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Front stage, back stage

Front stage back stage illustration: the Irving Goffman metaphor of life as theater illustrated with a couple and a waiter at a fancy restaurant

Most of us behave differently in a flashy restaurant than we do in a job interview or at a funeral. We naturally tune our behaviour to our audience and environment. As part of the metaphor of Life As Theatre with Social Life As a Performance, the famous sociologist Erving Goffman called this front stage behaviour — how we behave when people are watching. In contrast, we may only let our guard down and fully relax when we're by ourselves — here we're back stage.

In a flashy restaurant, wait staff will behave differently in their interactions with guests than they will out back in their break time, and you may find yourself saying a wine you've just tasted is lovely even when you don't think it is. Once you start thinking about front stage and back stage behaviour you'll spot the "performance" of social life throughout almost every daily interaction.

Erving Goffman explains front stage, back stage and more in his classic sociology book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life .

Published 26 Sep 2021

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Keep exploring

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Phubbing: snubbing people for your phone. We've probably all experienced it — heck, we've probably all done it at one point or another — or at least it's likely to be familiar. Someone in a restaurant waiting for their friends to put their phones down. A family gathering where people are no longer talking to each other. A teacher without the attention of their students. A child failing to get the attention of an adult who's trying to process some messages on their phone. Research on phubbing, mostly since the word was coined, says it largely has the effects you'd think it would. The effects vary with who's being phubbed and who's doing the phubbing: bosses and employees, family members, parents and kids, or partners. Whoever's phubbing who, snubbing is a suitable root word for it — it's not so nice to feel snubbed. I learned about phubbing from the Mind over Tech community — they also have a newsletter on forming better digital habits. The word phubbing has the unusual distinction of being created for an advertising campaign to sell a dictionary. Phubbing, you may have spotted, is a portemanteau. For more phone annoyance see halfalogue. See, for example, Knausenberger, J. et al. (2022). Feeling Ostracized by Others’ Smartphone Use: The Effect of Phubbing on Fundamental Needs, Mood, and Trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883901 Also see: phone zombie, continuous partial attention, when drinking tea…Phubbing: snubbing people for your phone. We've probably all experienced it — heck, we've probably all done it at one point or another — or at least it's likely to be familiar. Someone in a restaurant waiting for their friends to put their phones down. A family gathering where people are no longer talking to each other. A teacher without the attention of their students. A child failing to get the attention of an adult who's trying to process some messages on their phone. Research on phubbing, mostly since the word was coined, says it largely has the effects you'd think it would. The effects vary with who's being phubbed and who's doing the phubbing: bosses and employees, family members, parents and kids, or partners. Whoever's phubbing who, snubbing is a suitable root word for it — it's not so nice to feel snubbed. I learned about phubbing from the Mind over Tech community — they also have a newsletter on forming better digital habits. The word phubbing has the unusual distinction of being created for an advertising campaign to sell a dictionary. Phubbing, you may have spotted, is a portemanteau. For more phone annoyance see halfalogue. See, for example, Knausenberger, J. et al. (2022). Feeling Ostracized by Others’ Smartphone Use: The Effect of Phubbing on Fundamental Needs, Mood, and Trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883901 Also see: phone zombie, continuous partial attention, when drinking tea

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