Authority figures’ signals carry outsized weight in shaping citizens’ self-concepts

Evidence

When one person in an interaction has status and power relative to the other, the signals emanating from that person are particularly potent. Since a person’s self-concept is substantially a function of the response of others who are important to the person, interactions with street-level bureaucrats have psychological as well as material implications. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Goffman’s symbolic interactionism and the reader’s interest in how routine administrative contact shapes identity. — connects to: Knowing one is visible makes the subject self-police by internalizing power’s constraints — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1585; Humanism centers individual agency and subjective intuition against received authority — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 49

Broader Connections

• Knowing one is visible makes the subject self-police by internalizing power’s constraints #expands (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1585
• Humanism centers individual agency and subjective intuition against received authority #complicates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 49