Social expectations, not causality, determine which actions express personality

Evidence

The question of which actions or aspects of actions are considered significant as expressing personality is less a matter of pure causality than of what clarifies, normalizes or delimits the causal social context. Social expectation determines whether or not actions are attributed to personality. The institutionalization of such expectation, however, is a selective, simplifying process which reinforces what is selected. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Institutionalized expectation selecting what counts as personality-expressiveness maps onto Stevens’s total internalization of butlerhood — the institution selects exactly which of his actions count as his own.