Symbolic
Interactionism:
This is based on the work of G.H. Mead and Herbert
Blumer. It is distinctly and
American perspective and its origins lie within pragmatist philosophy.
This tradition also includes William James, John Dewey and Charles S
Peirce.
For Mead mind emerges out of social behaviour and its function is to aid in the process of adjustment. The result of thinking is the establishment of habit, which means that adjustment regarding a particular kind of situation can be made without thinking.
Under the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution especially the theory of adaptation and adjustment the pragmatists were the first to revolt in a positive way against the spectatorial theory of mind. For Mead perceiving and thinking and knowing are not apprehensions of a pre-structured world
But the world that is there takes on new meanings, new forms, new structures and new characteristics. We do not first construct a time – space system and later recommend that it be used in a certain way. Structuring the world of events and the knowing process are at once for the sake of solving problems and making adjustments.
The pragmatist approach views living being as attempting to make practical adjustments to their surroundings. For these philosophers the truth of an idea is dependent upon the practical consequences – an idea is true if it works.
For symbolic
interactions meanings do not reside in the object but emerge from social
processes. Emphasis is placed upon
the active interpretative and constructive capacities of human beings as against
the determining influence of social structures.
Blumer
summarised the main principles for this approach:
Symbolic interaction stands opposed to behaviourist approaches. As Cooley puts it ‘society is not a chicken yard’. Symbolic interactionists reject approaches in psychology and sociology that seek determinist universal laws or the discovery of overarching structural functional regularities.
Mead is his book Mind Self and Society human intelligence is closely linked with the development of evolution and that the origins of mind lie in human society.
Mind becomes an integral part of the behaviour of the species. Human conduct was far too complex to be explained by instincts. Complex animal and insect systems – the beehive – might be explained by genetically programmed forms of behaviour there is too much cultural diversity, novelty and complexity for instincts to be a satisfactory explanation of human conduct. This went against ideas proposed by psychologists such as William McDougall who had written that in order to understand how human being are affected by society it is necessary to study what he called the ‘native basis of the mind’ and to ‘discover the innate tendencies of thought and action’.
For symbolic
interaction society has at its basis action and interaction. Both action and interaction are processes which occur within
a linguistic world of symbols. Individuals
are focused not only on body movements but to vocalisations – words can arouse
the same response in two or more individual – these are significant symbols.
So within the word ‘fire’ we have:
Individuals
who anticipate what others will do in response to their acts are able to plan
their own subsequent acts and obtain control over their own behaviour.
To anticipate panic flight the individual uses a subdued tone to warn a
crowd and thus improve the chances of safe evacuation.
When this is done the individual exerts control over his or her behaviour.
The human
being is understood acting in the present not by what happened in the past but
what is happening now.
The capacity to employ symbols in imagining the responses of others to our own acts also gives us the capacity to be conscious of our selves. The individual can become an object to himself/herself.
Human beings live in a world of objects – a world of symbolically designated things, ideas, people, activities, and purposes.
An object is not only something given shape and significance because the person designates and acts towards it but it also the goal of a person’s action. So people:
It is important to realise that physical things are only one category of objects which people designate and act toward. Symbols make it possible the communication of objects that are not present even things which do not exist. A child may construct the shadows that play on the bedroom wall as ghosts and hide from them.
No thing
exists apart from the shadows on the wall and that is constructed as an object
– a ghost. So the child has
constructed an imaginary object which is treated as physical object.
When the child goes to the parents for comfort both parties construct a
new object called reassurance.
According to Bernard Meltzer:
| An object represents a plan of action.
That is, an object doesn’t exist for the individual in some
pre-established form. Perception
of any object has telescoped in it a series of experiences which one would
have if he carried out the plan of action toward the object.
(Bernard N. Meltzer (1972)’Mead’s Social Psychology’ in Symbolic Interaction in Social Psychology’ ed. Jerome Mainis and Bernard Meltzer, Boston: Allyn and Bacon
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Action and Acts
An
act is a unit of behaviour which has a beginning and an end. According to Mead there were 4 stages:
For symbolic
interactionists meaning is anchored in behaviour. The meaning of an act is neither fixed nor unchanging but is
determined in conduct as individuals act towards objects.
The individual’s action does not only consist of what may be observed by others – as with behaviourist theory – but entails an internal process of control in which the individual directs conduct toward some goal or objects.
Social
objects are created as people engage in social acts – a social act is one
which involves ‘the cooperation of more than one individual and whose object
as defined by the act… is a social object’.
Each individual must take into account the possible response of the other
to his or her own impending act and assume that the other will do the same.
Such a process of mutual orientation in completing social acts is what we
mean by social interaction.
Meaning is
triadic: -when an individual acts he or she indicates
What is essential to communication according to Mead is that the symbol should arouse in oneself what it arouses in the other individuals.
Problematic
situation:
This is the act of trying to interpret a situation. Daily life is routine the result of habit when something interferes with this the individual closely examines the object. Why can I not reach my goal? If an individual is driving and the lights change suddenly to red - a problem has arisen interfering with the routine habit of driving – solution brake immediately.
The self:
The
Augustinian doctrine, based on the Pauline doctrine that men’s/women’s
natural impulses are evil or that man or that man and women are all depraved and
must be reborn of the spirit if he/she is to live the good life is no longer
tenable for those who wish to solve personal and social problems.
A thesis
proposed by Freud seems to be universally accepted, that a sense of guilt and
much of our behaviour which seems to be unintelligible, if not irrational, have
natural causes which can be found in past experiences of the individual.
There is nothing supernatural or unintelligible about the workings of the
mind.
For Freud
abnormal behaviour is the result of a conflict between the individual and the
attitudes of society between the desires of the id - the ego and the demands of the superego.
Contrary to Mead Freud assumed:
Mead holds
that the self emerges in the child only because the child is able to take the
attitude (role) of the other. (See
chapter 1 in Miller for a comparison with Freud).
The self as
a social object arises in childhood through interaction with parents and other
individuals and it constantly undergoes change as the individual interacts with
others in various situations. Mead
that the ‘essence of self … is cognitive:
it lies in internalised conversation of gestures which constitutes
thinking, or in terms of which thought and reflection proceeds’.
Essential to the ideal of the self is the idea that humans can be objects to themselves. Mead use the personal pronouns I and ME to describe two phases of the process by which the self is created and recreated.
The I is the
immediate, spontaneous, impulsive aspect of conduct. The individual’s awareness of his/her initial response to a
stimulus signals the beginning of the ME phase. In taking the point of view of the other the person becomes a
me.
The I and
the ME continue to alternate in ongoing human conduct. The I or the impulse phase is not under the person’s
control people do not know what they are going to do until they begin to act.
It is then that control is exerted.
This process is related to internal conversation – in this the individual runs through an internal dialogue. If a person is invited to a party then that person might mentally run through all the reasons for not going I his or her mind. In this internal dialogue the person imagine himself/herself refusing to go and then imagines various internal responses and the way in which the inviter might respond to them.
This is the
essence of self as a process:
We do not only imagine how another will react to us but
also feel the emotions and sensations we attribute to them.
This is not simply conformity there is tension between
the I and the Me.
Because human beings can inhibit their responses, form images of themselves and then choose to act, they can refuse to act as expected, choosing inappropriate acts instead. They can act in self-interested ways and chose alternative and socially disapproving ways of doing so.
How can an individual get outside of himself experientially in such as way as to become an object to himself? [It is through] the process of social conduct or activity in which the given person or individual is implicated …
The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group…[he] becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience…it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience. (1934:138-40)
In the words of Peter Berger the self is no longer a
solid given entity that moves from one situation to another but rather a
process, continuously created and recreated in each social situation that one
enters …a man/woman is not only a social being, but he/she is social in every
aspect of his/her behaviour that is open to empirical investigation.
This is the organisation of perception in which people
assemble objects meanings and others and act toward them is an organised,
coherent way. Students and teachers
in a class usually as on the basis of a familiar definition of a situation.
The self is a social object - it is a thing like other things pointed out and shared in interaction. Blumer (1962) the individual can act towards himself/herself as he or she acts towards other people so we can also judge ourselves.
The symbolic
interactionist concept of role:
A role can be defined as a perspective from which conduct is constructed. It is a place to stand as one participates in social acts.
This means that roles can constrain conduct but there is a human tendency not merely to accept the guidance of a role but to structure situations into roles. If the individual finds him/herself in a situation that is so ambiguous that there is no structure then that person will construct one. So if structure is not there it is created.
Definitions
of situations together with role structures associated with them provide human
beings with 2 important capacities:
Knowledge of situations provides people with a sense making as well as predictive capacity – it is possible to make retrospective predictions so that what ever does happen in a defined situation the individual can make sense of it in terms of the definition of that situation and its roles.
The
predictive and sense making capacities roles provide are important in
understanding our own behaviour
in a situation. It is
possible to get outside of ourselves anticipate and make sense of our own
conduct by putting ourselves imaginatively in the shoes of others.
The roles contained within the situation as well as the definition of the
situation as a whole provide us with a place to stand and provide us with a
perspective from which to view ourselves.
Role
Making and Role Taking:
Taking the
role of the other is taking the perspective of the other – seeing the world
from another’s perspective. There
are four stages in the development of the self:
Role making
is the processes where constructs activity in a situation so that it fits the
definition of the situation, relates to the person’s own role and meshes with
the activity of others.
Role taking
is the process whereby the person imaginatively occupies the role of another and
looks at self and situation from that position in order to engage in role
making.
These two processes are linked there can be no role making without role taking. Roles are not packages of lists of mandatory behaviour but perspectives from which people construct lines of conduct that fit the situation and the lines of conduct with others.
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Perspectives are made up of words - it is these words that are used by the observer to make sense out of situations. In a way the best definition of perspective is a conceptual framework, which emphasises that perspectives are really interrelated sets of words used to order physical reality. Joel Charon (1979) Symbolic Interactionism. London: Prentice Hall. (p.3)
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Selfhood
means that one is able to see self in situation. The human being can have a
number of ideas about him/herself and these ideas affect what he or she does in
a particular situation. This
self-perception is also called the self-concept. It is what we see when we look at the self.
It is our picture of our self. –
This is not only what we see but also what we want to see.
What we
think of our selves involves judgement -
this is known as self esteem. Self-judgement
is a result of judgement by others. According to Shibutani:
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Like other
Meanings, sentiments toward one-self are formed and reinforced in the
regularised responses of other people.
Through role taking a proud man is able to visualise himself as an
object toward which others have feelings of respect, admiration, even awe.
If others consistently address him with deference, he comes to take
it for granted that he deserves such treatment.
On the other hand if someone is consistently mistreated or
ridiculed, he cannot help but conclude that others despise him.
If a person is always ignored, especially in situations in which
others like himself are given attention, he may become convinced that he
is a comparatively worthless object. Once such estimates have crystallised,
they become independent of the responses of other people. (1961: 434-35)
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Social
objects are called names and this is the means by which they are identified and
classified and as we give ourselves a name.
Gregory Stone describes identity as the perceived social location of the
individual. Where one is situated in relation to others.
Role
taking as a generalised skill:
Individuals are afforded a place to stand and a perspective on our own and others conduct by the generalised perspectives of groups to which we belong or to which we aspire to belong. Situations and roles are anchored in a larger context of organised group life. Groups, organisations and communities also provide individuals with perspectives. There is an idea of generalised process of role taking working here.
In addition to the role taking of his/her parents the child takes on the role of a generalised other by which he meant the generalised perspective of a group, community or society as a whole.
The
generalised other is like a role a perspective that a person must imaginatively
adopt in order to take it into account in forming his or her own conduct.
It is composed of the standards expectations, principles norms, and ideas
that are held in common by members of a particular social group.
In a complex society there is not one generalised other but many –
while some general ideas about conduct seemed to be held in common by all
members of society and this represent the perspective of a society others are
confined to specific regions, classes or ethnic groups.
People may at various times take different generalised others in
constructing their behaviour. Each
generalised other represents a unique perspective of some community,
organisation, group, occupation, religion, social class or ethnic group.
Tamotsu Shibutani states that a perspective is an ordered view of one world - that which is taken for granted about attributes of various objects events, and human nature. It is an order of things remembered and expected as well as things actually perceived, as organised conception of what is plausible and what is possible; it constitutes the matrix, though which one perceives his (her) environment. The concept of reference groups are simple those groups the individual shares with others. Reference groups are groups the individual may belong to (membership groups) but social categories such as social class, ethnic groups or community may also be reference groups. Shibutani calls these reference groups social worlds.
Modern mass society is characterised by a multitude of these social worlds each sharing a perspective/culture and each one held together by some form of interaction or communication – newspapers, magazines, internet…
The
phenomenological Fallacy:
According to
Mead there can be no separate self apart from others. Self awareness presupposes the other and that other or others
must be or must have been a participant in the social processes in which the
others perform existentially different roles, each role being a part of a more
inclusive social act whose effect is the result of these different role
performances.
Phenomenologists,
beginning with Descartes assume that the individual begins with a knowledge of
his/her own self and that
knowledge is immediate in his own experience, such as sense data stripped of all
interpretation and from such supposed personal or subjective experiences these
philosophers try to work towards a knowledge of God and the external world and
toward a knowledge of other selves. They
begin with subjective contents and assume that we are certain of these alone.
And then they try to work towards a knowledge of the nature of their
causes and a knowledge of an objective order.
Husserl locates the self outside of society it is transcendent – he holds that although his own ego must be in contact with other egos a knowledge of all others is derived from the knowledge of the contents of his own ego.
For Mead knowledge is shared. Private perspectives arise out of common perspectives which are not made up of a collection of private perspectives. Self-awareness means awareness of the other.
Both Mead
and Whitehead were concerned with the establishment of the criteria for the
objectivity of perspectives. Herman
Minkowski had proposed that events are laid out in a space-time continuum that
change is subjective and as a consequence creativity and novelty is impossible.
Mead argues that minds are a part of nature and that the individual is in
the perspective not the perspective in him.
Minds emerge in individuals only insofar as the individual can enter into
the perspective of the other and such a perspective is by definition objective.
This process proceeds by hypotheses testing.
References:
Berger, P.
(1963) Invitation to
Sociology. Middlesex: Penguin Press
Blumer, H
(1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. London:
Prentice Hall
Charon, J. (1979) Symbolic
Interactionism. London: Prentice Hall.
Denzin N.K.
(1972) ‘The Gensis of Self in
Early Childhood’. Sociological
Quarterly, 291-314
Fisher, B. and Strauss, A (1978) The Chicago Tradition and Social Change: Thomas Park and their successors, Symbolic Interaction. Vol 1(2) pp 5-21.
Hewitt J.P.
(1994) Self and Society: A
Symbolic Interactionist Social
Psychology. Massachussetts:
Allyn and Bacon.
McCall, G.
J., Simmons, J., L. (1966) Identities
and Interactions. New York: Free Press
Joas, H.
(1985). G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of his Thought.
Cambridge: Polity Press. (chapter
5)
Mead, G. H,
(1934) Mind Self and Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, D.,
L. (1973). George Herbert Mead: Self, Language and the World. AUSTIN :
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS.
Morrione,
T.J. and Farberman (1981) Conversatons with Herbert Blumer:II.
Symbolic Interaction. Vol 4(2) pp 273-295.
Shibutani, T
(1955) ‘Reference Groups as Perspectives’.
American Journal of Sociology, 60:562-69.
Unruh, D. R.
(1980) ‘The Social Organisation
of Older People: A Social World
Perspective’. Studies in
Symbolic Interaction, 3: 147-170.