The difference between inclusion and exclusion refers to the way in which a society permits individuals to be persons and therefore to participate in communication. The concept of the person describes neither the consciousness nor the body of the individual, which are independent autopoietic systems. Rather, it is located at the level of communication: "person" is a social structure allowing society's finding of addressees for the continued production of →communication. As such, the reference

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... a person facilitates the attribution of communicative responsibility (for utterances) and the localization of possibilities of understanding. In this sense, persons are not systems in the way that conscious systems and bodies are, but rather artifacts of communication. They identify individual contexts that generate expectations of limited possibilities of behavior [→Identity/Difference], and in which each individual is faced with the alternative of confirming these expectations or surprising the communication with unexpected stimuli. The choice between confirming and surprising has a different meaning for the psychic and for the social system; it may have decisive consequences for the history of the consciousness, but remaining irrelevant for the history of communication. Persons and their characteristics, which can be observed socially, emerge from the unstable circularity of →double contingency: ego and alter observe each other reciprocally, and this being observed leads to stabilizing the personal traits that can be expected both from the person herself and from other persons. Thus, the way in which we are observed determines the type of personality that can serve as the addressee of a communication. Inclusion and exclusion are manifested in different forms depending on the structure of the society [→Differentiation of Society] in which persons are observed. In segmentary societies, inclusion consists in belonging to a segment, for instance to a tribe or to a village. Exclusion from a segment can