What is Social Appropriateness? Voices from 90 Years of Research

Abstract

Social appropriateness is not easy to define and can be described and analysed from a manifold of scientific perspectives. Here we give a quick kaleidocopic view of aspects of socially appropriate behaviour and about aspects of what might influence judgement thereof. 

The very first question when considering social appropriateness as a phenomenon is:

$${\mathbf{How\;should\;Social\;Appropriateness\;be\;understood?}}$$

How can we define it? What does it encompass? What do we need to consider if we wish to achieve socially appropriate behaviour (whether by humans or non-human entities)? The literature on this topic and philosophical analysis of the concept of social appropriateness have shown that not only is this definition non-trivial, but there cannot be a universal definition at all. To offer a preliminary understanding and an initial conceptual approach, the next section therefore gives a loose collection of investigations of and explanations about the concept of social appropriateness—presented as a kaleidoscopic overview of social appropriateness—compiled during our literature search into various theories and concepts, so that we can begin the book with a definition of the field of social appropriateness. The complete list of literature we’ve researched is publicly accessible as an interactive database at www.polite-data.netzweber.de. In addition, please note: All the following quotations are our own translations.

FormalPara A Kaleidoscopic Overview of Social Appropriateness

• Social appropriateness for artificial assistants can be evaluated in service providing contexts. (Hegenbart 2019)

• Social appropriateness is made up of the quantifiable average and particular judgements of a perceiver, a perceived, and the relationship between them. (Kenny and La Voie 1984)

• Social appropriateness depends on the framing attributed to the situation by the interacting agents. (derived from frame analysis, cf. Goffman 1974)

  

• Social appropriateness consists of cooperation and coordination of social behaviour and can be explained in terms of game theory. (derived from game theory, c.f. e.g., Voss 2001; Diekmann 2016)

• Social appropriateness is a component of human behaviour that is oriented according to environmental affordances and can be influenced by a constructed environment. (derived from affordance theory, cf. Gibson 1979/2014, 1982)

• Like any human behaviour, social appropriateness is made up of the valence of the situation and the individual reaction possibilities of the individual. (derived from the discussion of valence, cf. Koffka 1962)

• Social appropriateness is a component of human behaviour generated by the environmental powers acting on it and the specific needs of the perceiver. (derived from the discussion of stimulating character, cf. Lewin 1926)

• Social appropriateness is status-dependent, and status manifests partly through clothing conventions. (derived from Bohn 2000; Esposito 2004)

• Social appropriateness encompasses different functions of politeness, friendliness, and tact that preserve society and interactions. (Luhmann 1996, 2008, 2017)

• Manners primarily serve the social integration of as many people as possible and facilitate the expression of sovereignty. (Goffman 1982a)

• Certain interpersonal manners—forms of propriety—serve the moral education of man. (Kant 1983)

• Through social appropriateness, there is a dependency on the situation within which the action is unfolding, its specific rules of actions, and the identity of the actors. (Weber et al. 2004; following March 1994)

• Socially appropriate behaviour is based on quantifiable cultural intelligence. (derived from the discussion on cultural intelligence, cf. Ang and van Dyne 2008)

• Social appropriateness serves primarily to avoid social dilemmas and make social interactions successful. (derived from game-theoretical approaches, cf. Voss 2001)

• Social appropriateness depends on constitutive rules for normative standards of appropriateness for the realization of social practices. (derived from Searle 2011)

• Social appropriateness depends on normative standards of appropriateness that are constantly renewed by situational social practice. (Poljanšek 2019)

• Social relations and therefore the framing of the rules of social appropriateness are primarily negotiated through the factors of ‘power’ and ‘status’. (status power theory, cf. Kemper 2011)

• Social (in)appropriateness results from maximization of utility/minimization of cost. (derived from rational choice theory, cf. Coleman and Fararo 1992)

• Social appropriateness is or results from the activation of the norms applicable to a situation. (derived from the norm activation model, cf. Schwartz 1977; Schwartz and Howard 1981)

• Social appropriateness/Socially appropriate robot behaviour results from the correct identification of the ability needs of the robots being deployed. (derived from Dautenheim 2007)

• The phenomenon area of social appropriateness contains expectations, aspects of validity, reference to rules, references to role, personal attitudes, and an experience bank. (Busse 2021)

• Social appropriateness arises from the perception and correct interpretation of social cues. (Vinciarelli et al. 2009)

• Social appropriateness results from the correct selection of a frame or script. (derived from models of frame selection (cf. Kroneberg 2010) and social information processing (e.g., Döpfner 1989))

• Social appropriateness serves to ensure smooth communication and manifests in the observance of the politeness principle. (cf. Geoffrey Leech 1983)

• Social appropriateness amounts to saving face, namely the public self-image of the interacting agents. (derived from the face-saving view, cf. Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987)

• Social appropriateness is behaviour consistent with expectations. (derived from the expectancy violations model, Burgoon et al. 1988)

• Social appropriateness manifests as pragmatic competence in following politeness rule. (derived from the rules of pragmatic competence, cf. Lakoff 1973)

• Manners reinforce (and partly arise from) class affiliations and are part of the habitus. (Bourdieu 1982)

• Social appropriateness encompasses culturally sensitive behaviour. (Hößler 2019)

• Knowledge of social appropriateness contain: a description of certain types of behaviour in the context of social interaction; a stipulation of whether these types of behaviour should be reproduced or avoided; a stipulation and description of specific types of situation in social interactions where the behaviour should be considered desirable or undesirable; a stipulation of the social group(s) in which the rule(s) should apply; a stipulation of situation-related role(s) (rank, status) to which a particular rule of socially appropriate behaviour applies; a specification of the dependency relationships between the various subaspects (from the report by Busse 2019)

• Social appropriate behaviour for technical systems can be constructed through a 5-step design process that in particular reflects the area of application of the system and the users’ expectations. (derived from design for etiquette-sensitive HRI application, cf. Bickmore 2001; Miller 2004; Zhang et al. 2001)

• Social appropriate behaviour of technical systems can be constructed with a politeness algorithm based on the face-saving view of Brown and Levinson. (derived from the ideas of the etiquette engine, cf. Wu et al. 2011)

• Social appropriateness encompasses a spectrum ranging from rude to over-polite behaviour, is negotiated in interactions, and depends on the perception of the interacting agent and their expectations of appropriateness mediated by their habitus and the social field of the interaction situation. (derived from Locher and Watts 2005)

• Society defines what is considered expectable expectations in various contexts; every communication and every performance of socially (in)appropriate behaviour contributes to the realization of society. (freely adapted from Niklas Luhmann)

• Socially appropriate behaviour depends on environmental influences, cognitive, emotional, and biological processes, and is mediated by social learning. (derived from social cognitive theory, cf. Bandura 1989)

• Cultural schemas can contain scripts or procedure schemas that specify the socially appropriate sequence of actions. (Schank and Abelson 1997)

• Social appropriateness depends on how much contextualization is associated with individual interactions in a society. (derived from the discussion of low-context and high-context cultures, cf. Gudykunst 1983)

• Event associated with specific rules of social appropriateness are stored schematically in human memory (Bartlett 1932). Schemas are organized by assimilation and accommodation. (Piaget 1936, 1976)

• Judgements of appropriateness depend on the personal preferences of the judging parties regarding group dynamics. (derived, e.g., from social dominance theory, cf. Pratto et al. 1994; Pratto and Sidanius 2012; Ho et al. 2012; Pratto et al. 2016)

• The status of a person influences their behaviour options with regard to the judgement of the social appropriateness of behaviour (e.g., Cornelia Bohn 2000; Elena Esposito 2004), as well as their own judgements of the appropriateness of the modes of behaviour of others.

• In premodern societies, social appropriateness was based on situational and cross-functional status difference (e.g., Bernhard Giesen 1991; David Diehl and Daniel McFarland 2010; Randall Collins 2000). It was recognized, e.g., by clothing regulation, forms of address, and spatial distance and was mediated and fixed by rituals and ceremonies. (Jörg Berns and Thomas Rahn 1995)

• In certain social contexts, such as care, gastronomy, or diplomacy, describable standards of social appropriateness are required. (freely adapted from Youssef 2019)

Finally, the phenomenon of social appropriateness can be presented as a spectrum, as illustrated in Fig. 3.1 in the context of linguistic politeness research (Watts 2005, xliii), a topic that we will discuss in more detail later. This spectrum ranges from grossly impolite (rude) to excessively polite (over-polite) behaviour and can be divided into three sectors: rude, impolite, and over-polite behaviours are typically classified as inappropriate and are therefore described by Watts as negatively marked behaviour. In the region of merely non-polite behaviour, behaviours are typically not noticed for reasons of social appropriateness (unmarked behaviour)—in a certain sense, this captures appropriate behaviour in the narrow sense as behaviour that ‘just passes’ (cf. Poljanšek 2022, own translation). Finally, the third sector encompasses courteous (polite) behaviour that typically stands out to participants as positive (positively marked behaviour).

Fig. 3.1

Social appropriateness as a spectrum (Watts 2005, xliii)

For these and other approaches to clarifying the question of what structures socially appropriate behaviour and judgements of the appropriateness of behaviours, as well as countless individual aspects and references to technical systems, see also the database of literature on social appropriateness at www.polite-data.netzweber.de.