ABSTRACT
Employing as a point of departure the interaction process between the confidence man and his “mark,” Erving Goffman considers the social processes by which transformations in self-concept and social role are consciously and deliberately facilitated by others. Although the author is principally concerned with devices by which individuals are persuaded to accept failure, his suggestion that some processes require “cooling in” rather than “cooling out” is illustrated by one of the processes observed in the next chapter, where children are seen to “cool in” their parents for a life without them. Socialization is a continuous process of learning to abandon old roles and self-conceptions and to acquire new ones. Professor Goffman skillfully explores some of the means by which this process can occur and some of the consequences when it does not occur.
