The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life – A Summary

Last Updated on September 10, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) is the founding text of the dramaturgical approach in sociology. Its argument runs as follows:

1. Social life is best understood as a performance, with people acting on a social stage in front of an audience.
2. We create a front using setting, appearance and manner, and we manage the impressions we give off.
3. Social life is divided into front stage regions, where we perform, and back stage regions, where we drop the act.
4. Performances are usually staged by teams, not individuals, and teams keep secrets to protect the performance.
5. The self is not something we bring to the stage. It is produced by the staging.

Goffman’s theory is one of the main social action theories taught within the Theory and Methods module, which appears mainly on Paper 3 and also on Paper 1 of the AQA A-level sociology specification.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Summary

The best way to understand human action is by seeing people as actors on a social stage who actively create an impression of themselves for the benefit of an audience — and, ultimately, for themselves.

When we act in the social world we put on a front in order to project a certain image of ourselves. We create that front by manipulating the setting in which we perform (our living room, our office), our appearance (our clothes) and our manner (our emotional demeanour).

We are called on to put on different fronts depending on the social stage we find ourselves on and the team of actors we are performing with. The workplace and the school are typical examples of social stages that require a front. On these stages we take on roles in relation to other team members and carefully manage the impressions we give off, in order to fit in and to achieve our own goals.

Impression management involves projecting an idealised image of ourselves. That means concealing several aspects of the performance: the effort that went into putting on the front, and any personal profit we stand to gain from the interaction.

Audiences are constantly on the lookout for the signs we give off, because that is how they work out who we are. Goffman’s point is that we can stop giving expressions but we cannot stop giving them off. in Goffman’s own words:

‘”performers can stop giving expressions, but they cannot stop giving them off.”

This means we must be constantly on guard, practising expressive control. Plenty can go wrong with a performance in ways that betray the fact that we are not really the person the act suggests. We might lose bodily control, or make a mistake with our clothing.

Acting out social roles is demanding, so alongside the front stage of our lives we also have back stage areas where we can drop the front, come closer to our relaxed selves, and prepare for the next performance.

Some of the roles we play contradict each other, so we need to keep audiences apart. A student might act studiously at school and care-free among friends outside it. Thankfully most audience members are tactful: they voluntarily stay away from back stage areas, and when someone falls out of character they tend to look the other way.

The Front: Setting, Appearance and Manner

This section and those that follow work through Goffman’s argument chapter by chapter, in more depth.

Goffman uses the term ‘performance’ to refer to “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on observers. ‘Front’ is ‘that part of the individuals performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance”.

There are three things an individual uses to establish a social front. The last two together Goffman calls the personal front.

• Setting — the fixed elements: the physical layout of a room and its background props. A workspace or a living room is a setting.
• Appearance — the things that follow the person around. Some are fixed attributes such as age; others are chosen, such as clothes and the items one carries.
• Manner — the attitude displayed towards the setting: confidence, humility, authority.

We generally expect setting, appearance and manner to be consistent with each other, but they do not always match up, and the mismatch is itself informative.

Goffman also notes that society constrains the front we can adopt. If we take on certain roles we do not have much choice about the front that goes with them — social norms require a particular front and leave little room for manoeuvre. HOWEVER, he also suggests that the same kinds of front are required across many different roles, so an individual who learns to project one front successfully can transfer it to other settings.

Dramatic Realisation: Making the Work Visible

“While in the presence of others, the individual typically infuses his activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts which might otherwise remain hidden.“

Many social roles and status positions require energy to be invested in the performance of a task over and above the energy needed to do the task itself.

The clearest illustration is the aristocracy, who spend an enormous amount of deliberate effort performing ordinary daily tasks with excess decorum in order to distinguish themselves from everyone else — rituals around dress, greetings, eating, body language and speech. More mundanely, many jobs require people to do certain things purely to convince a customer that they are competent.

This creates a problem in social life. Those who have the time and talent to perform a task well may not, for that very reason, have the time or talent to make it apparent that they are performing it well.

Since there are more roles to fill than there is energy to fill them, people have to choose which performances to invest their egos in. Some routines are treated as more important than others.

Idealisation and Audience Segregation

“When the individual presents himself before others his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does his behaviour as a whole.“

There may be a nod to Durkheim in that second line.

People play their status up or down according to how they think others perceive them. Social mobility often requires a good performance, frequently conceived as making sacrifices in order to maintain a front.

People also engage in negative idealisation, which involves concealment. Someone interacting with people they believe to be of lower status may play down their own — although the audience does not always appreciate it.

A performer tends to conceal or underplay activities, facts and motives that are incompatible with an idealised version of themselves. Goffman identifies several standing discrepancies between appearance and reality:

1. Hiding the profit made from a performance
2. Hiding the mistakes made during it
3. Hiding the effort that went into preparing it — the back stage work
4. Hiding illegal activity
5. Hiding double standards, which arise because we are often expected to maintain several values at once that cannot all be met. A restaurant team may sacrifice quality for speed of service and keep quiet about it, hoping the audience does not notice
6. Hiding origins — people conceal what they were before the performance and give the impression they have always been this way

Performers also tend to encourage the audience to believe the relationship between them is more special than it really is.

Keeping these things hidden depends on audience segregation. Different performances belong to different roles and are meant for different audiences, who ideally never see the actor in any of the others. This matters because performers routinely make each audience feel like the most important one, when in reality it is one audience among many.

Audience segregation is the concept that has aged best. It is much harder to practise now than it was in 1959 — see the section on social media below.

Expressive Control and Misrepresentation

Performers can reasonably expect small cues to be read by the audience as signs of something significant. Unfortunately the reverse also holds: minor cues that were never meant to be read can be taken as significant and can undermine the image being projected.

These unmeant gestures are common and fall into three types:

1. Losing muscular control — tripping, yawning, belching
2. Showing too little or too much concern with the interaction
3. Lacking dramaturgical direction — a sloppy setting, or bad timing

“The expressive coherence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy between out all-too-human selves and our socialised selves. As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that change from one moment to the next. As characters for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs. A certain bureaucratisation of the spirit expected so that we can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogeneous performance at any given time”.

The same tendency of audiences to read meaning into signs also creates the opportunity to misrepresent — to use signs to signify things with no basis in reality.

Not all misrepresentation is treated equally. We judge someone acting up to a higher status more harshly than someone acting down to a lower one. Some statuses are also ambiguous: it is easy to prove someone is not a qualified solicitor, much harder to prove they are not a true friend.

Most misrepresentation is not outright lying. It is a matter of not displaying everything one does in order to fulfil a role, and there are very few roles in which a person could be completely open about everything without losing face.

Mystification

One of the easiest ways to maintain an idealised image is to keep a distance between oneself and the audience. The more distance a performer maintains, the more room they have to sustain an idealised image. Kings should not mix with ordinary people.

Sincere and Cynical Performances

Goffman distinguishes two approaches to acting out a social role: sincerity and cynicism.

Sincere individuals genuinely believe their act expresses their own identity, and want others to believe it too. This, Goffman says, is the typical case. Cynical individuals do not invest themselves in the role; they act towards some other end, which may be self-interested, like a conman, or for the benefit of the people around them, like a teacher who acts strict without being strict by nature.

“In our Anglo-American society, a relatively indoor one, when a performance is given it is usually given in a highly bounded region, to which boundaries with respect to time are often added. The impression and understanding fostered by the performance will tend to saturate the region and time span, so that any individual located in this space-time manifold will be in a position to observe the performance and be guided by the definition of the situation which the performance fosters”.

People also move between the two poles across a lifetime. Goffman gives the example of an army recruit who initially acts out the disciplined routine because the alternative is punishment, and who over time comes to find that a disciplined life has genuine personal meaning.

Most performances sit somewhere between the two. What social life requires is that individuals learn enough about role-playing to fulfil the basic roles expected of them. Most of us buy into this and act out what is expected, investing something of ourselves in our roles without going at them wholeheartedly. Most acting is therefore neither fully sincere nor fully contrived, and most people oscillate between the two across a single day.

Performance Teams

People do not present the self only as individuals. Performances — attempts to define the situation — are usually staged in teams. Goffman uses performance team to mean a group who collaborate in staging a single performance.

He notes two features of teams engaged in dramaturgical cooperation. First, any single member can wreck a performance, so everyone depends on everyone else’s conduct. Second, team members share a degree of familiarity, which means they share a back stage where the collective performance is dropped.

Teams have to conceal certain things to make the performance work. The fact that a party line has been agreed and rehearsed is hidden, because a united front looks more sincere if the audience believes each member arrived at it independently. In large organisations the party line tends to wear thin, because it is difficult to keep everyone happy.

For the same reason, corrective sanctioning is done back stage. Teams also have a division of labour: directors, those who are dramatically dominant, and those who actually do the work the team is supposed to be performing.

Front Stage and Back Stage

This is the distinction Goffman is best known for.

Front stage

In a front region the performer tries to convince the audience that their activity there maintains certain standards. They do this through talk — verbal and non-verbal exchanges with the audience — and through decorum, maintaining manners and moral standards while merely visible to the audience rather than interacting with it.

One form of decorum is make work: acting busy in front of a superior when there is nothing to do. Everyone knows what is going on, but not performing it would be read as disrespect.

Back stage

A back region is where the impression created by the performance is routinely contradicted. Here the performer can relax and step out of character. Back stage is where the audience is expected not to go, and it is necessary if a person is to buffer themselves against the demands of performing.

The ability to control both front and back stage is a fundamental power distinction in society, and some people have far more of it than others. This matters for evaluation, because it is Goffman himself acknowledging the point his structural critics say he ignores.

Some regions are permanently front regions — churches, classrooms — so much so that people behave deferentially in them even when they are not part of the congregation. Others are notably back stage. Some are both at different times: a household on a Sunday morning, and the same household while entertaining guests.

Goffman gives examples of groups who lack control over their back stage, or where the walls between the regions are too thin to hold. He also notes that the boundary between the two is an excellent place to observe transformations of character.

Even within teams, back stage familiarity is rarely total. Three things get in the way: members still need to convince each other they are worth having on the team; they may need to keep morale up for the coming performance; and where there are differences of age or gender, further acts are often put on to mark them.

“In saying that performers act in a relatively informal, familiar, relaxed way while backstage and are on their guard while giving a performance, it should not be assumed that the pleasant interpersonal things of life – courtesy, warmth, generosity are reserved for those backstage and that suspiciousness, snobbishness, and a show of authority are reserved for front region activity.

Discrepant Roles and Destructive Information

A team’s overall objective is to sustain the definition of the situation its performance creates. Given how fragile that is, there are usually facts which, if attention were drawn to them mid-performance, would discredit or destroy the impression being fostered. Goffman calls these destructive information. For a performance to work, the audience must not have it — a team must be able to keep its secrets and have them kept.

There are three general types of secret:

• Dark secrets — things the team wants nobody to know, because disclosure would fundamentally undermine its credibility. A financial institution systematically breaking the rules it claims to uphold would be an example
• Strategic secrets — secrets that give a team a competitive advantage. Disclosure would harm the team but not discredit it
• Inside secrets — tricks of the trade. Knowledge that allows a team to perform well, but whose disclosure would not really damage it in the eyes of the audience

Goffman also distinguishes entrusted from free secrets, in terms of an individual’s relationship to their team. An entrusted secret would discredit both the individual and the team if leaked; a free secret would discredit the team but not the individual.

Secrets are not the only source of destructive information. There are also latent secrets — damaging facts for which no hard evidence exists — and unmeant gestures, which are simply accidents.

The three basic roles, and the discrepant ones

Any social situation contains three general roles:

• Performers, who define the situation and hold destructive information about the performance
• The audience, who largely accept the definition but do not hold destructive information
• Outsiders, who know little of either

On top of these Goffman identifies a set of discrepant roles: the informer, the shill, the spotter, the shopper, the mediator, and the non-person — the servant, the very young, the very old.

There are four further discrepant roles held by people not present during a performance but who hold information about it, and who may be present in the performer’s mind while they act: the service specialist, confidants, colleagues and renegades.

Communication Out of Character

Discrepant sentiment turns up almost everywhere institutions are studied. There are nearly always moments when team members make clear to each other that they are only playing a role. Goffman identifies four types of communication that are incompatible with the impression the team is collectively trying to project.

Treatment of the absent. Back stage, it is especially common for team members to talk about the audience in derogatory terms. Ritual mockery of the performance is part of this.

Staging talk. Discussion of the front stage apparatus and how well suited it is to the job of impression management.

Team collusion. Performers use secret signals during a performance — often just catching another member’s eye. One notable form is derisive collusion, of which schoolchildren passing notes in class is the obvious example.

Realigning actions. Guarded exchanges between teams, sending out feelers and setting the tone for interaction where the boundaries are not yet clear.

“each of these four types of conduct directs attention to the same point: the performance given by a team is not a spontaneous, immediate response to the situation absorbing all of the team’s energy; the performance is something the team members can stand back from, back far enough to imagine or play out simultaneously other kinds of performances attesting to other realities.“

The Arts of Impression Management

Unmeant gestures and badly timed interruptions cause dissonance and embarrassment, but performers and audiences both have strategies for saving the show.

Defensive practices used by performers

• Dramaturgical loyalty — building in-group solidarity so that no member gets close enough to the audience to give away dark or strategic secrets. Regularly rotating the audience is another version of the same strategy
• Dramaturgical discipline — each member learning to control their own performance better
• Dramaturgical circumspection — selecting the audience most likely to be kind. Teachers prefer schools where they expect an easier time; salespeople prefer to pitch to one person rather than two

Protective practices used by audiences

Audiences stay away from back stage areas voluntarily, and they pay attention to the parts of the performance they are supposed to. When a performance goes wrong they practise tactful inattention.

Goffman finishes by noting that performers and audiences have to be tactful about tact itself — each needs to be sensitive to when the other is being tactful, or the masks come off and everyone is embarrassed.

Conclusion: Impression Management as a Way of Seeing Any Institution

Goffman’s own conclusion is worth reading in full, because it summarises the whole book.

[RETAIN EXISTING QUOTE — the long conclusion passage beginning “any social establishment may be studied from the perspective of impression management”]

He presents the dramaturgical perspective as a fifth way of looking at a social system, alongside the technical, political, structural and cultural perspectives. Used as a way of ordering facts, it directs us to describe the techniques of impression management in a given institution, the main problems of impression management there, and the identity and relationships of the performance teams within it.

Goffman suggests each of these can then be examined in relation to the technical and cultural aspects of the system, and in relation to their effects on individual personality, on the interactions themselves, and on wider society.

The Self as Character and Performer

This is where the argument ends up, and it is the part students most often miss.

To understand a situation fully we would need to know all the relevant social facts about the people in it. Full information is almost never available, so appearances are relied on instead. The information people give off is treated as having a moral character — we assume others should not mislead us, even though we know perfectly well that misleading is exactly what we all do, and that much of what is given off is not intentional at all.

[RETAIN EXISTING QUOTE — the “In their capacity as performers…” passage on the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression]

The dialectic is this: the more effort we put into managing the impression of being a moral actor, the more distant we come to feel from the standards we are performing. The higher the standards, the more effort required, and the more distant we feel.

Goffman then splits the individual in two:

• The character — the social self presented to the audience, constructed out of props, a setting and a team of collaborators. The individual cannot construct a self without all of the social staging that goes with it.
• The performer — the harried actor putting on the show, whose psychological wellbeing is bound up with the social self they maintain

This is the radical claim in the book. The self is not the cause of the performance. It is a product of the scene that gets staged.

Why Goffman Matters for A-Level Sociology

From a theoretical point of view, Goffman criticises structural theories of socialisation. Marxists argue that school socialises children into passively accepting authority and hierarchy, preparing them for exploitation at work. What Goffman’s theory suggests is that many of those children may simply be acting out acceptance of hierarchy in order to get through school with as little hassle as possible, while back stage they may think school is unimportant and may not accept authority at all.

This is a genuinely different account of the same observed behaviour, and that is what makes it useful in an essay. Structural theories read compliance as evidence of successful socialisation. Goffman reads it as evidence of competent performance.

From a research methods point of view, the implication is that if we want to understand people we need participant observation, because we only see people’s real feelings when they stop performing and we can only do that by getting back stage with them.

If a researcher hands out a questionnaire, or even conducts an in-depth interview, they risk being perceived by the respondent as another member of the audience — and the results may be nothing more than a performance staged for the researcher’s benefit. This is a strong argument against the validity of survey data, and it is directly usable in a methods answer.

From an interactionist point of view, human interaction is intricate enough that the right way to study it is to look at individuals or small groups and focus on the effort they put into maintaining their identities in public, and how those public identities differ from the more relaxed selves that appear back stage.

Applying Goffman to Social Media

Goffman was writing in 1959, decades before anyone had a profile to curate, and the theory has aged remarkably well.

A social media profile is a front in Goffman’s precise sense: setting, appearance and manner, all deliberately assembled. Posting is a performance, and the idealisation Goffman describes is visible in almost every feed — the holiday photograph rather than the airport queue, the finished result rather than the work.

The concept that translates least comfortably is audience segregation, and that is what makes it interesting. Goffman assumed performers could keep audiences apart. On a single platform a post may be seen by school friends, family, employers and strangers at once — what researchers now call context collapse. This is a real limitation on Goffman’s model rather than a confirmation of it, and saying so is worth more marks than simply asserting that social media proves him right.

The front stage and back stage distinction also blurs. A video presented as candid and unedited is a performance of being back stage, which is not a category Goffman’s framework handles neatly.

Use this section for AO2 application marks. Do not over-claim: the honest position is that some of Goffman’s concepts transfer directly and others need modifying, and the modifications are where the analysis is.

Positive Evaluations of Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory

The theory has extraordinary reach. It applies to schools, workplaces, hospitals, prisons, families, courtrooms and online interaction, using one set of concepts throughout, and students can test it against their own experience within minutes of learning it.

It generated an enormous amount of empirical research, and remains one of the most heavily cited works in the discipline more than sixty years after publication.

It corrects the determinism of structural theories. Functionalism and Marxism both tend to treat individuals as passively moulded by social forces; Goffman shows people actively managing, resisting and sometimes subverting the roles they are handed.

It also explains something the structural theories struggle with — the gap between how people behave in institutions and what they actually think about them.

Criticisms of Goffman’s Dramaturgical Theory

It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using others, and Goffman attracts criticism from structural theorists in particular.

It ignores power and social structure. This is the standard critique, made most fully by Alvin Gouldner (1970) in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. Gouldner argued that Goffman offers a sociology of co-presence — one that dwells on the episodic, sees life only within a narrow interpersonal circle, and is effectively ahistorical and non-institutional. Class, gender and ethnicity shape who gets to perform which roles, who has a back stage to retreat to, and whose performance is believed. Goffman notes in passing that control over front and back stage is a power distinction, but he does not develop it.

Marxists and feminists extend this. Describing how a low-paid worker manages the impression of cheerfulness says nothing about why they have to. Describing how a woman manages a performance of deference does not explain the structure that requires it.

The methodology is unsystematic. Goffman built the book from observation, anecdote, etiquette manuals and literary examples rather than systematic data. It is close to impossible to falsify: any behaviour can be read as either a sincere or a cynical performance after the event. Positivists would say a theory that cannot be disproved is not much of a theory.

The evidence base is narrow. Much of it comes from 1950s Anglo-American settings and from Goffman’s Shetland Islands fieldwork. Whether these concepts travel across cultures with different norms of self-presentation is an open question, and it is a fair criticism to make.

Is there a self behind the performance? Goffman is ambiguous, and critics have pushed at it from both directions. If the self is entirely produced by the staging, it is unclear who is doing the staging. If there is a real self back stage, then the theory is less radical than it appears. HOWEVER, this ambiguity may be the point rather than a flaw — Goffman is arguing that the question itself is badly posed.

It sounds more cynical than it is. A common misreading is that Goffman claims we are all constantly manipulating each other. He explicitly denies this: the sincere performance, in which people genuinely believe in their own act, is the typical case. Students who get this wrong lose marks, and students who correct the misreading pick them up.

Exam Application

Goffman is most likely to come up in the Theory and Methods section of Paper 3, and can appear on Paper 1.

He is rarely the whole question. He is usually one of two or three social action theorists — alongside Weber and Mead — used to answer a question about social action theory in general, or used as the interpretivist counterweight in a question about structural theories or about the validity of quantitative methods.

A plan for using Goffman in an essay on social action theory:

• Point — Goffman’s dramaturgical approach treats social life as performance, with the self produced by the interaction rather than existing prior to it
• Explain — front, setting, appearance and manner; impression management; front stage and back stage; performance teams
• Analyse — this reverses the structural account of socialisation. Compliance may be performance, not internalisation. It also implies participant observation as the only method that gets back stage
• Criticise — Gouldner (1970): no account of power, hierarchy or history. Unfalsifiable. Narrow evidence base. But it explains the gap between institutional behaviour and private belief, which structural theories cannot

Two things examiners reward here: getting the sincere/cynical distinction the right way round, and using front and back stage to say something about method rather than just describing the concepts.

Signposting and Sources

This post has been written primarily for students studying Theory and Methods as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, where it appears mainly on Paper 3 and also on Paper 1.

Goffman’s dramaturgical approach is one strand of Social Action Theory, which is usually taught as the main alternative to structural theories such as Functionalism and Marxism.

It sits within the broader tradition of Symbolic Interactionism, alongside Mead and Blumer.

The methodological implications connect directly to the debate between Positivism and Interpretivism in Social Research, and to the strengths and limitations of Participant Observation as a research method.

For more on research methods generally, see the Research Methods hub. For the other social theories, see the Social Theory hub.

Sources

Erving Goffman (1971) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Pelican edition). This was the version I read to construct the above summary. The book was first published as a monograph in Edinburgh in 1956 and in its revised form in 1959, which is the date usually cited.

Alvin W. Gouldner (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books, pp. 378–90.

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