The Importance of Audience effect to Family/Human Communication and Development
by Dhruv Sharma
2023 N. Cleveland St.
Arlington VA 22201
Dhruv Sharma is an independent scholar with a background in Systems engineering and Organizational Behavior. Mr. Sharma holds a Master’s in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a MA in Organizational Behavior from Marymount University. Mr. Sharma has 8+ years experience working in mission oriented non-profit financial institutions and writes about human behavior, personal change, organizations, risk management, complexity, cybernetics, and interdisciplinary systems and holistic topics in the tradition of Bateson on the integration of systems and human thought.
Keywords: Audience theory, human communication, family and individual experience, therapy
Abstract
This article discusses the role of the audience effect in family and organizational relations and communication. The audience effect has been well studied in isolation but not integrated with human and family psychology. This article highlights the centrality of the audience effect to family communication and all human communication. Audience theory is used to reframe existing literature as a possible figure and ground reversal of Goffman’s work on presentation of the self. The article posits audience as central to human need and experiences urges greater study on this topic by all social sciences.
Introduction
The audience
effect, also known as social facilitation, is a well studied phenomenon in
social psychology (Rollag). The audience effect is so prominent that it has
been found to be effective in animals as well. That said, the audience effect is
a concept which has not been used as an 'intervention' in organizations or
individual therapy. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of the
audience effect and show that audience effect can be used successfully in family
therapy. The family is a quintessential form of organization and many neuroses
of organizations are transferences of unresolved family issues (Kets De Vries,
1984)..Thus interventions which can fruitfully be applied to family
organizations are likely to produce effective results in organizations if
properly adapted to work settings.
Literature Review of Audience Effect and Social Facilitation
The audience effect put simply is the fact that the “presence of others” or having an audience, affects how human beings and animals behave (Verwys). The majority of research on audience impact has focused on social facilitation in which the presence of an audience helps enhance performance of tasks that are easy to perform or ones which the performer has mastered and as such helps dominant skills (Charness, 2003). The other dimension to this research has been that the presence of an audience hinders complex tasks or tasks which the performer has not mastered (2). In addition audience theory has been found to increase moralistic punishment (Kurzban, 2007). In the presence of other animals and humans, animals have been found to eat more and have higher brain chemicals (Rollag). The two main causal factors posited to cause the audience effect have been “due to an increase in alertness or arousal from the possible threat of another person or as due to greater conformity to public norms in the presence of others” (Guerin, 1984). Early focus of audience impact has been on sports study (Verwys). Recently the impact of the audience effect on individuals making suboptimal economic decisions has been studied within organizational contexts (Charness). Although the existence of the audience effect is a surprising phenomenon, it deserves greater interest from researchers and practitioners. An alternate theory for explaining the audience effect could be that performers attempt to impress an audience and when one is good at the task the performer is able to enact an optimal performance but if the skill on performance is lacking and requires concentration it cannot be spontaneously performed well on the fly. This is similar to “evaluation apprehension…self-consciousness…and distraction” explanation (Verwys). Current research shows how the audience effect can improve or hamper individual performance, but it fails to investigate its normative potential, especially within families.
Family Therapy as Interventions in Systems
Family therapy has a long tradition of innovative interventions and research ranging from Bateson, Watzlawick, and Erikson. The basis of successful family therapy and intervention has been that "family systems, like all social systems, are organizationally complex, open, adaptive, and information-processing systems (Kantor,10). In this framework "'family therapy' is an intervention into a family system. (Haley,1987,106).
Within the family system
members of a family...any social system...have 4 basic parts to play: mover, follower, opposer, and by stander. ...any social action initiated by one member of a family stimulates a reaction from the other members. The initiator ...is the mover of the action. The responders are co-movers. They may exercise one of 3 logical options: following-agreeing with the action taken by the mover; opposing-challenging the action of the mover; or by standing-witnessing the mover's action but acknowledging neither agreement nor disagreement with it (Kantor, 180-181).
The audience effect holds great promise as an innovative intervention in family systems.
Case Study
Problem Statement
The simple application of audience theory to family therapy is examined in a simple recurring family problem: parents constantly arguing and fighting in front of children and trying to get children to take the side of each parent. This is an issue which occurs where the parents of one of the spouses comes from a family with a similar interaction pattern where one party feels taken for granted and held back or nagged by the other party. The other argues back. Both parties only see their side of the story and these fights tend to occur when children are at home. Each parent wants the child to side with them and 'see' what the other parent is doing to them. They even tell the children to tell their mom/dad to stop bothering them. In studying such cases from first hand observation I have observed that the children become an audience for the parents and their fighting and consequent playing the victim. Even if the child sides with one parent then the other parent will tip the balance by equally harrowing tales of being wronged by the other parent. To the children it may appear one parent is in the wrong as if one of the parents, usually the submissive one, will yield the conflict will resolve. What the child does not understand is that these arguments occur because both parents have wronged each other in one way or the other or at least within their own minds. As such during the fights even the submissive parent will not back down and will argue back to make a stand based on prior fights or arguments.
From a game theory point of view when a family member has an outside audience(potentially biased in their favor) they can ala prisoner’s dilemma turn on another family member in front of the outside audience and make themselves appear victimized or attempt to gain sympathy. This behavior is only advantageous as long a s there is the presence of another. Once the outside audience leaves, the offending family member must win back the slighted regular audience as the immediate family member is the audience most available to the individual.
Audience Effect and Social Phenomena
Audience effect is a simple concept but it has vast implications for social psychology and family therapy. Audience effect if reframed more generally has implications for how people view themselves as identity exists in a social context and is constructed (Wagner). Arguments, competition, and personality (self-esteem) can all be impacted by this important force of audience effect. For example even relationships between couples can be seen as individuals constructing their relationship within which each partner has an audience to whom they share themselves and construct themselves in each other’s eyes. As the relationship matures and the audience may not be fully supportive then other sympathetic audiences may be sought to buffer of boost one’s ego or personality. Given a context of social construction audience effect in this sense is as important to social psychology as gravity is to physics. Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in this sense is a pioneering work not for utilizing theatre as a crucial metaphor for understanding human system but more importantly showing impact and need of audience by people and groups. This view putting audience effect at the center is a figure and ground reversal of Goffman’s work in the sense that his work is traditionally read from the viewpoint of performers trying to appease explicit or implicit audiences. Instead it should be read from the viewpoint of how central having an audience is to the human condition. As part of an effort to direct research and application of audience theory a family therapy case will analyzed using audience effect as an intervention. The application of audience effect used for illustrative purposes will involve the case of parents fighting and arguing in the presence of others (children, relatives etc). A simple connection of arguments relating to audience impact is shown simply by the following parable from Chuan Tzu quoted by Watzlawick highlighting how audience effect can result in a “certain conflict engendering human attitude”:
suppose a boat is crossing a river, and another, empty boat is about to collide with it. Even an irritable man would not lose his temper. But supposing there was some one in the second boat. Then the occupant of the first would shout to him to keep clear. And if the other did not hear him the first time, nor even when he called to 3 times, bad language would inevitably follow. In the first case there was no answer, in the second there was because in the first case the boat was empty, and in the second it was occupied. And so it is with man. If he could only roam empty through life, who would be able to injure him? (Watzlawick, 65).
This is simple example of where the mere presence of another allows one the chance to get agitated and perform being angry. From a game theory viewpoint the presence of another allows one to perform and play out the victim. This is truer in when there is a third party present in front of a couple where each spouse has the chance to rat out their partner to earn sympathy from an ‘audience’
Family System as Social Construction of Parents
Within the family system view the children generally play the by stander role passively or try to take sides by convincing one of the parents to yield unsuccessfully. The role of children is important as many quarrelling couples use the children to sustain their arguments over time. In this case as Haley points out there is a triad which is the patient, as “rivalrous quarrels that amplified in intensity required someone outside the dyad to intervene and stabilize it (Bateson, Naven). If a third person is regularly activated to stabilize a dyad, the unit is in fact not dyadic but is at least a triad”(Haley, 106). With this view children are part of a “social construction of the parents” (Ambert, 2001, 7).
An easy and effective solution to this dilemma using audience theory is to ask
the children not to get involved in the fight and to ignore it. Also if a fight
erupts the children should leave the room. Usually feuding couples do not fight
when they are alone. It is only when there are children or outside guests in the
house who can serve as willing audiences to hear about how the spouse is wronged
that such fights erupt. These fights have a chicken and egg sort of self
reflexive nature which precludes trying to figure out who is at fault or started
the issue. When the parents are alone they cooperate more as they each become
the audience they wish to woo and are willing to compromise. The same parents
when given a third party audience start to feel they can take their spouse for
granted and use the audience to vet past grievances or become the victim.
Once denied an audience such arguments subside and parents treat each other as
human beings and talk to each other. This is a counterintuitive intervention and
relies on the fact that a majority of parent arguments are driven by the
audience effect.
Extensions: Dysfunctional Patterns of Family Communication in Family Theatre
The paper now turns to analyzing audience effect via autobiographical fictional family dynamics in literature. Literature offers a rich detailed information for research on functional and dysfunctional families and human interaction. Many fictional family stories are based on autobiographical accounts such as the ones we will examine next.
Often the audiences of family members may differ leading to arguments and hostility. For example for parents their audience might be their peers or even their own parents. While for children their audience at school is their teachers and students. Some students view teachers as the audiences while other regard their peers as the audience. This distinction can have impact on the student’s performance in academia. The difference in audience’s leading to conflict is showcased in Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize winning play called “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”. The play revolves around a mother who is fixated on her remembered audience of childhood peers who made fun of her and is always berating her daughter as she fears her daughter is a social outcaste like herself. The daughter lives in her own world with her own audience and her inability to share her mother’s audience leads to turmoil for the mother daughter pair. Trying to force the child to share the adult’s audience often leads to quarrels and agitation.
Eugene O’Neil’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” is another play which captures the conflict within a family with audience effect run amok. The head of the family is an actor who is always playing a role at home and does not deal directly with his wife or son’s illness which he feels responsible for. Eugene O’Neil’s play is based on his own childhood experiences and revolves around the theme that there is no such thing as ‘love’ as it merely acting. Acting of course only makes sense in the context of an audience. The play shows the extreme case of only audience effect.
Audience Effect in the Classroom
Anyone who has taught a class knows that the teacher is in the spotlight and the student audience is watching them keenly. Each student is safe in their desk as they are not on the spot being watched by the audience. Kids often try to not raise their hands and thus avoid the gaze of the audience. This happens in the home as well where children try to not stand out and keep a low profile. This often relates to the hostile or negative connotation of the audience as a form of judging primarily taught by parents or authoritarian individuals. The gaze of audience as a positive or negative phenomenon has important implications. Most adults learn to avoid responsibility and blame in the workplace and know standing out is deemed a negative thing in the workplace. There are also cases where children want the spotlight and love the audience. Often these are kids who at home do not get attention as the parents are self-absorbed. At home their parents are not interested in being an audience as they are too caught up in their own insecurities. As such school becomes the outlet for such kids where they are able to create themselves in the audience of the classroom and experience a sense of achievement and positive reinforcement from the benevolent audience of the teacher and a class of advanced students. This all depends on the audience of course as there are many people who hate school as it reminds them of a belligerent audience.
Gaze of the Audience
The great psychologist Jacques Lacan noted the importance of the gaze of the audience in his work (Zizek, 1992). To Lacan the gaze was where the audience could see itself watching itself. This self-referential aspect captures the crucial point that the audience effect is in the mind of the individual as they construct the audience and what they believe about the audience greatly affects their behavior, communications, and interactions. An important intervention might be to simply elicit the audience from the individual and show them the hidden assumptions about the unseen invisible audience that guides their day to day actions. This is a delicate operation as the audience lives in the invisible as we do not like to acknowledge that we are aware of the audience. We want out performances to appear sincere and true to character as they reveal who we really are.
Internet Audience
Now with the rise of Facebook and blogging on the internet the human audience effect reaches to new heights. People are making available personal information about themselves revealing their beliefs about the audience they want evaluating themselves. The new generation is characterized by its openness in revealing personal details about themselves. Having an audience becomes in this sense a possession and everyone is out there trying to catch the attention of their own audience. The great thing about the internet audience is that everyone in the family can have their own audience outside and not be dependent on the available audience at home. The act of giving and paying attention after a long day’s work adds to the tensions at homes as people work longer hours and with children not having much time with their parents. Now everyone comes home and go on their own laptop pursuing their own audience and being audience to other people’s work. This phenomenon was noted by Patricia Wallace in her book entitled The Psychology of the Internet. The use of home pages to define and present themselves reminds Wallace of David Elkind’s work which focused on ‘egocentrism’ as a preoccupation with an imaginary audience (Wallace, 1999,34). Elkind’s work highlighted the importance of imaginary audiences in adolescent development. Although the majority of imaginary audience theory has focused on adolescents this phenomenon appears to be at play through one’s life. An example of this is Maccoby’s work on narcissitic leaders (Maccoby,2007). Within an organization managers act in accordance to the whims of internal audiences as carefully analyzed by Ginzel, Kramer, and Sutton (1992). The garbage can theory which highlights the fact that most managers make decisions in a haphazard irrational model can be viewed from the audience lense as showing how the confusing context of multiple audiences with different agenda lead to decisions which do not make surface rational sense but are explainable if viewed as attempts to satisfice and impress powerful audiences (Cohen, 1972). Of the 4 out of 7 managerial learning themes found to be important in managerial development studied by Akin, at least 4 involve an implicit or explicit audience: emulation of mentor, role taking, anticipation, and validation (Akin, 1987).
Reality TV
The recent rise of reality television is also indicative of the primacy of audience effect in social phenomena as reality shows allow audiences to watch hyper aware individuals under the influence of audience effect. The characters on tv are able to express their views of the audience watching them. Substantiating the reality of audience effect and how it is essential of humans is one reason why such shows are popular. These shows highlight the Sally Field like tendency everyone has to be liked. Caring about the audience enough to alter ourselves make people seem more human. Reality shows reveal the reality of the audience effect.
Audience of the Self-EGO
Identity formulation from the lens of audience effect can be seen as a search for our intended audience. Once the child knows who their target audience is they can begin to act in accordance with that audience in mind.
Importance of Audience Disposition
Once an audience is deemed or recognized as persistently unsympathetic individuals eschew that audience if possible, given a environment with heterogenous audiences.
This phenomenon might even be at play when individuals have behaved inconsistently with their own views as individuals rationalize their inconsistent actions. When in one frame of mind one’s actions become inconsistent one can eschew the internal audience and look for another internal audience as frame of mind. Change of internal or external audience when either becomes unsympathetic is likely. The external manifestation of this phenomena occurs when one may offend an outside audience beyond appeasement and one seeks another audience. Great turmoil is experienced if one loses their only audience. In this context multiple internal and external audiences are equivalent. The importance of audience maintenance, care, change or exchange may be central to the way humans adapt to change. When one loses face to an audience, besides ignoring this, winning back the audience, the only other choice is to seek another audience, which would ignore or condone one’s behavior. The individual who has offended one audience, then finds a new audience and attempts to tell their story from a biased way neglecting prior facts related to faux pas. Continual and repeated exposure to unsympathetic or malevolent audience, which interprets all actions of individual negativity can be a corrosive experience. One common example of malevolent audience is that of opposing political parties which interpret each other’s actions in the most negative perspective possible. The pervasive example of negative audience may be one’s workplace, for e.g large bureaucracies are known for creating performance systems which attempt to find fault or reasons not to give pay increases. In such organizations, which are prevalent, work and worker quality of life suffer. Interplay, recognition, search, and replacement of audience is crucial to human communication as without an audience no communication is possible.
Audience As Motivator
Without an audience no would write at all (even scholars). All writers have an implicit or invisible audience they are writing or speaking to in words. Writing as a thought reflection tool allows one to become their own audience. When one does not fit with their own internal audience they might seek an external audience as stated before. The need or desire for an audience is essential to the human condition. It is even evident in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther where Goethe depicts suicide as a result of disease. This reflected Goethe’s desire for an audience for the depiction of lost love. Without an audience for the tragedy the enactment of the tragedy no longer matters. After this book came out the book resonated with other audiences and resulted in copycat suicides and was read much by Napolean who also ultimately committed suicide. By creating an audience for tragic suicide the book allowed readers to share in this implicit audience.
If one lacks a benevolent and sympathetic audience immediately they may engage a future audience like future generations or imagined future readers or scholars. Audience as a motivational force for communication, scholarship, and art is an understudied phenomenon. The importance of social networks and the success of dedicated small groups of people all involve the benefit of mutually reinforcing audiences. The motivational benefits of such groups may outweigh or make secondary the more well known benefits such as social capital or diverse talents and viewpoints brought in by a group. An audience holds things together. Being able to imagine the lens of audience is a crucial skill. This is consistent with recent research on mirror neurons found in humans and other social animals (see Rizzolatti 2004 or Ramachandran, 2006).
Conclusion
Audience theory can serve as a rich source of understanding and interventions for family therapy and social psychology. The coupling of audience effect with social construction and family systems shows the importance of the roles of by standers in families such as children. Audience theory discussed here has been examined in family communication via a case study intervention in a real family. An extension of audience effect and its role in human communication and interaction has been explored conceptually with examples from literature. By analyzing the role of audience theory in human interaction one is able to conceive of new interventions based on the audience construct. It is the belief of the authors that using and researching construal of audience as a construct will help audience psychological research and further the understanding of human communication and interaction. To be human is to have an audience as all anthropologists and informants do. Perhaps the reason postmodernism did not go mainstream is that it neglected the human need for audience, and in doing so deconstructivism removed the role of audience and humans do not feel comfortable creating and living in a world without audience to share meaning with. This is something Victor Frankl attempted to address indirectly with logotherapy. The topic of audience as a construction and tie to human experience deserves greater study and thought by all social sciences.
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