How Contextual Frames Normalize Submission

ABSTRACT

Two studies demonstrate how contextual frames normalize submission and hereby complement and legitimize the exercise of power. Combining Kuhn’s qualitative concept of the self with Charles Osgood’s empirical measurements of self-attitudes, the first study tests the impact of the frame of submission on self-attitudes. This assessment of the self allows to quantify the influence of a frame or context. A second study tests the hypothesis that selves, organized by the context of submission, will normalize acts of submission. Computer simulations that quantitatively operationalize the Cybernetic Symbolic Interactionist perspective, find evidence for the normalizing quality of frames.

Notes

¹ This study has been made possible by Fulbright Scholar grant. For their support and advice, I would like to thank the National Research Council of Thailand in Bangkok, the Governor and Vice Governor of Phuket and the members of the Phuket Provincial Cultural Office. For their support and hospitality at the research sites, thank you to Prasert Fakthongphol, the President of all Puket Shrines, and Goh Ahn, the president of Jui Tui Shrine. Thanks go to Karudee Chotithamaporn (Cheng) the PR manager of the Bang Neow Shrine who provided extremely valuable information about the organization of the Vegetarian Festival and who helped to administer the interviews at the Bang Neow Shrine. I am especially indebted to Supatra Supchukul, my colleague and chair of the sociology department at Burapha University, who administered the interviews at the Jui Tui Shrine. Finally, many thanks go to the community of the Ma Song for their trust and collaboration.

² Supatra Supchukul, chair of the sociology department at Burapha University translated the TST into Thai. As a native Thai who has received her Ph.D. in the U.S., she is fully bilingual.

³ Because of conditions with limited or no access to electricity or the Internet, I could not use computer-based technology like surveyor (Heise 2014) to collect EPA ratings. Even if this could have been resolved, available software uses a predefined set of stimuli and needs to be modified to handle subjects who produced their own stimuli with the TST. While I was able to use the same scales, stepping back into pre-computer-assisted interviewing and administer paper and pencil ratings was a cumbersome but unavoidable procedure. One benefit, however, was that subjects rated the concepts as they had listed themselves which eliminated problems with misspellings, variation in the Tai spelling, and reading handwritten Thai.

⁴ All simulations were conducted with US impression formation equations included in Java Interact. Cross-cultural research has shown that despite the fact that there are cross-cultural differences in the equations information processing is largely similar (Schneider 2002; Schneider, Schröder 2012; Schröder 2011; Schröder et al. 2013). Hence, comparative cross-cultural comparisons simulations were conducted with one set of equations to increase the comparability of results.

⁵ Matching the measurement technique used in the database of Interact I do not employ the hierarchical self-ratings, for MaSong, Thai Student and Thai Poor of my first study, but average ratings. Comparing the sex separated average ratings to the hierarchical ratings in table one, an extreme similarity becomes apparent. Finding such a similarity is very much in line with the failure to empirically replicate hierarchies of self-attitudes reported by MacKinnon (2015). The similarity of averaged and hierarchical self-ratings is subject of a systematic investigation submitted for publication by the author.

⁶ I am using the same ratings for the behaviors for Thais and for the Ma Song ratings since they were not sub-culture specific. Using culture-specific ratings instead of US ratings of behaviors would increase normativeness and decrease deflections (Schneider 2012). Therefore, the choice of using the same behavior ratings in both subcultures makes testing my second hypothesis more conservative.

⁷ In this illustration I use the U.S. concept of God which is rated as (2.57 2.90 0.91) by contemporary U.S. males and (3.28 3.67 1.21) by females.

⁸ In my investigation, I treated contexts as entities endogenous to individuals in interactions. The idea that structural properties are reflected in our selves is not entirely new. In the past, I (Schneider 1997) used cluster analysis to identify higher-order structural properties in identities. Later, in their extensive linguistic investigation, Neil MacKinnon and David Heise (2010) used factor analysis to identify in identities the institutions of Family and Marriage, Sexuality, Medicine, Education, Business and Work, Law and Corrections, Politics and Government, and Religion. In an exploratory analysis of these institutions, they found the religious and medical settings to be relevant. Overall, there is strong evidence that institutional properties and properties of settings are reflected in measures of identity.

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Notes on contributors

Andreas Schneider

Andreas Schneider is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas Tech University. In the late 80s he started working on computer simulation models operationalizing symbolic interactionism at Indiana University. Involved in international cross-cultural comparison, he taught and worked in Asia, North America and Europe as Fulbright scholar and faculty. He used this comparative international focus to identify cultural differences in the fields of sexuality, religion, and authority. Most recently Schneider uses this comparative approach investigating submission as a flipside of authority.