1978: Towards a social psychology of everyday life: a standpoint in action. In M. Brenner, P. Marsh and M.

Williams (Eds.) The Social Contexts of Method: Readings in the Sociology of Methodology: London: Croom Helm,
pp.28-65.

TOWARDS A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE: A STANDPOINT 'IN ACTION'

John Shotter

In this chapter I have space to treat of one question only but it is, I feel, a crucial one: Is it possible to devise as
part of a new approach to the study of actual everyday life activities, a special way of seeing them which will
not, on the one hand, distort their nature, but which will, on the other, allow us as professional social scientists
to deepen and enlarge our understanding of them?
It is necessary, I think, to pose such metamethodological questions as this, for, if the professionals
way of seeing the world is no different from the laymans, then it is difficult to see in what consists the
professionals claim to have access to any special knowledge, unavailable to laymen.
But if the professionals way of seeing the world distorts or is from a different standpoint to the
laymans view, then we have a situation in which the very nature of the scientific knowledge meant to help us
solve our own everyday life problems brings into question, and apparently denies (Joynson, 1974), the
common-sense assumptions about ourselves that we would use in applying that knowledge to the solution of
such problems. The professionals account lacks, in the current jargon, ecological validity; but much worse: if
believed, rather than resolving our moral confusion and bewilderment, the studies of social scientists may
play no small part in compounding and augmenting it.
My claim in this chapter is that it is possible to have such a special viewpoint; although, only as a
theoretical construction (for if we try to catch ourselves in the act to see how we do what we are doing, we
stop the temporal flow of our action): we can learn, but only with great difficulty, to see everyday activity as if
from a standpoint in action, seeing it not as an external observer but as an actor, not as an objective pattern of
events but as meaningful activity which, in its temporal flow from less to more realised states, may be
perceptually (but not physically) divided into coherent acts which can be taken as expression of an intention.
And such a new viewpoint in action is, perhaps, all that one needs to embark upon a new approach; a
methodology as such being not only unnecessary but at the moment at least, difficult to [end 33] decide upon.
For what one seeks from such a new standpoint is to see the ways that men do things: the methodologies
(Garfinkel, 1967) they use become the subject matter of our new approach.
Undermining Our Confidence in Our Own Com mon Sense
Let me begin my argument for a new standpoint by first discussing how at least some of us, as tyros, come to a
study of the social sciences: quite without knowing how it is that we can make sense of it, we wake up in the
world one day, fording ourselves able to make at least some sense of it - and in it. And of course, if we were not
able to do so, then we would be unable to conduct our daily lives as we do. So it is not in our daily lifes
activities that our problems with the nature of our own abilities usually occur; it is when we disengage
ourselves from such activities and pause to reflect upon what it is that enables us to act as we do that we run
into difficulties. It is thus from our knowledge of what we can do - or strictly, from our accounts of it - that
problems arise.
Facing such problems, some of us turn to academic psychology, and try to become professionals in
studying them; for surely, we feel, a disciplined and scientific investigation of them must yield some solutions.
But - after much struggle and hard work to become trained in the discipline - we find it, strangely, of little help.
It begins in a plausible enough manner, by suggesting to us that a special way of seeing ourselves and

of formulating our problems must be fashioned to replace the inadequate stories that we have told ourselves
in the past. For we must admit that our common-sense folk psychology is full of fallacies, fantasies and
falsehoods; and is most certainly lacking in precision ... it was a sense of common senses inadequacies that
drove us to academic psychology in the first place. Accepting, then, the truth of such remarks, we are not at all
surprised to hear it suggested next, that all our social problems - our criminal tendencies and mental
illnesses, etc., etc. - continue because of its inadequacies, because of our ignorance, the unreasoned attitudes
enshrined in our common-sense ways of going on. And that if we were to redesign our culture (or at least
aspects of it) upon a scientific basis, much conflict and hardship, fear and confusion, in short, much that is bad
in social life could be eliminated, and, of course, we would all vote for that. Thus it is that the first step in the
education of a psychology student is the undermining of his confidence in the importance and the reliability of
the knowledge of everyday affairs that he already possesses, and the institution in him of the unrealistic ideal
of a [end 34] conflict-free, logically structured social life. Surely, real life is intrinsically conflictful and vague...
isnt it?
Learning to See Objectively
Instead of introductory textbooks beginning, then, with both practical and imaginary exercises designed to
awaken in the student a special awareness of that knowledge - an awareness of how he actually does use it in
regulating his own affairs, and how he acquires and transforms it - texts begin by showing what psychology, as
a science of behaviour is, and how it goes about its business. They have to do this because, as they all without
exception point out (because its true), there is a great difference between popular conceptions of things
psychological and their proper scientific formulation; the novice has to learn - to quote from a popular early
text - to think in a new way about the living organism and the activity we [psychologists] call behaviour
(Hebb, 1958, p. 1).
And we (psychologists) all know what that new way is - we have all been trained in it - it is the
method of studying human activity objectively from the standpoint of external observers. Rather than seeking
from a standpoint in action to understand the sense of their actions, we have to view peoples activity as an
orderly sequence of movements, seeking, by use of an experimental methodology, the cause-and-effect laws
supposed to govern all such movements. And, as it is maintained that all the concepts and distinctions
important in daily life should be abandoned, what one sees should be described within a supposedly neutral
language designed to replace everyday terms. We have had to try to learn, for instance, to see a smile not as a
smile but as a certain pattern of facial movements; we have had to try to work with - as Hull (1943, p. 25) put
it - colourless movements, and attempt to build up complex human behaviour from its atomic parts.
Now I say try here because it is not at all clear that it is actually possible to see human activities in
this way, as those who know for example of Birdwhistells (1970) work on smiling will realise. After a great
deal of work attempting to correlate smiling with a particular, well-defined pattern of movements,
Birdwhistell (p. 33) could only say to sum it all up: Only [as a result of my analyses] have I been able to free
myself from an ethnocentric preconception that I know what a smile is. In other words, there seems to be no
such well-defined pattern of movements to be discovered at all. To adapt St Augustines statement of his
problem with time, we could say What is a smile? If nobody asks me, I know, but if I want to explain to some
one, then I [end 35] know not. And in general the same result turns up time and again; we find in different
social contexts the same pattern of movements being different things, and different patterns of movement
being the same thing. Evidently, our ways of identifying things in real life, the methodologies that we use
there, are quite different from the methodology we are meant to apply in the pursuit of our science - that
methodology, including as it does seeing things objectively, will become an item in the subject-matter of our
new approach; for, how we agree amongst ourselves as to what are the objective aspects of a particular
situation is problematic.

Mowing Down Straw Men?

The difficulty with our standard objective methodology is, I think, a real one, and in a moment I shall suggest
that to meet it we must abandon - not our common-sense ways of going on - but that standard methodology

which currently we feel makes our profession a scientific one. But before I do, I want to point out something to
those who say that to attack psychologists who use behaviourist and other such-like methodologies is to
attack straw men. I want to point out to them that it is only our methodology at the moment which unifies all
the various specialisms within psychology, and it is only in virtue of it that we can claim access to a form of
knowledge which competes in truth and accuracy with common-sense knowledge. It is only by use of our
methodology that we can transform the observations we make into data. Thus it is no use saying that all
psychologists now recognise and take account of the fact that people think, and feel, and so on, and that few
apply the methodology strictly. For without our methodology, our special way of seeing the world and
seeking truth within it, we have nothing to distinguish us from laymen - and there are many laymen with
experience at least equal to if not greater than our own in the special fields we have chosen for study. Thus we
cannot in one breath legitimate our special status as professionals by reference to our methodology, while in
the next, having gained access to the corridors of power in the meantime, revert merely to common-sense
modes of analysis and explanation; at least, that is, not if we want to remain honest (and rational).
So, whether it is a real possibility for us or not - and the prospect is of course still debatable - if we
want to claim the status of a science, then we must possess as part of a methodology, a special way of seeing
the world, a special technique for making a proper contact with the subject-matter of our science - whatever
that subject-matter may be. [end 36]
W e are Responsible for at Least Some of Our Own Actions: Our Methodologies are the Subject-Matter
of Our New Approach
Now I do not want to argue any further here about the inadequacies of the behaviourist methodology we
borrowed from the natural sciences long ago. Many, including my colleague R.B. Joynson (1974), seem to me
to have produced quite devastating accounts of its shortcomings. And were it not for the fact that in this
modern world there is nowhere else to turn for help in lifes problems, except to the social sciences in general
and to psychology in particular, many psychologists might well have felt tempted in the force of such
depressing prognostications, to shut up shop and go home. But we cannot, not now, for many reasons other
than merely personal ones (like not having any other job to go to): it would be to give up our dream in the
power of rational thought as an instrument of progress; it would be to give up the task of constructing a
methodological framework within which successive generations of men could contribute to the same tasks
and move towards the same goals.
Thus, the task of reconstructing psychological enquiry is an important one. For no deliberate and
continuous progress is possible without a method for comparing what we are doing now with what we used to
do in order to assess whether there is any improvement or not.
Now one way of putting what seems to me to be wrong with our classical methodology while offering
at the same time an alternative to it - if I may be permitted here merely to sketch what I think is the difficulty
rather than arguing it properly - is that while claiming to replace our everyday ways of doing things with a
scientific method, it still relies heavily upon them. In other words, it does not offer, as it claims, knowledge that
can compete with common sense, as commonsense procedures still lie at the heart of the method it uses.
When illustrating this point in the past (Shotter, 1974a, 1975), I have introduced it, under the
influence of work in the philosophy of human action (Winch, 1958; Peters, 1958; Taylor, 1966), by way of
discussing the distinction between actions and events, between what we do and what merely happens, to,
within, or around us. I have pointed out that not only can we all make the distinction, but that we must make it
if we are ever to conduct scientific investigations: for the only way of ever testing scientific theories
necessitates that we recognise, when acting in accord with the theories, whether the consequences of our
actions accord with or depart from the expectations engendered by those theories. Thus I took it that, being
able to assess our responsibility for things - which is of course at the heart of everyday life - was also [end 37]
at the heart of doing science and was quite irreplaceable, for scientists without any sense of responsibility for
their own actions would be unable to do experiments. Thus I took it that, no matter what metaphysical notions
one may believe about universal determinism, etc., in everyday life, it seems, people can themselves cause at
least some of their own motions; not all, but at least some of them.

But even more than this: I also took it that men face the task of acting, even when all alone, in ways
which make sense to others. And the main force of Winchs (1958) argument - which still seems to me valid in
spite of devastating attacks upon his cultural relativism - is that one cannot find the sense or meaning in a
persons action just by looking at the logical structure of the movements in which it consists; one must study
how these movements are put to use in a social context. Thus it is that, learning-to-make-sense-to-others is
not just a matter of learning to make a well-defined pattern of responses - that is, learning something objective
- it is a matter of learning how to adapt and modify ones actions continually in the face of changing
circumstances in relation to an ideal or standard - that is, it is a matter of learning a practical skill. Given this
approach, ones focus of concern becomes not behaviour, not the pattern of peoples movements as viewed
from the outside by someone merely as an observer, but peoples actions, the ways that people do things as
understood (not merely viewed) from the inside by someone involved in some manner in the action being
studied - peoples everyday-life methodologies become ones topic of research.
Self-Mystification in the Form ulation of Problem s
In this chapter I would like to present that same issue that scientific accounts rely heavily upon
common-sense knowledge - in another way to do with how we formulate our problems for ourselves. As an
example of how, upon reflection, a problem about our own abilities might occur to us, consider the following:
we know, for instance, that in the context of their daily use we understand the meaning of words without
being continually baffled and bewildered by them; it presents us with no problems until one day, someone
suggests to us that we only ever have waves of activity in the basilar membranes of our ears, and, to make
matters worse, all other types of sounds, as well as speech sounds, make waves similarly. Thus - they go on to
suggest - hearing speech sounds as having a meaning is a problem to us. And we, seeing the force of their
argument (why?), agree, and begin as scientists to study it as a central problem of auditory perception.
But, perhaps, we mystify ourselves in allowing ourselves to be faced [end 38] with such a problem, in such a
way: that is, by letting it be taken for granted that we already know what it is we actually do when we hear
sounds - we understand meanings - and that thus the problem is simply that of explaining how we do it. For
such an approach:
(1) biases us towards a search for that within us (a mechanism) which causes us to hear the sounds of
speech as having a meaning; (2) leads us to treat a meaning as a product rather than a process, a
noun rather than a verb; and (3) directs our attention towards just the behaviour of (and within)
individuals, and away from the social arena of exchanges between people.
The activity of meaning, the process by which people make sense to and of one another, and themselves, in the
course of their daily lives, is thus left unstudied.
This is, of course, exactly the point Garfinkel (1967, p. 31) makes in discussing the sociologists
professional concern when he says:
In short, a common understanding, entailing as it does an inner temporal course of
interpretative work, necessarily has an operational structure. For the analyst to disregard its
operational structure, is to use common sense knowledge of that society in exactly the ways
that members use it when they must decide what persons are really doing or really talking
about, i.e., to use common sense knowledge of social structures as both a topic and a
resource of inquiry. An alternative would be to assign exclusive priority to the study of the
methods of concerted actions and methods of common understanding. Not a method of
understanding, but immensely various methods of understanding are the professional
sociologists proper and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena.

A Phenom enological Approach from a Standpoint In Action

Rather than taking it for granted, then, that on hearing words we do in fact simply perceive their meanings,
and seeking the mechanisms within us supposedly responsible for such an achievement, is there another way

in which we could begin? Well, perhaps we should, even before we begin, notice that the statement of our
initial problem - what is it that enables us to act as we do? - is ambiguous, in that we might be asking either:
[end 39] (1) what in us enables us to do it? (the classical question); or (2) what enables us ourselves to do it?
(1) requires as an answer a description of some mechanism within us, whereas (2) requires a
description of some process of social exchange productive of increased self-directed, self-regulated, or
self-determined behaviour; an account of what goes on between people rather than within them. In (1) and (2)
then, one has two quite clearly different foci of interest, with two quite different aims; needing in their pursuit
- presumably - two quite different guiding frameworks of thought. One should notice too that in (1) and (2)
two quite different images of man (Shotter, 1975) are involved: while in (1), man is a special nexus of causal
mechanisms, in (2) he is a peculiar bifurcated thing, manifesting partly natural processes or powers (Harre,
1970) outside his agency to control, and partly personal processes or powers which are within his own
self-control - and allowing, also, of the former to be transformed into the latter in a process of social exchange
(Shotter, 1973). It is thus perfectly legitimate to ask of such bipartite beings as these, what is it that will
enable them to act as they themselves, rather than their circumstances require?, in a way not possible when
addressing causal mechanisms.
If that is the first point to note, the next in constructing our new point of departure is that we must
avoid taking as given the world simply as it appears to be - as being full of acts and objects, words and things,
all being just as we believe and describe them to be - and then attempting simply to explain how it is that we
can do and see all these things; for that is a statement of the problem that leads us, as we saw above, to study
products rather than process, our achievements rather than how we achieve them; in short, it leads us into
self-mystification. Instead, we must start phenomenologically, with - what is extremely difficult to describe, as
we shall see - an analysis of psychological and social psychological processes as we experience them; that is,
we must deal with that which in each and everyones experience makes it possible for us to live our daily lives
in processes of exchange with both one another and our physical surroundings. For instance, here I mean the
distinction in our experience, mentioned above, between that which we, as individual personalities,
experience ourselves as doing, knowing that we intended to do it, and that which we merely find ourselves
doing (and often only recognise as an act for which we could possibly be responsible when our attention is
drawn to it by others). Such a distinction can only be made by those who reject the behaviourists [end 40]
view of peoples activities as consisting in a sequence of objective events; but in rejecting such a view, what
view of or in action could we have?
A Copernican Revolution
If we are to take the standpoint in action that I am proposing (rather than that of the external observer), then
the methods that people actually do use in their concrete, everyday life situations to bring off certain socially
intelligible achievements would become the topic of our enquiries. But, rejecting the behaviourists view of
peoples activities as consisting in a sequence of objective events, what view of action could there be?
The problem is a difficult one for it entails, as John Macmurray (1957, p. 85) who has discussed this
issue puts it, a Copernican Revolution: if we do try to view ourselves in the middle of our acting and to think
about how we are doing it, while we are doing it, we usually trip ourselves up or something in the process.
Such a standpoint in action is not one that we actually can have in practice - but we can have it in theory,
Macmurray points out. Just as the astronomer can conceive of the planetary system from a standpoint on the
sun (even though he cannot actually have such a standpoint), so we too must conceive of action as if from a
standpoint in action (even though we cannot actually have one there). In other words, just as in many other
areas of science, we must construct a theoretical view of our everyday-life world; the world from such a
standpoint looking quite different, surprisingly perhaps, from how it looks to us when we ordinarily just look
at it, uninvolved in any action in it. Thus in the approach I am proposing, the professionals view of the world
is, as with the behaviourists, a view quite different from the laymans, it is, however, a view from a position of
involvement in the real affairs of the everyday-life world, in which the professional hopes to see more than the
layman, rather than from a position that disregards or distorts the reality of those affairs, in which the
professional hopes to see, not more, but something quite different from the layman.

Seeing the Meanings and Uses in the Everyday-Life W orld

To construct such a theoretical view is not, of course, an easy task. It involves, I think, at least to begin with,
asking oneself over and over again the question: What must my world and the other people in it be like in
order for this particular way, that particular way, for all the particular everyday ways of going on that I can
make myself aware of, to be possible at all? Now luckily for us, a great deal of this kind of [end 41] question
asking has already been done. And while no doubt the answers given are controversial, they at least provide
us with a starting point. To me, this much about the everyday-life world seems clear: as Schutz and Luckman
(1974) or Berger and Luckman (1967) point out, we begin by fording ourselves in a world that presents itself
to us as in large part self-evidently real. It was there before we were born and it will be there after our death.
It has a history which antedates our birth and which is not available to our introspective recollection. This
history, as the tradition of the existing institutions, has the character of objectivity. That is, it is something
which we as individuals cannot wish away, neither can we change it merely by wishing that it were other
than it is; even though as such it is a history made by men. A world with such a history to it has an objective
structure with which people must learn to cope if they are to execute their practical projects within it successfully; this objective structure being present, not in their heads as an idea available to introspective
examination, but in the shape of their social practices - practices which they learn in the course of their
everyday practical exchanges with those who already execute such practices successfully (Shotter, 1974b;
1976). Thus, to begin with, Schutz suggests, such a world is experienced pre-theoretically, simply as the
prevailing and persistent condition of everyones projects. It is experienced too as an intersubjective world,
known or knowable in common with other people.
These and other properties of the everyday-life world are, for any child born into it (to borrow
Merleau-Pontys phrase) always already there. Our world, however, the world of the professional
psychologist - not the world of the behaviourist seeing only objective events, nor the world of the layman
seeing more than the behaviourist, but still only seeing the products of his own processes rather than the
processes themselves - but the world of methodical human action in which the professional studies the ways
in which people make themselves, and their world, understood, to one another, and to themselves, is indeed a
strange place. None of us can ever see it directly, but it is one which, with effort, we can none the less
understand. With such a view, we could hope to see more than, but not differently from, the layman; and
presumably we would be able to see both better and worse ways in which we all might act. And, unlike the
behaviourists view in which mans behaviour is seen merely as the effect of a cause, in this view man himself
would still have to choose, and his choice would bear upon the degree of responsibility he could have for his
own actions. [end 42]
Endnote:
1. One may find this view very clearly stated, for example, in Broadbent (1969), where he says: In summary then the
traditional terms which are sometimes regarded as referring to mental activities or states give us grave difficulty when
we try to apply them to detailed experimental analyses of the way people work.... There is no obvious and clearly correct
way of identifying the traditional with the experimental concepts. One needs therefore to abandon the older mental
terms, and rather to generate new technical languages for considering particular psychological problems. One such
language is that of information processing ...
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