Most of us behave differently in a flashy restaurant than we do in a job interview or at a funeral. We naturally tune our behaviour to our audience and environment. As part of the metaphor of Life As Theatre with Social Life As a Performance, the famous sociologist Erving Goffman called this front stage behaviour — how we behave when people are watching. In contrast, we may only let our guard down and fully relax when we're by ourselves — here we're back stage.

In a flashy restaurant, wait staff will behave differently in their interactions with guests than they will out back in their break time, and you may find yourself saying a wine you've just tasted is lovely even when you don't think it is. Once you start thinking about front stage and back stage behaviour you'll spot the "performance" of social life throughout almost every daily interaction.

Erving Goffman explains front stage, back stage and more in his classic sociology book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Front stage, back stage

What makes you trust someone in a professional context? I liked this simple equation by Charles Green which makes it a combination of how credible, reliable, and how intimate — or how safe you feel with that person — divided by the self-orientation of the person — are they focused on their interests, or simply paying more attention to themselves vs being genuinely interested in you and your success. Depending on how you scored this abstract model I guess that would mean that trust is either undermined by someone focusing on their own interests, or strengthened the more they are focused on yours.

The trust equation

I grew up with the idea that there are developed countries and developing countries. There was the ‘rich’ world and the ‘poor’ world. I didn’t actively consider it. It’s just always been there. And it’s wrong.

In his excellent book Factfulness, Hans Rosling shows that wealthier countries tend to have smaller families and a low child mortality rate. In contrast, poorer countries are more likely to have larger families and a high child mortality rate. Plotting the spread of countries in 1965 gives a reasonable approximation of a cluster of ‘developed’ countries with small families where most children survive and a cluster of ‘developing’ countries with larger families where more children die. But that was in 1965.

The world has changed a lot since then, and that model of dividing the world into two buckets no longer holds true with the data. Most people in the world are somewhere in the middle.

And more helpful than dismantling my worldview was providing a new model to replace it: a model with 4 income levels instead of 2 and the number of billions of people living at each level. It’s a model with most people somewhere in the middle.

For more, check out the Factfulness book, or Gapminder. And you could do much worse than watch Hans’ entertaining TED talk: the best stats you’ve ever seen.

Sketchplanations tagged with sociology