer goods is driven by the extent to which such goods are direct or indirect inputs into the IRs through which EE is distributed. IR market theory suggests the need for a range of empirical research on this point. The market for automobiles or other means of transportation, the market for clothing, the market for entertainment as well as for religious or political ceremonial, the market for homes and buildings as places of assembly and display: all of this can be charted historically in relation to the kind of IR markets that they sustain, and in relation to their pull upon economic production.
I have proposed that individuals’ motivation to work, invest, and consume is predictable from their market opportunities and constraints in the sphere of IRs. The analysis that I have just given of the market for EE is a micro-economics, designed to show the rationality of the behavior of the individual in such a market. The macro-economics of such markets remains to be studied. One hypothesis is that we should not necessarily expect a negative correlation between high levels of IR participation and high degrees of effort put into materially productive work. On the contrary, where there are high IR payoffs for an increasing part of the population, and while the costs of rituals are also rising, many individuals are strongly motivated to work to be able to afford the requisite level of investment in IR participation. This has been suggested, for example, in the economics of tribal societies: Mauss (1925/1967) argued that tribes that periodically assemble for competitive potlatch ceremonies are highly productive during the remainder of the year in order to produce the goods necessary for an impressive potlatch. Sahlins (1972) shows that the ostentatious ceremonial of the tribal big-man structure acts as a collection point for material goods.
We have an opposing image of precapitalist societies as ones in which work motivation is kept to a minimum, merely covering subsistence, because most attention is devoted to the ceremonial aspects of life. This is in part a legacy of Weber’s vision of medieval Catholic society draining off social energy into religious ceremonial; hence the Protestant Reformation, in abolishing monastic and clerical excesses, turned this energy into the secular economy. Weber’s analysis is empirically wrong, although it contains the germ of a useful analytical point. Religious energy can indeed be turned into economic activity: what Weber overlooked was that there was an economic takeoff of the Catholic Middle Ages, which centered on the capital accumulation and investment by the monasteries themselves (Gimpel 1976; Southern 1970; Collins 1986, 45–76). Religious ceremonial is not the only kind of interaction ritual, although for a period it was the leading sector that organized the most energy and attracted the most material investment. The period of secularization in Europe that began with the Renaissance and Reformation was to a large extent the spilling over of the market for IRs into secular channels, at first through the courts of the nobility, later into a vast middle-class market for entertainment and status display. The analytical point is that IRs, whether religious or secular, can be the leading edge of expansion of economic production. I suggest a more precise formulation: it is the expansion of a market for IRs, rather than the static size of the IR sector, which shapes the flow of EE and brings about changes in the motivation of material production.
(II) Emotional Energy Is Generated by Work-Situation IRs
The foregoing has analyzed the condition in which work and leisuretime rituals are mutually exclusive, and has attempted to show that a high demand for leisure IRs will create a high demand for the material inputs for staging such rituals. In many instances, however, materially productive work and the production of emotional energy through IRs are not mutually exclusive. Every social situation exists somewhere on the continuum of conditions that make it a low, medium, or high-intensity IR. Conditions in the realm of work generate their own degrees of emotional energy and solidarity, ranging from zero up through very high intensities. At the high end of the spectrum, some work situations generate high levels of EE in their participants: the business executive at the center of a decision-making network, the busy professional, the skilled craftsperson surrounded by advice-seekers and apprentices, the salesman in a favorable marketplace. There is a type of charisma in the realm of work, produced by the same variables that operate in nonpractical IRs. Individuals whose work life consists of high levels of ritual interaction density will have high levels of EE, and find their work lives to be highly motivating for them, more so than sociable or other nonwork interactions.8 The slang term for such people is “workaholics.”
For persons in such situations, there is no conflict between material rewards and EE incentives. The same structure typically gives them both high EE and high material payoffs. They are at the center of favorable market or authority networks, which simultaneously generate high ritual density and high income. Under these circumstances, there is no need for the individual to calculate the financial payoff of their time and effort. If they simply follow the flow of emotional energy, it will lead them into those work situations that bring them the greatest (or at least acceptably high) material payoff as well.
The IR model is also capable of predicting when individuals will be most consciously focused upon monetary calculations. High-intensity IR makes a sacred object, a membership symbol, out of whatever object is the focus of attention within the interactional situation.9 Some work situations are explicitly focused upon money: above all, sales negotiations and financial dealings. Individuals who experience high IR intensity in such situations will be most strongly motivated to treat money, or the process of monetary calculation itself, as the highest good. Ironically, it is not because monetary calculation is intrinsically the highest good that they act this way; this becomes the attitude of individuals precisely to the extent that they are involved in IRs that focus them upon monetary calculation. They become money-making junkies. For such individuals, there is no diminishing marginal utility of money, even at very high levels. The IR model predicts that billionaires will continue to seek yet higher profits, precisely to the extent that their lives are organized around IRs of financial dealing, and that these IRs bring higher EE payoffs than the alternative ritual occasions available to them.10
A similar process operates at all levels throughout the labor force. Many individuals experience moderate or weak levels of IR intensity at their work. The IR model predicts that they are much less committed to their work, and to the material payoffs it brings.
Individuals who work alone constitute a special case. If no additional conditions are present, the IR model predicts that they have very weak EE incentives to put effort into their work. They will continue to work because they need material resources in order to live and to participate in nonwork IRs that offer them more EE. But how do we explain individuals who work alone but nevertheless show high levels of work motivation?
The strongest example of such individuals are persons in intellectual occupations, such as writers and scientists. A special application of IR theory explains their behavior: their work consists in organizing systems of symbols, which are in turn emblems of membership in particular groups within the intellectual world. Intellectual creativity consists in making mental coalitions among ideas, representing real coalitions that can be established among their corresponding intellectual groups. Evidence supports this model on several points. Creative scientists and other intellectuals have high emotional energy; this is indicated by their personality descriptions and by the fact that the most eminent intellectuals also tend to be the most prolific producers (Simonton 1984, 1988; Price 1986). And such creative individuals tend to have the closest network contacts with other highly active intellectuals; creativity clusters in social groups within the intellectual field (Collins 1998). Thus creative intellectuals are pumped up with the EE of being close to the center of ongoing intellectual action, at the intense center of intellectual IR chains.11
No doubt there are other sources of psychic benefit in work besides the EE that it generates from the surrounding social relationships. For instance, there is the pleasure in exercising a skill, and perhaps the aesthetic aspects of a work setting. The IR-market theory proposes, however, that EE-maximizing is by far the strongest of such motivations, and that the distribution of IRs at work gives a good approximation to the motivating effects of work situations.
If one had a survey of the IR intensity of all interaction situations, one could calculate the distribution of EE payoffs to all persons, both in their work and their nonwork experiences. From this it would be possible to describe an overall market dynamic as individuals attempt to maximize EE. Putting together (I) the motivation for material work, investment, and consumption driven by the distribution of leisuretime IRs, and (II) the distribution of EE produced indigenously by IR conditions in the social relations of work, we can arrive at an overall picture of the flow of EE into economic activities.
(III) Material Markets Are Embedded in an Ongoing Flow of IRs Generating Social Capital
It has often been pointed out that markets—which is to say, material markets—are embedded in social structures or cultures without which the markets would not be able to function, or to come into existence in the first place (Granovetter 1985; DiMaggio 2002). This so-called “social capital” has often been discussed, and I will make only the following points. There are two main aspects of embedding: shared trust among coparticipants in economic activities, and, more generally, a set of ground rules, customs, or procedures that define what the actors are doing and how they can expect each other to do it.
Shared trust, which is often what is meant by “social capital” in the narrow sense of the term, is generally attributed to network ties. Quite so; and what we mean by network ties, when viewed microsociologically as events in the flow of everyday life, consist in a certain kind of repeated social interaction. A casual encounter does not usually count as a “tie”; what is meant are interactions that take place repeatedly and that are picked out by the participants themselves as significant (e.g., network researchers usually start with a questionnaire asking to list “three best friends,” “people you talk about business problems with,” etc.). Network ties are a particular kind of IR chain, those in which similar symbols and emotions are recycled and sometimes augmented—and to a higher degree than other interactions those persons have with other people. Thus the amount of “social capital” that individuals have is determined by the extent to which there is an ongoing flow of micro-situational ingredients for successful IRs—and IRs that are attractive enough compared to other possible interactions so that they are repeated instead of broken off.
Another way to say this is that positions in networks are created and sustained on the micro-level by the degree of success of IRs. Networks are not fixed, although it is convenient for us as network analysts to treat them as fixed and preexisting so that we can examine the effects of being in different network positions. Network ties become created by just the kind of matchups of membership symbols and emotional energies that I have been discussing. And network ties vary in their strength, precisely as the situational ingredients that go into them vary.12
“Social capital” or trusting relationships are determined by the market for interactions. Social capital facilitates the operation of material markets, not just in general as a structural embedding in a featherbed (or warm bath) of trust, but in a variable and distributed way across the population of people who take part in the economy. As many researchers have pointed out, some people are richer or poorer in social capital than others. High-intensity pockets of social trust contrasts with low-intensity regions, and even more pointedly with regions of intense social distrust—which are based on IRs with negative contents. Social capital is an individual good or resource; the fact that it is simultaneously a collective good, a feature of the embedding that makes markets operate more smoothly and effectively, means that social capital is inevitably stratified. And the overall level of social capital in the material economy shifts over time through variations in intensity of membership propagated via shared emotion; that is just what a business boom is: an increased intensity of trust that spreads out to include more people. Conversely, a business bust is a decline in the sense of trust that other people will also be buying and investing; a panic is a shared negative emotion, in which the collective feeling builds up a sense of certainty that business is going to fall.
Shared trust is Durkheimian social membership. The other form of embedding is shared cultural understandings; these, too, are products of IRs, Durkheimian collective symbols. Here again we can say that markets are embedded in cultures, and that to a considerable extent those cultures are generated in an ongoing fashion by the social interactions that take place among the actors in a material market. Here again the particular shape and extent of those shared symbols is variable and both regionalizing and stratifying. There are shared business cultures that build up in particular spheres: in production markets, networks and climates of investors, financial markets, and occupational milieux. Material markets are not simply sustained by an overarching culture of agreed-upon practices and beliefs, such as what constitutes an acceptable currency of exchange. As Zelizer (1994) shows, there are distinctive kinds of currency that in practice are confined within particular kinds or circuits of exchange. These currencies are quite straightforwardly Durkheimian sacred objects, like the shells that circulated in the famous South Sea kula ring (Mauss 1925); they exist to differentiate the levels of capitalist markets today, from financial instruments accessible only to the highest financial circles, down to the earmarked currencies of poor people’s welfare payments.
The patterns of sharing symbols do not just constitute market capitalism in general but also give it its structure as particular production markets. As Harrison White (1981, 2002) has argued, what makes something a market is a recognized kind of product that is being produced by several competing producers.13 Every business needs to know what business are you in. Which is to say, which competitors are you tracking and emulating, and also trying to avoid head-to-head competition with by finding a niche in the space of differences in quality and quantity produced. Producers need competitors, because it is by monitoring each other that they can tell what the consumers out there seem to be willing to buy, and thus to strategize about what else they may be willing to buy in the future. Consumer demand is not simply an exogenous quantity, but something that is constructed by what is being offered by producers. Hence there is no reliable way for producers to monitor the exchange directly; they need to look in the mirror of the market “in which producers see each other” (in White’s famous phrase). The dynamics of change in producers’ markets thus is driven by the ongoing monitoring of producers by each other, and a particular market may be characterized as a mutually monitoring producers’ clique or network. Those who are far from the network center and hence are not good at monitoring it generally do not do well in finding favorable niches in that market. Conversely the successful innovators are generally those who know the market because they have already worked in it; successful new organizations tend to be spin-offs from well-established organizations.
The point I want to stress here is that every product market is constituted by the IR chains of these mutually monitoring producers. The personal computer market of the 1980s, the cell phone market of the 1990s, the automobile market of the early 1900s, are all social constructions in the sense that these products had to get defined as competing with each other over a particular group of consumers, and in the process to construct what sorts of things these products could be used for. Brand names acquire their cultural force and presence by their competition and contrast; Coca Cola and Pepsi mutually define each other and thus build up the social presence of the market they are both in. Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benz (at particular times in business history) held their distinctive images by contrast to other cars, those regarded as on the same level of quality and those viewed as on lower-quality levels.
There is an ongoing flow between two regions of social interaction rituals and hence of symbol circulation: the mutually monitoring producers’ networks, which keep promoting their products vis-à-vis each other; and the buying public, which gets caught up in a buzz of enthusiasm for some products that it takes as specially prestigious or au courant, and that consumers display as part of their self-presentation in everyday life and as the content of some of their conversations. Producers and consumers are both realms of networks, and thus of IR chains; the producers’ network is smaller and more concentrated, whereas the consumers constitute a concatenation of different networks, with greater or lesser focus. Movements of enthusiasm or disillusionment by consumers can shift the emotional resonance of material products as collective symbols, in effect shifting the amount of EE connected with those brand names. Such shifts in turn feed back into the considerations of the producers as they try to modify their existing product lines to find favorable niches. Thus the symbols that are given meaning by one network—producers or consumers—resonate further in the other network. The initiative, however, is generally from the producers’ side; it is these smaller and more concentrated networks that make the earliest and most decisive moves that begin to pump up material objects into Durkheimian sacred objects, which will in turn generate the biggest profits. This is a dynamic and ongoing embedding of material markets in the symbols and emotions of interaction markets. Not just capitalism in general is being sustained by this embedding, but the very process of the struggle over capitalist innovation and profit.
• • •
We turn now to several remaining cases of allegedly anomalous behavior, in order to show that this behavior is rational in terms of maximizing EE.
Altruism
Altruism is a situation in which an individual gives away something of value to benefit someone else. Altruists are usually depicted as giving away material goods and sometimes as risking their lives. I suggest that all cases of altruism are cases of apparent conflict between interests in social solidarity and interests in material goods (including one’s body, seen here as a material good). If the market for IRs is the prime determinant of EE, altruism is not irrational; it is even predictable.
The simplest form of altruism is the case where individuals sacrifice material goods for the group in which they are ritually mobilized. IR theory predicts that the higher the level of ritual intensity in collective activity, the more that individuals will sacrifice to the group. This practice is well known to fund-raisers who time their collections just after the emotional high point at rallies and meetings, and who attempt to build up a rhythmic crescendo of gift-giving or pledge-making within the group. Risk to one’s life, which from the point of view of individual self-interest is the supreme sacrifice, occurs regularly when well-integrated groups are mobilized against collective danger or for intergroup combat. There is a good deal of evidence that the degree of ritual solidarity in combat military units directly determines the willingness of individual soldiers to risk their lives (Keegan 1977; Shils and Janowitz 1948).
More complex forms of altruism are those in which members of one group give gifts to nonmembers. Such situations always have the structure in which the charity-giving group has higher resources and power than the charity recipients. Such recipients are never a power threat; giving gifts focuses attention upon the donors’ power superiority as a group, as well as on their material possessions themselves as superior to those of others. The focus of a charity-giving ritual is explicitly self-congratulatory, generating symbolic capital in the process of giving away material capital. It is notable that groups that assemble as privileged interest groups (e.g., business associations) or as upperclass sociable celebrations (ostentatious gatherings of “High Society”) balance their ritual display of dominance by publicizing their gatherings as devoted to charitable activities. Charitable contributions are made in material goods, or in time and effort, whichever is in most abundant supply. Persons who make large charitable contributions typically do this in a situation of highly publicized ritual participation, so that the same investment serves both ends.
The question of altruism is almost never posed in terms of sacrificing power. It is typically regarded as a high degree of charitable contribution to take the lead in a charitable organization, or to be in the forefront of ritual assemblies that make charities a focus of attention. Far from being a sacrifice of power, there is a power payoff for charitable participation of this sort. In a premodern religious context, great physical abnegation by monks and ascetics made them the center of ritual attention, and extreme displays of self-sacrifice gave one the reputation of being a saint and often enabled one to become the head of a religious organization. Individual physical sacrifice of one’s body is thus predictable whenever high levels of ritual mobilization takes place around such self-sacrificing individuals.14
Are there any power altruists, or in other words, those who give away power to others? Not apparently, among those whose power comes from their centrality in intense IRs. If anything, such altruists are also highly egotistical. A possible exception might be organizational executives who delegate authority. But this is typically power that derives from a chain of resources, based in low-intensity interactions; and the expressed motive for delegating authority is not usually to further an altruistic cause or demonstrate one’s own altruism, but as an instrumental technique for making power more effective. Even here, it appears, powerful persons rarely give away power that will challenge their own.
Altruistic leaders are easy to explain: they get a great deal of EE not only from being in the center of admiring attention, but also from exercising power over their followers. Altruistic followers, especially at the humbler ranks, might seem harder to explain, especially since (as indicated in chapter 3) being subjected to someone else’s power decreases one’s EE. This is often a matter of what situational niches are available. There is only a limited amount of attention space for individuals to act as group leaders. Individuals who give away considerable power to others, such as joiners of charismatic movements, are presumably those who had little prospects of acquiring power for themselves in their own IR marketplace. They have little power-generated EE to sacrifice, and receive much higher EE payoffs from total commitment to ritual participation.15
Altruistic behavior is not an anomaly for rational action. It is predictable from the distribution of interactional situations from which individuals derive their EE.
When Are Individuals Most Materially Self-Interested?
The IR model does not propose that individuals are never concerned about their material self-interests. It says that individuals normally can attend to the ritual sources of EE, and this will determine most of their material goods earning and spending behavior as well. But note also that high-intensity rituals are a relatively small portion of all situations. Since situations vary all across the continuum of ritual intensity, the IR model straightforwardly predicts in which situations individuals will show the greatest concern for material self-interest. These are the situations in which individuals are most isolated from the presence of the group.
Thus individuals going shopping by themselves may experience no immediate ritual influences upon their emotional energy.16 If the goods that they buy (e.g., staple foods and household necessities) have not been the focus of ritual situations, there will be little symbolic motivation to value certain products. Similarly, political choices may be made to some extent in isolation. The practice of voting in privacy is explicitly designed to remove citizens from group pressures that would occur if voting took place, for instance, by a collective show of hands, or worse yet, by collective raising of voices.
Such isolation may be only relative, insofar as individuals may have recently taken part in collective rituals such as political rallies that have charged up membership symbols in their minds and that now guide their private behavior. IR theory proposes that explicit calculation of material self-interest occurs to the degree that individuals have been insulated from collective rituals focused upon these choices. This is not to say that when collective participation does take place, it must always focus upon nonmaterial issues. A political rally may be explicitly concerned with taxes or property values. In such cases, one might say that material self-interest and the EE of collective participation are mutually reinforcing. But it might be more accurate to describe this as a situation in which the material interest itself becomes a collective symbol of group solidarity. Thus participants who are charged up with group enthusiasm may contribute more to an insurance-reduction campaign than what they can expect to gain from it in lower premiums. Financial and property interests can also become symbolic interests, driven by the dynamics of EE-producing rituals. Here we may have a departure from purely material rationality, in the direction of an overshooting commitment to particular material interests.
The Bottom Line: EE-Seeking Constrained by Material Resources
Since all social goods are experienced in interactional situations (or are offshoots, through symbolic memory or anticipation, of interactional situations), we may say that all the various kinds of social payoffs that appear to escape from self-interested maximization are means of gaining EE. Altruism, power, etc., are merely alternative forms of EE-producing social rituals, and the question of the rationality of seeking these kinds of goals reduces to showing why particular individuals would seek each particular route to an EE payoff. My answer is that there is a market for interaction rituals, such that individuals invest what social, material, and emotional resources they have at the time in relation to the opportunities available for attaining EE payoffs in particular kinds of situations. The market for IRs makes it rational for some individuals to act altruistically or to seek power, to be a lover or be the party clown. Emotional and nonmaterial-seeking behavior is rational behavior, once we take EE as the central payoff that persons are seeking. There is an advantage here from the sociological side in seeing such behavior as rational: it gives us an apparatus for predicting, in the contours of the market for IRs, which individuals under what circumstances will pursue these various social goals.
The difficulty raised at the outset of this chapter of finding a common denominator is solved in the same way. Emotional energy is the common denominator of all social comparisons and choices. Every alternative is assessed in terms of the amount of EE it carries, whether as a gain or a loss. Power, altruism, love, and every other social goal is measured by the same yardstick, the increment or decrement that the interactional process involved in it produces for one’s emotional energy. Situations in which one gains (or loses) money or material goods are assessed in the same way; that is, working for material gain is first and foremost a situation in which emotional energy is gained or lost in the social interaction itself. Persons who are highly motivated to make money are in an interactional market in which their work interaction is the major source of EE in their lives; “workaholics” are obsessed with their work lives because it is the sole high-EE interaction available to them. The same may be said about spending money, or handling money (and other financial instruments) as in investment, entrepreneurship, organizational politics, gambling, or the like: these are first of all situations of social interaction, which carry their own EE weight. For some persons, being a consumer is the main form of everyday social interaction that produces an EE payoff; for other persons, their EE high points occur when they interact as an invester, or as a practitioner of leveraged buyouts. It is a complication, but not an insoluable difficulty, that some persons work alone, and that activities focusing on finances sometimes take place in solitude. I suggest that in these cases money has become a Durkheimian sacred object, an emblem of the EE with which it originally generated in interactional situations. The internalization of financial symbols parallels the internalization of intellectual symbols, which explains the high-intensity inner conversations of intellectual thinking. The business-obsessed invester seeking out the hum of the stock exchange, and the business enterpriser in a constant buzz of plans and telephone calls, are magnetized by high-energy niches in social networks.
By such considerations, we may analyze all material and monetary goals into their component everyday interactional situations as sources of EE. Thus there is a common denominator among the trade-offs of socializing with one’s friends, working late at the office, playing the stockmarket, or giving money and time to a political campaign. If we start with money as the common denominator, we cannot incorporate nonmonetary, social goods into a common metric; if we start with EE as the metric, then material-monetary goals become measurable in terms of their direct social and indirect social-symbolic EE payoffs.
The previous sketch shows how the numerator of the benefits / costs ratio is put into a common metric. How, then, is this composite numerator compared to the denominator? For the costs of any choice or social pathway are not merely in EE but also in the material means of ritual production. To go to a church service or a political rally may produce a surge of EE, but it also costs real materials for transportation, for the church building, the microphones, prayer books, minister’s salary, and so forth. If individuals are comparing costs and benefits, how do they put these real costs into a common metric with the emotional benefits (and with the emotional resources also invested on the cost side)? I suggest that individuals do not usually have to take costs directly and consciously into account; nevertheless material costs have an impact upon the choices that are made. That is because if the material resources are not available for carrying out an interaction ritual, the ritual will fail, and little or no EE will be produced. The group will not be assembled, attention cannot be focused, emotions cannot be amplified. Pathways that do not lead toward production of material resources sufficient to sustain IRs will also fail to produce EE. Thus individual behavior is motivated immediately and directly by EE-seeking; indirectly and implicitly individuals are driven to produce material goods, to just the degree that these resources are demanded by their favorite rituals. Production in the material economy is initiated and shaped by the market for IRs.
The formula:
becomes: seek maximal EE benefits among the array of IR opportunities. This array is restricted because some IR situations are closed off when material resources are not available for a successful EE-generating IR to be carried out.17
The rationality of material costs is indirect. People seek benefits directly in terms of their emotional common denominator, and become guided by material costs only in the long run, often contrary to their anticipation and beyond the realm of their attention. I am arguing that pursuing a business, giving a party, or fighting a war are all motivated in the same way; in each case, one seeks EE according to what is immediately attractive and what is emblematic of past EE payoffs. If, in fact, the enterprise sinks or sails according to the level of material resources available, the participants do not usually find that out until they are well into the swing of things. Costly, material-consuming enterprises like wars typically come to an end, not necessarily because the emotions are exhausted, but because ignored costs mount up to the point where the enterprise can no longer be sustained.
SOCIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS AS THE SOLUTION TO RATIONAL CHOICE ANOMALIES
Let us now take up the experimental anomalies noted at the outset of this chapter in the list of difficulties for rational choice theory (Kahneman et al. 1982; Frey and Eichenberger 1989). These anomalies fall into four main types:
1. Overestimating a single pathway of action and failing to examine alternatives. There is a strong tendency to overlook opportunity costs, the gains foregone from the paths not taken. In general, individuals are unwilling to search fully for information.18
2. Once a choice is made, persons tend to stick with it. Persons are generally unwilling to reconsider, to change a choice already made. They avoid changing their estimation of probabilities even after disconfirming experience; they are especially resistant to changing the categories through which they frame their problem. As in point (1), persons are rather averse to calculating, pure and simple. By the same token, they are apparently even more averse to recalculating, readjusting fundamental cognitive choices once they have been made. Here the evidence converges with naturalistic observations of the ethnomethodologists, and of conversation analysts, which show that persons resist changing their taken-for-granted routines.
3. When persons frame the situation (such as estimating the likelihood of a given event occurring), they prefer to focus upon cultural stereotypes rather than information of a statistical nature. If there is no cultural stereotype readily available, persons become fixated on the initial baseline from which their observations are made. In the absence of a preexisting stereotype, one arbitrarily creates a typical case and judges what happens subsequently in reference to it. Persons want their world of experience to be framed from the outset, and they very quickly establish a model of what is happening, then use it as a lens through which to view whatever comes next.
4. Another series of behaviors are more directly emotional. Persons are over-optimistic about the future payoffs of their chosen alternative. Once they have invested in a particular pathway, they tend to stick with it, investing further in it rather than spreading their risks; sunk costs or endowments create an emotional bias toward protecting and enhancing the pathway already entered. Once such an investment is made, when risks and costs become salient one tends to protect prior investments, seeking to avoid losses more than to make gains. In sizing up new possibilities, persons prefer the framing that defines the alternatives in terms of potential gains rather than as potential losses. And one avoids risky alternatives more if they are framed as applying to oneself, or to persons with whom one has a social bond, than if they are stated as impersonal or hypothetical possibilities.
This latter case is one of the few instances of rational choice anomalies that permits a comparison between choices in social and nonsocial contexts. Most anomalies research deals with a detached actor, either hypothetical or experimentally constructed by physical isolation and by strict control of what can go through channels of communication, and so the person is prohibited from using the normal modes of decision making, that is, drawing upon the emotional energies and symbols of the surrounding social situation. When a real-life actor is made the explicit focus of attention, she or he becomes the dominant frame in terms of which decision-relevant emotions are marshalled.19
Virtually all such research focuses strictly upon material gains and losses, leaving out the interactional situations in which such ends would actually be negotiated; hence we have no way of knowing what EE loading would actually exist in real-life choices. In effect, anomalies research constructs a situation in which the only possible object of emotion is the material gain or loss itself. If we take the experimental situation in itself as a form of interaction ritual, the object focused upon in that situation is the material good (the token or hypothetical money that the experimenter gives experimental subjects and that they are told to accumulate). The experimenters, who regard themselves as outside the experiment, are in fact constructing the social reality that they claim to be researching. The initial choice, or the initial endowment, becomes the sacred object for that interaction; protecting or enhancing one’s sacred object becomes the value in terms of which one structures all subsequent action. The experimental research situation is an emotional vacuum; it is filled by the only object with any emotional charge at all, the material goal or sunk cost. This is not to say that such experimental results are entirely artificial; persons in real economic life may also act in this fashion, provided that they are making their business decisions in a social vacuum as well.
At this point we may as well recognize that most research and theorizing in the rational choice tradition is not really micro, in the sense that the term is used in this book. It appears to be micro because it is about individuals; but individuals are a larger unit of analysis than are situations; individuals are really abstractions from a long chain of situations. Rational choice research (also carried out under the label of exchange theory) gives a deceptive appearance of being micro for another reason: because its experiments are typically carried out in a few hours or less. But these are not naturally occurring situations, but have been structured so that there is a speeded-up flow of exchanges compressed into those minutes or hours. In real life, it could take weeks or even years to make so many bargaining exchanges with a number of partners. Rational choice is not a micro-theory, but a compressed mesotheory. Taken literally, “rational choice” is the wrong micro-mechanism of how situational thinking actually takes place. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, this does not necessarily undermine the usefulness of the theory as a model of human behavior in the medium run, provided we understand with what micro- and meso-mechanisms we are actually dealing.
The Microsociology of Material Considerations
If an individual is going to engage in thinking about future situations, what symbols will come most readily to mind? It will be those symbols that have the highest EE charge. Accordingly, if they are going to plan, or to compare alternatives, their mental search will begin with the most strongly charged ideas, and these will become most salient in their decisions. If one set of ideas, linked to a particular situational alternative, has an overwhelmingly high charge compared to other situation-linked ideas, the person will come to a rapid decision. One alternative appears overwhelmingly right, and it feels unnecessary to consider the others.
Consider now the rather narrow range of ideas that are focused on in experiments involving rational choice anomalies. Money, investments, material costs and gains: these are to some extent familiar conceptions from everyday interaction, although some persons focus upon these in their conversational interactions more than others do. The everyday mode of thinking and talking about money and material possessions come from their focus within conversational rituals concerned with social status. Perhaps the most common form of speech in which money plays a part in sociable conversation consists in bragging about one’s wealth or possessions (often indirectly and surreptitiously by complaining about the high costs of things that one buys). This is frontstage talk about money; in the intimate sphere within the family, money is the primary topic of domestic quarrels.20 The result of such conversational rituals is to give money a fairly simple emotional loading; it is something one has, as part of one’s status identity.
Ordinary conversation about money and possessions does not usually focus upon calculating alternatives, considering opportunity costs, or the like; money-concepts acquire an emotional resonance as showing one’s social membership in the group of persons who can sustain talk about money-affairs at a given level of stratification. Money may be real capital, but talk about money is a symbolic capital that directly determines social membership. If this is what money symbolizes emotionally for most persons, when we put them into an experimental situation and ask them to calculate potential costs and gains, it is no surprise that they tend to treat the monetary symbol in that context as an endowment to be protected; the emotional focus upon the money emblem keeps them from letting their attention range more widely toward assessing the framework of probabilities and assumptions within which their decisions are to be made.
To broaden this discussion, we may go in two directions: to consider choices that do not involve money; or to consider persons who are much more familiar in their daily social encounters with financial transactions. Let us take the latter first. Persons who are monetary professionals also have a propensity to rational choice anomalies, although for reasons opposite from those that bring about anomalies among persons concerned only in a casual manner with conversation about money. For ordinary persons, money is a symbolic category relatively little charged with situations of calculation; it is a relatively static emblem of social rank membership, or of power within the family. For monetary professionals, on the other hand, situations in which they deal with money are likely to be very highly charged emotionally; they take place in encounters of intense focus of social attention and a great deal of shared emotion. Thus the typical everyday life situation of a gambler or of a stockbroker comprises a high-intensity IR in which money is at the center of attention: for such professions, money becomes the sacred object par excellence (Abolafia 1996). Members of these occupations tend to be subject to rational choice anomalies (Slovic, Fischoff, and Lichtenstein 1977) precisely because they think in terms of symbols that are highly emotionally charged. The very intensity of their focus upon money (or upon their sunk costs, particular strategies chosen, financialaction frames adopted) narrows their attention to those symbols and causes them to ignore the larger range of calculations.
The other broadening of this discussion is to cases where the choices considered are nonmonetary, but involve general estimates of the probabilities of various kinds of events and the payoffs of various courses of action. Here the problem for most experimental subjects is generally that none of the alternatives is framed by very strongly charged symbols. Hence persons fall back upon baseline assumptions or other initial framing devices; they create a temporary cognitive sacred object, faute de mieux. If they have available a cognitive stereotype they will use it to do their thinking with. To use a stereotype can be considered “irrrational” only from the point of view of another framework that has the emotional value-symbol “rational” attached to it. In the course of everyday thinking, however, one simply maximizes EE. In the round of conversational interactions, some verbal symbols become relatively more highly charged with EE; one uses whatever such symbols are available when an occasion for thinking arises. If everyone in a community is bragging about how much money they have by describing the things they spend it on, the immediate EE payoff comes from joining in with bragging of one’s own. There is an economy of thinking based on EE flows. One thinks efficiently and economically by expending as little EE as possible, relative to how much EE one gets back from the process of doing the thinking; moreover, since in most situations there is an immediate emotional tone, it is not long-term EE payoffs that are determining, but the short-term, indeed immediately processual EE feedbacks that are overriding.
Thinking that involves a good deal of searching among little-known alternatives (that is to say, symbolic concepts that have low-EE loadings) is unrewarding, an EE-drain; it is avoided whenver possible.21 The preferred alternative to thinking is to use symbolic categories that are already highly EE-charged, that spring readily to mind; here thinking is easy and spontaneous. Thinking in available cultural stereotypes is efficient thinking, in terms of an EE metric.
How, then, does any other conception of “rationality” ever arise? Who makes the judgment that certain kinds of thinking is “anomalous”? Obviously, it is another social community, one that has charged up a different set of categories as its sacred objects. Such are the communities of statisticians and mathematically oriented economists. For them, numbers have become emblems of group membership, and sources of solidarity and emotional energy; what ordinary persons (especially those with the common pattern of ritualized math-aversion) tend to view and feel as a symbolic marker of an alien worldview and an alien group, is for the statistician / economist a taken-for-granted emblem of their own group membership.22 As in the case of all social groups with strong patterns of interactional enclosure and group solidarity, statisticians and those in similar professions take their own symbols for granted; for these professionals, statistical ideas are charged with higher emotional energy than other symbols; they jump easily to the mind and flow off into a series of mental statements leading to conclusions that seem obviously superior to all other modes of conceptualizing such topics. The very concept of “rationality,” as identified with mathematical-statistical calculation, is itself a value-emblem, anchored in the emotional energy and the group solidarity of such a profession.
In everyday life, persons carry out their thinking by using the verbal concepts most charged with EE by their personal group interactions. I have argued that such behavior is broadly rational, not in the restricted sense of the cognitive sacred objects that belong to the communities of statisticians, mathematicians, and economists, but in the specific sense of maximization of benefits relative to costs, where the common denominator is EE. This does not mean that everything takes place in everyday thinking in a uniform manner. The variations, however, are predictable from the IR-EE model.
Let us consider two special cases. First, take the case where an individual’s EE is low in regard to every situation and every symbol in his or her environment. No alternatives are emotionally very appealing; no thoughts spring to mind with great spontaneity. This would occur if that person’s IR life is impoverished. One might think that this would be an ideal person to engage in rational calculation, dispassionately considering all the alternatives and deciding without sources of bias. But IR theory proposes that this person would be sunk in apathy, unable to decide. Emotional energy is necessary to get the thinking process going, as well as to supply alternatives and provide focus.
Then there is the case where a person faces a number of alternatives with approximately the same level of emotional loading. This person’s IR market situation is very complicated; or there are many contingencies, which make it difficult to anticipate which alternative will bring stronger EE payoffs than others. In such situations, IR theory predicts that the person becomes genuinely stalled. His or her behavior is indecisive and vacillating. If this stalling occurs among alternatives that have relatively high emotional loadings, the indecisiveness becomes agonizing. The existence of such situations does not imply an imperfection in the IR model of cognition. On the contrary, it is one empirical alternative that it can account for.
Emotional energy is a common metric in terms of which individuals weigh alternatives. To speak less metaphorically, the EE loading of symbols determines which ideas spring most readily to mind, and which have the greatest appeal in one’s thinking. What is the form of this EE scale? It is certainly ordinal; is it experienced in such a way that it has properties of an interval scale? It is doubtful that the human actor can directly observe the EE levels of various situations and symbols, to stand back and read off their values. Instead, one responds directly to whatever EE value is highest. There may very well exist zones of indeterminacy, in which is it impossible to tell which EE level is higher than another. This may lead to a stalled situation; since EEs are transitory, different situational alternatives may decay at different rates (depending on their recency and repetitiveness); what may be a stalled comparison at one moment can become resolved at a later time.
In this analysis, I have not distinguished among behavior under certainty (full knowledge of all outcomes), under risk (known probabilities of outcomes), and under uncertainty (in which neither of these hold). Within any immediate situation, an individual responds directly to the EE flow occuring in that group. This is equivalent to behavior under certainty. When we step back and consider this same individual in a longer timeframe, moving toward some parts of the market for IRs and away from others, we are in the realm of uncertainty.23 Similarly, thinking by use of symbols loaded with EE from interactional experiences is likely to be thinking under uncertainty.
The distinction between certainty and uncertainty may have little effect on an EE-based model of behavior. If EE levels are high, individuals act as if outcomes are certain. EE gives them high confidence; this may be objectively misplaced (the often-found overestimation of future success), but it makes it unnecessary to complicate our model of the human cognitive agent. When EE-levels are moderate, however, uncertainty may become more salient. A reasonable hypothesis is that when an individual’s IR experiences generate only moderate levels of EE, one feels more uncertain; and that uncertainty itself makes it more difficult to clearly focus upon a given alternative. Symbolic IRs within one’s mind become harder to construct; real IRs with other persons are less successful if they try to focus upon a particular source of uncertainty. Areas of uncertainty thus have low EE-loadings, and both individuals in their own thinking, and groups in their interacting, will tend to focus away from them. This aversion to areas of uncertainty fits the observed heuristics of most people’s behavior.
Research on decision making or situational thinking converge on the theme that the human being has limited information-processing capacity, that she or he operates in a situation of bounded rationality. How then are decisions made? With a degree of arbitrariness; given a limited cognitive capacity, it makes sense to reduce alternatives and to avoid complex calculations.24 But what gives an actor the tendency to treat one feature rather than another as arbitrary, or to use heuristics that make some particular item especially salient?
The answer is the emotional energy loading of various alternatives or their symbols. Features of the situation (or the range of possible situations about which decisions could be made) that have low-EE loadings are ignored. Decision making concentrates on whatever features evoke the highest EE. Grappling with alternatives is highest when there are several features that all evoke fairly high EE levels.
This is consistent with the various models of cognitive heuristics and anomalies. March and Simon’s (1958) satisficing implies disattending routine areas, which would generate little emotional intensity in their social interactions, and focusing upon problem areas, which should be those with the greatest collective emotional arousal.25 Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethods similarly imply that ritual accounts will be offered when there is a breach in normal expectations, generating emotional arousal and mobilizing participants into focusing their attention on the trouble. Most anomalies of the Kahneman and Tversky sort hinge upon overestimating a single alternative and ignoring the full range of considerations (leaving aside opportunity costs, being over-optimistic about future payoffs for one’s chosen alternative, focusing narrowly upon stereotypes, being unwilling to engage in full informational search, or to change one’s categories). In all of these cases, one concept is overcharged relative to others. This is expectable if thinking is determined by a focus mechanism, and if the particular symbols focused upon are those that are most charged with EE by their occurence in recent social interactions.
Situational Decisions without Conscious Calculation
The fact that most empirical studies of individuals in micro-situations find them doing little conscious calculating need not impugn the rational action model of behavior, provided that it can be shown how individuals move toward optimizing their medium-run balance of benefits over costs. The two prongs of my argument have contributed to this goal by showing that behavior motivated by nonmaterial benefits is rational behavior; and that there is a common denominator that enables individuals to weigh the payoffs of disparate kinds of goods; they do this by moving toward the strongest available source of emotional energy.
If human beings are EE-seekers, it is not necessary that they should engage in conscious calculation. Where I have used the term “choice” or “decision” in the preceding descriptions, it should in most instances be taken as metaphorical. Human behavior may be characterized as emotional energy tropism. Social sources of EE directly energize behavior; the strongest energizing situation exerts the strongest pull. Subjectively, individuals do not experience such situations as controlling them; because they are being filled with energy, they feel that they control. They may well describe their behavior, if they are reflective about it, as a firm decision, a strong sense of volition. But they need not exercise any conscious calculation over the costs and benefits of various alternatives. When EE is strong, they see immediately what they want to do.
The notion that cognition is crucially entwined with emotion is the next step beyond recognition of cognitive heuristics. Advanced efforts in artificial intelligence (AI) to model the human actor have aimed to combine cognitive architecture with emotion (Carley and Newell 1990). A successful model would incorporate the social network of IRs that load symbols with EE, and a cognitive process driven by these emotional loadings. Ultimately, if social science is to be able to model real human thinking in an AI, it will have to incorporate an interactional basis for emotions that motivate the selection of cognitive symbols in the ongoing flow of situations. As I have argued elsewhere (Collins 1992), a truly human AI would have to be constructed with devices for tuning in the rhythms of human speech and producing them back to real human interlocutors; it would be a robot with emotional capacities that would learn the human use of symbols by interacting with people in the same way that a baby learns to talk.
I have attempted to broaden the realm of rationality, to show that nonmaterial, emotional and symbolic behavior may also be analyzed as the optimizing of benefits in relation to costs. This theoretical strategy may seem to have a very high intellectual cost, since it involves using emotional energy as central dynamic around which everything else, including material interests, revolve. But this strategy has the advantage of making the model of the actor congruent with the findings of noncalculating behavior on the micro-situational level. I believe that these advantages outweigh the costs of changing certain conceptual biases of the rational choice tradition.
What is jettisoned is primarily the tradition of taking money as an emblem of all rationally disposable goods. It also becomes unnecessary to postulate abstract utility conceptions. Emotional energy is an empirically based concept, and it is possible to measure it directly and to show the social conditions for its variations. The theoretical change I am proposing makes it necessary to jettison the notion of “calculation” or “choice” as a description of short-term situations, or rather to reconceptualize just what is going on when individuals steer their behavior among alternatives. The theory of maximization under material constraints becomes more powerful when applied to the emotional currency of social life and the structures of interaction that produce it.
