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Social Affordances
Just as other physical objects afford consumers modified relationships with the environment,social objects afford consumer-modified relationships with the environment. (Social objects are any
social aspect of the consumer’s environment. From any consumer’s subjective point of view, any
other person is an object.) What distinguishes a social object from any other physical object is
behavior independent of manipulation. A hammer, rock, bicycle, computer or spacecraft will not
behave without manipulation. Further, when people manipulate such objects in the absence of social
objects, the affordances are not social. No matter how well one person may play a guitar, in the
absence of another person, the instrument affords no modified relation to the social environment.
When interacting with consumers, social objects act on their own; plants and nonliving objects do
not.As Gibson (1977) points out, behavior affords behavior. However, the behavior must be
tangible, i.e., observable through interaction. Consumers interpret observed behaviors according to
cultural norms, selecting their response behaviors from the same catalog of norms. Conversely, when
consumers select their own actions, they expect the reactions from social objects to be within the
range of appropriate behaviors specified by culture. Behavior communicates according to a cultural
script. That which fails to conform to the script is a behavioral non
sequitur. Culture offers systems of conditional probabilities for anticipating actions
and responses. Those whose behavior is unacceptably improbable invite certain specified cultural
responses: people will ignore them or ostracize them.Culture itself affords social categories often composed of reciprocal, complementary
attributes. Categories of age, class, gender, occupation and status are among the most important,
according to McCracken (1986), but are not the only cultural categories. Cultures also include such
additional categories as intelligence, talent, skill and beauty. Attributes within cultural
categories explicitly define relationships. In fact, one can see that the purpose of any category
is to define relationships. When objects have identical attributes, their relationship is an
identity relationship. Such objects, however, do not afford culture the ability to distinguish
among them. Therefore, culture separates them into categories. To say that someone is young—or
female, intelligent, professional or skilled—implies that someone else is not.
To afford people the ability to place social objects within cultural categories, cultures
develop tangible indicators and indices of attributes that are hidden or abstract. Cultures
disseminate indicators through mechanisms such as marketing. Through convention, i.e., consistency
of use, people interpret the tangible not as indicators, but as the actual attributes. The
interpretation of indicator as attribute affords people the ability to change categories and modify
relationships by adopting different tangible indicators and indices. Old can become young. Male can
become female. Blue-collar can become professional. Average can become intelligent. The motion
picture and television entertainment industries owe much of their success to this flexibility of
cultural indicators. These indicators afford producers and directors the ability to create
environments conducive to a sense of presence.
