Interaction Involvement

Interaction involvement is defined as the extent to which an individual participates in a social environment. This entails the individual's being aware of his or her own thoughts/feelings about messages from others, as well as attending to the likely meanings other people intend for their messages. It also means responding to those messages in an effective, appropriate manner. As such, interaction involvement is a fundamental element of competent interpersonal communication. This entry describes the components of interaction involvement and how these relate to interpersonal communication.

The concept of interaction involvement is grounded in the early work of Erving Goffman. Among other important ideas, Goffman observed that interpersonal society is governed by the meanings and interpretations people attribute to social acts, the pattern of verbal and nonverbal behavior that expresses one's view of the situation and evaluation of the participants, including self. Such a view of communication underscores the realities of interpersonal society as extremely fragile, whereby the slightest untoward act can potentially tear a delicately woven social fabric and significantly affect how one sees the relationships among participants and the reality of what is going on at a particular moment. Thus, the collective sense of social reality based on interaction is sustained by each person's assumed responsibility for regulating the flow of communicative events.

Consistent with most contemporary views of interpersonal communication competence, the central idea of interaction involvement is individuals' ability to regulate the flow of communicative events. Based on Goffman, interaction involvement consists of three related components, attentiveness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness.

[Page 527]Attentiveness is the most basic component of interaction involvement. It is concerned with an individual's attention to visual and auditory sources of information in the immediate social environment. For example, attentiveness includes listening carefully to what others say, taking note of what appear to be significant nonverbal cues, and keeping focused on the social events as they evolve. Goffman notes several ways in which individuals may become inattentive during social interaction. For example, one of the most common ways is to become preoccupied with something unrelated to the present conversation; another is to overly focus on some aspect of the conversation to the point that other important matters are missed or only partially processed.

Attentiveness to the flow of communicative events is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for adequate monitoring of the expressive order. One must also demonstrate perceptiveness, in other words, awareness of the meanings/interpretations others have placed on one's behavior and what meanings/interpretations one should perhaps place on their behavior. Basically, perceptiveness is one's ability to determine and integrate meanings associated with self and other(s) and generally understand what is going on in a particular social encounter. Examples of perceptiveness include suspecting that a person is lying, understanding what another's emotional needs are, and realizing that one has behaved inappropriately or at least may have been seen as such by others.

The first two components of interaction involvement—attentiveness and perceptiveness—reside in the cognitive/affective domain. The third component, responsiveness, lies in the behavioral domain. It is concerned with an individual's ability to adapt to the immediate social environment by knowing what to say and when to say it. As such, responsiveness is important to Goffman's notion of social acts, the pattern of verbal and nonverbal behavior that constitutes the expressive order.

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