0.3 Individuals and their situations  (Page 6/7)

It is hard to understand how social some people are compared to other people. I don't know if it is sufficient to just ask how satisfied someone is with their social interactions, because someone might not know if they are really at their full potential or not. I would think the best way would be to assess what a person could do better and how well they are functioning with other people socially. There could be a social problem that is causing a larger mental problem, so it is important to note if there is a major malfunction with someones social interactions.

However, a consideration of the impact of individuals on situations suggests a fundamentally different approach to understanding individuals. This approach focuses, instead, on the processes of choosing and influencing situations . Instead of defining sociable individuals as those who (1) when given the choice, choose to enter situations that foster the expression of sociability, and (2) once in a situation, will act in ways that increase the sociability of that situation. Thus, sociable individuals are those who, when given the choice of going to a party or going to the library, will choose to enter the party situation. Similarly, when sociable individuals find themselves with groups of people, these sociable individuals will work actively to mold their situations into one conducive to the display of sociability.

It is taking being social a step further when you actively try to influence a situation. You have to at least be getting along well first before you move up to that step. Someone that doesn't function well socially could try to influence a situation, but I doubt it will be very successful. I mean, if you are going to influence other people to be more social, it makes sense that you would have to be social yourself first. Some people do things that don't fit in with other people, while other people do things that exceed normal sociability. Some people easily engage in conversation, and get along when they do it. Others are awkward, while some do it with enthusiasm.

From this perspective, sociability is defined behaviorally as the processes of choosing whenever possible to enter sociable situations and acting to maximize the sociability of one's situations. In so doing, sociable individuals would be constructing for themselves social worlds most conducive to the expression and manifestations of their sociable dispositions. Not incidentally, as direct consequences of the active and constructive processes of choosing and influencing their social situations in ways that create "sociable" worlds within which to reside, "sociable" individuals would come to display sociable behaviors with high frequency and great regularity across situations and over time. In other words, these individuals would come to display the cross0situations consistency and the temporal stability that traditionally are regarded as the defining features of a "trait" or "disposition" of sociability. However, by understanding sociability in terms of the processes of choosing and influencing social situations, it has been possible to go far beyond the identification of regularities and consistencies in observed behavior to a theoretical understanding of these regularities and consistencies as the consequences of consistencies and regularities in the processes of choosing and influencing situations. This is not to say that the identification of regularities and consistencies in social behavior is not an important or a productive task. Rather, regularities and consistencies in social behavior are not important in and of themselves: they are important because of the processes that generate them. And from the perspective of one concerned with the impact of individuals on their social situations, regularities and consistencies in social behavior are the product of regularities and consistencies in the social worlds that individuals have constructed for themselves by means of the active processes of choosing and influencing their social situations.