Social Panic

A recurrent feature in my social life-that is my life in the social domain-is an uncomfortable situation caused by a conflict between two social constraints upon my action. One one hand, as I move about in the social domain, my awareness of the potential meaningfulness of my actions leads me to be aware of my surroundings so that I my temper my conduct with respect to what I perceive, with the goal of maintaining some desired relation to my surrounding social world.

However, ever so often I face a situation whose solution (the course of action that will resolve the situation in a desirable way) is in some other way problematic. For instance, if when walking down the street, I see an acquaintance, it is my usual desire to acknowledge this by saying e.g. "hello". If the acquaintance is more than 20 feet or so away, I am forced to account for the fact that quietly saying hello is unreasonable-especially if it is noisy out. As a result, I have several options: to raise my voice, wait until the person is closer, or give a greeting that is too quiet to hear. Each of these is problematic in that they will be intrinsically meaningful in their own ways-even as they solve the original problem.

By raising my voice I will satisfy my desire to greet the friend, but in doing so, engage in an activity (yelling) that has other social connotations which may conflict with the message I want to convey. If I wait until the friend gets closer, I will solve the problem presented by the distance, but in doing so will do nothing to fulfill my desire to be sociable towards my friend. As I approach the friend silently, I position myself in an ambiguous zone of social relations towards my friend-I may not be planning to greet them, I may be waiting, whatever the case, my positioning is ambiguous to my friend. This is an uncomfortable position to be in, because such ambiguous zones may catalyze (in the friend) several different courses of action. The friend is forced to attempt to interpret the ambiguous performance I am giving, and may interpret my actions in the "wrong" way-a way different from what I myself intend.

THe reason that this situation is so undesirable is that we do not look appetizingly on the possibility of reacting to ways of acting that are beyond our control. We act in certain ways towards others so that we may enjoy a particular social positioning. There are courses of action that we don't take because we don't want to face the social consequences of acting in these ways. When are actions make our intentions ambiguous, we enter a realm in which undesirable responses form others are made more likely.

Thus, such situations place us in a bind: though we want to position ourselves in a certain way, the possible courses of action that we have for achieving such a positioning would actually make our positioning ambiguous because these actions have additional significance-in addition to offering solutions to the present problem.