A mathematical model of symbolic interaction between police and suspects

Abstract

This article deals with information transmissions between police and suspects in channel and net subsystems which convey symbolic information among persons in a community, a system at the level of the organization. Social psychologists have assumed that the sequence of symbolic acts between persons is a process, i.e., a sequence in which some stable contingency describes the relation between one act and the next. Yet there is virtually no research on interaction in natural settings in which (1) it is shown that the sequence of symbolic acts is a process, or (2) what kind of process it is. Field data gathered during interaction between police and suspects are examined to determine whether interaction is a process and, if so, what kind of process. This paper also describes the implications of these findings for both scholars of police and of interaction. Symbolic interaction is found to fit a special model of a second-order Markov process, with distinctive roles evident for police and suspects. Implications of behaving in different ways for each role are discussed, and it is suggested that development of this area of study as a new topic in social psychology may be useful for the understanding of cognitive as well as interactional phenomena.