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Duck/McMahan, Communication in Everyday Life, 3e
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Lecture Notes
Chapter 3: Identities, Perceptions, and Communication
Outline and Key Terms
I. Key Ideas
A. People do not possess a core self.
1. Put simply, identity is who a person is.
2. People construct multiple identities.
3. There is no central, unchanging self influencing actions and waiting to be revealed
through disclosure.
a. People may have developed and possess core value and beliefs.
b. People may have a particular biological make-up and physical
characteristics that influence how they communicate with others
and how others communicate with them.
c. People construct multiple, sometimes contradictory, identities through
communication with others.
B. Identities, communication, and relationships are interconnected.
1.We must establish who a person is when he or she is using verbal and
nonverbal symbols.
2. A relator uses verbal and nonverbal communication.
3. An individual is using symbols but within the context of relationships.
4. Identities and relationships are being transacted or created through the
use of symbols.
5. Identities influence communication and communication influences
identities.
6. Identities connect communication to meaning and connect people
relationally.
a. We become friends with people whose identities and personalities we like.
b. It is through relationships that our social understanding of
identities is tested and established.
C. Society provides ways to describe and evaluate identities and personalities.
1. Society also places more value on some identities than others.
2. Cultural groups and societies do not always agree on what an identity
looks like or how it is valued.
D. People perform their identities with others.
1. People are doing an identity rather than having one.
2. When people perform identities associated with social roles, they are
not being fake or necessarily being dishonest.
Instructor Resource
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3. Performing identities associated with particular roles may be easy to
understand and accept.
4. Other types of identity performances may be more challenging to grasp.
a. Masculinity—established by society
b. Femininity—established by society
c. Both may be performed by the same person in varied situations
and with different people.
5. The transaction of identities is guided partly through perceptions of oneself,
other people, and situations.
a. Perception involves how a person views the world, organizes what is perceived,
interprets information, and evaluates information.
b. These influence symbolic activity.
6. Identities, relationships, and cultural membership, among others, are not embedded
within people’s minds but created symbolically through communication with others.
II. Do People Have Core Selves?
A. The onion model analogy describes identity as composed of layers, in which more
intimate information about the person is found in deeper layers.
1. A cross-section of the onion reveals layers and the core at the heart of
the onion.
a. The central core is rarely reached by others.
b. The model has persisted as the “commonsense” model despite
lack of supporting research.
c. The textbook authors reject the model.
2. No one is completely one way or another
a. People construct multiple identities throughout everyday life.
b. Multiple experiences in everyday life call the core self or
identity into question.
B. Different moods
1. How we feel may vary from one day to the next.
2. Mood swings may result from hormonal imbalances, gluten
intolerance, or simply unfortunate events.
3. Changes in mood can be temporary, unimportant, and reversible.
4. Fluctuations can be problematic for those who believe identity is
fixed or layered like an onion.
C. Different situations
1. People transact multiple identities in different situations and areas of life.
2. A person does not have a fixed identity and a layered onion does
not accurately portray how identities are transacted in everyday
life.
D. Different relationships
1. People transact different identities given the different
relationships they share with others.
2. Different relational identities are constructed based on the
relationships being transacted.
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3. If people had an unchanging core self, there would not exist any
changes in communication behavior around different people.
4. Changes can be dramatic.
E. Different evaluations
1. People may evaluate the same person in greatly different ways.
2. If everyone had a single core personality identity and perceived
it identically, the competing evaluations would make no sense.
3. Varying evaluations occur frequently.
4. One person may evaluate another person in different ways.
5. An unchanging core self would not allow anyone to change their
mind about someone else.
III. Identities and Perceptions
A. Key Ideas
1. Perhaps identity is a matter of perception rather than fact.
a. Identity is transacted between two communicators, rather than
something set in stone.
b. We form representations, attributions, and claims about other people
based on perceptions.
2. Perceptions influence the development of identities and meanings.
a. Perceptions are based on relational and cultural understandings.
b. Perception involves four processes:
1) Selecting
2) Organizing
3) Interpreting
4) Evaluating
B. Selecting
1. Receiving stimuli does not ensure attention to them.
2. People may attend to the world selectively and appear to not be paying
attention.
3. Everyone selects and focuses more on some things than others.
a. We tend to notice what stands out.
b. A person’s motives or needs at a particular moment also influence
selection.
c. A persons’ beliefs, attitudes, and values also affect the selection
process.
d. Selective exposure means being more likely to expose oneself
to what supports his or her beliefs, values, and attitudes.
e. We select activities that support our views of the world and pay
less attention to those that do not.
f. Selective perception means you are more likely to perceive and focus
on things that support your beliefs, values, and attitudes.
g. Selective perception explains why two different people might evaluate
the same person different ways.
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h. Selective retention, also known as selective memory, means you are
more likely to recall things that support your beliefs, values, and attitudes.
C. Organizing, Interpreting, and Evaluating
1. We choose observations of the world and organize them in
way that allows us to retrieve them when needed.
a. The way we organize information influences how it is interpreted and
evaluated.
b. New information is connected to previous information that is
already organized and stored as our own characteristic way of
looking at the world (through our own organizational goggles).
c. Our organizational goggles are constantly being updated based on new
experiences and evaluations of their meaning to us.
d. System seems efficient, but disadvantages exist.
e. Certain ways of acting become more deeply ingrained in thinking.
f. We organize information through schemata, prototypes, and personal
constructs.
2. Schemata are mental structures that are used to organize information in part by
clustering associated material.
a. This information is stored in a relatively accessible manner.
b. This information can be used to make sense of experiences and to
anticipate what might happen in a given situation.
3. Prototypes are the best-case examples of something.
a. We use prototypes as guideposts for measuring how other things
measure up to the ideal.
4. Personal constructs are individualized ways of construing or
understanding the world and its contents.
a. They are bipolar dimensions used to measure and evaluate things.
b. Narrow and more specific characteristics.
c. Can be used in the development of prototypes and to determine how
close someone may come to meeting all the criteria of the prototype.
IV. Identities and Communication
A. Identities involve cultural membership and relationships.
1. Some identities are based on group membership.
2. Some identities are based on personal relationships.
a. Group and relational identities take us further away from the
idea of an inner core self.
b. They also show that a person can construct many identities at
one time and we have a choice in the identity chosen at a given
time.
3. Through relationships, much identity work takes place.
a. Relationships with others provide opportunities to develop who
we are and how we want to be perceived by others.
b. Through relationships, we develop trust so we may disclose
personal information about ourselves.
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c. We come to understand ourselves through interactions with
others.
d. A person cannot have a concept of self without reflecting on
identities by way of the views of other people with whom he or she
has relationships.
e. Through relationships, we develop an understanding of cultural
norms and values.
4. Cultural membership informs us about the value identities and the
proper ways of constructing those identities.
a. Identities are partly based on the beliefs and norms of the society
in which we live.
b. We obtain information about what works and does not, what is
acceptable and what is not, and how much we count in that society
(what our identities are worth) when we communicate with others
in our culture.
B. Symbolic Identities and a Symbolic Self
1. Identities are created and performed symbolically.
2. Without symbols, we could not perceive ourselves as unique
individuals.
C. Transacting Identities Symbolically
1. Identities can be understood as being transacted symbolically through
communication with others.
a. We use symbols to understand ourselves and to project ourselves
to others.
b. Our multiple identities are created and performed verbally and
nonverbally.
2. Identities may be personal, relational, social, biological, racial,
national, regional, or based on sexual orientation.
a. Identities involving biological sex, race, sexual orientation, and national
or regional origin are relatively stable.
b. These relatively stable identities are referred to as “master identities”
c. Some argue master identities are the core self, but that is not necessarily
the case.
3. Transacting personal identities includes communicating and behaving in
cultural understood ways/representations associated with roles.
4. Cultural understanding and norms influence symbolic activities
associated with identities.
a. A person may choose not to conform.
b. A person may choose to emphasize or disregard identities.
c. Identities are socially and symbolically created and performed.
D. Symbolic Self
1. Identity is shaped by culture and the people with whom we interact.
a. Culture and the people with whom we interact affect how we
communicate and receive communication.
b. We can reflect on our “self” as an object of others’ perceptions.
Instructor Resource
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c. We can reflect that others can do critical thinking or listening
about us.
d. Identity is a symbolic self—a self that exists for others and
goes beyond what it means to us.
e. The symbolic self arises from social interaction with other
people.
f. We thus fit identity descriptions into the form of narratives that
are known and accepted by society.
g. Any identity we offer to others is based on the fact that we all
share meanings about what is important in defining identity.
h. The identity we adopt alters our ethos—our ability to be taken
seriously and to be persuasive.
2. Symbolic interaction refers to how broad social forces affect or
transact our view of self.
a. People get their sense of self from other people and from
awareness that others judge, observe, and evaluate our behavior.
b. An attitude of reflection describes the idea that we think about how we
look in other people’s eyes or reflect that other people can see us as social
objects from their point of view.
c. We may not always do what we want, but may do what we think others
will accept.
3. Identity is not ours alone.
a. Identity is partly adopted from society and affects our
credibility.
b. Self is a transacted result of communication with others.
c. We learn how to be an individual by recognizing how people
treat us.
d. We see our own identity through the eyes of others we respect.
e. People recognize and treat us differently from everyone else.
E. Self-Disclosure
1. One way we establish identities is by telling others about themselves.
a. People share their names and other information through stories to tell
others who they are.
b. People use socially prescribed terminology about identity.
2. Self-Description or Self-Disclosure?
a. Self-description involves information about self that is obvious
to others through appearance and behavior.
b. Self-description often involves membership in particular categories,
which is not really about individual identity but more about group
membership.
c. Self-disclosure involves revealing information that others could
not know unless they were told.
d. Self-disclosure often includes private, sensitive, and confidential
information—values, fears, secrets, assessments, evaluations, and
preferences.
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F. Dynamics of Self-Disclosure
1. Self-disclosure is important to identity construction.
2. Self-disclosure has a long history in the communication
discipline.
3. The Value of Self-Disclosure
a. Originally seen as beneficial to identity construction and
personal relationships
b. Making identity “transparent” to others (Jourard)
c. Transparency suggests acting in the most psychologically
healthy way.
d. Self-disclosure connected to growth in intimacy.
e. Intimacy between two people increases as breadth and depth of
disclosure increases.
f. The more we know someone’s inner knowledge structures, the
closer we feel to that person.
g. Closeness develops only when information is disclosed as
privileged information that others do not know.
4. Passing on the Onion
a. The revelation of identity is rarely a simple progression.
b. The revelation of identity is not a simple declaration that
immediately leads to intimacy.
c. Self-disclosure is a dynamic process tied to other social
processes and how self-disclosure occurs over time.
d. Self-disclosure occurs over the lifetime of a relationship rather
than being a single event.
e. Part of one’s identity is the skill used to reveal or conceal
information.
f. It should not be assumed that self-disclosure is necessarily
beneficial, desired, and welcomed, open to all topics, and that more
disclosure leads to making things better.
5. Good, Bad, or Nothing
a. It is possible to feel honored that someone disclosed his or her
secrets.
b. It is possible to not want others to disclose too much
information.
c. It is possible simply not to care about what is being disclosed.
6. Dialectic Tensions
a. Disclosure can be welcomed and unwelcomed.
b. Dialectic tensions (Baxter) are simultaneous push-pull tensions in a
relationship.
c. Tensions occur when we feel pulled in two directions.
d. There may be no single core of an identity, but a dialogue between
different “voices” in your head
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e. Identity, independence, and autonomy are affected by a
relationship—this view affects our communication and suggests
messages are jointly created.
f. The autonomy-connectedness dialectic is one tension.
g. Openness-closedness is a dialectical tension regarding control of
private information—giving out information or holding back.
h. Different versions of our identity may be told to different
audiences.
7. Identities and Boundaries
a. Rather than reveal all information to others, our relationships partly
determine how we negotiate boundaries of privacy with others.
b. We tend to have stronger boundaries around private information with
people we are not as close to or those we do not like.
c. Sometimes, with intimate partners, we prefer to avoid topics that may
provoke a partner.
d. People experience a tension between a desire for privacy and a
demand for openness differently in various relationships.
e. Couples create their own rules for controlling boundaries of
privacy.
f. People show, employ, and work within different parts of their
identity with different audiences at different times.
g. The suitability of something for disclosure is affected by the
relationship, context, and the agreement of the partners.
h. The amounts, type, or subject of self-disclosure can be a topic
for discussion (metacommunication).
i. Self-disclosure of identity rules are subject to personal
preference.
8. Narratives
a. We often use stories to tell others about something about ourselves and
to help shape who we are for others.
b. We adapt stories of our identity by social context.
c. We are influenced by both society/culture and the specific persons to
whom we are telling.
9. Stories We Tell
a. Reports about identity characterize people by means of memory or
history in its narrative—typical or amusing stories involving character,
plot, motives, scenes, and other actors.
b. The story organizes identity in ways others understand in terms
of rules that govern accounts, narratives, and other social reports.
c. Narratives can be an ontology (how I came to be who I am).
d. Narratives can be an epistemology (how I think about the
world).
e. Narratives can be an individual construction or a relational
process.
10. Origin Stories
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a. Identities come in part from narratives of origin.
b. Origin leads to family.
c. Family experience is often the first influence on one’s sense of origin
and identity.
d. We gain a sense of connection to a larger network of others through
family experiences.
e. A community goes beyond the family but in family-like
contexts.
11. Shaping Stories
a. Stories about us must fit with our societal audience’s beliefs
about what is coherent and acceptable.
b. We shape the telling of identity in a way the audience will
accept.
V. Transacting Identity and Other People
A. Altercasting involves the work that someone’s communication does to impose,
support, or reject identities of others.
1. Refers to how language can give people an identity and force
them to live up to that description, positive or negative
2. A person is labeled as a certain type of person by being positioned
to respond appropriately.
a. Altercasting may refer to the rejection of one’s identity.
b. We do not have to accept the identity another tries to create.
c. Altercasting also may refer to communication accepting and
supporting someone’s identity.
4. In all cases, the communication of other people influences the
transaction of someone’s identity.
5. Construction of identity does not take place in isolation, but is partly dependent
on other people.
B. Self as Others Treat You
1. How we perceive ourselves and attempt to construct identities is
influenced by how we are treated by others.
a. Directly
b. Indirectly
2. Relationships connect through communication to the formation of our
identity.
a. When treated with respect, we see ourselves as respected, and
self-respect becomes part of our identity.
b. How we are treated gets into our “identity” and becomes part of
us, although originating with others.
3. Our physical characteristics can lead to how people treat us.
a. Manner of communication comes to reflect expected reactions to
us.
b. Identity becomes transacted in communication.
C. Performative Self
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1. Others provide an audience to which we perform.
a. Identity is having a symbolic sense of self.
b. Identity is also doing identity in the presence of others and doing
it well in their eyes.
2. Performative self means selves are creative performances based on
social demands and norms of a situation.
D. Facework
1. Facework occurs in everyday life.
a. We have a sense of our own dignity.
b. Transacted in everyday communication by polite protection of
others’ “face”
2. Intended to perform public identity and present self in a way to make
the self look good
a. Momentary social forces affect identity portrayal.
b. Identity is performed in everyday life so that people manage their image
to make everyone “look good.”
b. “Looking good” refers to “looking good to other people.”
3. Portrayal of self is shaped by social needs at the time, the social situation,
social frames, and surrounding circumstances.
E. Front and Back Regions
1. Front region/front stage is a frame where a social interaction is regarded as
under public scrutiny, so people have to be on their best behavior or acting out
their professional roles or intended faces.
2. Back region/backstage is a frame where a social interaction is regarded as not
under public scrutiny, so people do not have to present their public faces.
3. Performance of identity is enacted based on social cues in context.
4. Any identity connects to other identities, so performance of identity changes to
suit different audiences and situations.
5. We all draw on information that is both personal and communal.
a. “Self as character”
b. “Self as performer” is changing a performance to suit varied
audiences and situations.