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.