Symbolic Interactionism

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Symbolic Interactionism
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Understanding the Theories

• A set of theories that share a common interest in
  the meanings individuals construct within a
  social context.
• The term was coined by Blumer in 1937
• Theorists Associated with Symbolic Interactionism
• George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, W.I.
  Thomas, Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman

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George Herbert Mead

• Born in South Hadley, Massachusets on February
  27, 1863.
• Graduated with a B.A. from Oberlin College in
  1883.
• For the next few years, he went on to teach
  secondary school, survey for railroads and work
  as a private tutor.
• Returned to study at Harvard in 1887.
• He was offered an instructorship at the
  University of Michigan in 1891- without ever
  receiving any graduate degrees. He never does.
• 1894- he moved to the University of Chicago and
  remained there for the rest of his career.
• Died 1931.

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Meads Two Main Influences

• Pragmatism
• Symbolic Interactionism

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Mead and Pragmatism

• 1) What factors most influenced Mead?
• 1) True reality does not exist out there in the
  real world. It is actively created as we act in
  and toward the real world.
• 2) People remember the base their knowledge of
  the world on what has proven useful to them.
• 3) People define the social and physical
  objects that they encounter in the world
  according got their use for them.
• 4) If we want to understand actors, we must base
  that understanding on what they actually do in
  the world.

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Mead and Symbolic Interactionism

• The elements of symbolic interactionism that
  influenced Mead were
• 1) A focus on the interaction between the actor
  and the world.
• 2) A view of both the actor and the world as
  dynamic processes and not static structures
• 3) The great importance attributed to the actors
  ability to interpret the social world.

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Mead is also influenced by Behavioralism

• Radical Behavioralism focused on observable
  behavior.
• Mead recognized the importance of observable
  behavior but also felt that there were covert
  aspects of behavior that the radical behaviorists
  had ignored.

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Meads Symbolic Interactionism

• Mind and society are both structured social
  processes and both constituted by acts of
  communication.

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The Priority of the Social

• The mind is viewed as arising within society.
  Mead gives priority to the social world in trying
  to understand social experience.
• -We are not, in social psychology, building up
  the behavior of the social group in term s of the
  behavior of separate individuals composing it
  rather, we are starting out with a given social
  whole of complex group activity, into which we
  analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the
  separate individuals composing it... We attempt,
  that is, to explain the conduct of the social
  group, rather than to account for the organized
  conduct of the social group in terms of the
  conduct of the separate individuals belonging to
  it. For social psychology, the whole (society)
  is prior to the part (the individual), not the
  part to the whole and the part is explained in
  terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the
  part or parts. Mead, 1934

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Mead and Language

• Language acts are outer acts of communication,
  but language acts are also a medium of thought.
  Language was both an outer and inner activity.
• He joins inner and outer worlds. He believes we
  need to understand how mind and self are formed
  and sustained.
• Reciprocal relationship of mind, self and
  society.
• The body is not a self, as such it becomes a
  self only when it has developed a mind within the
  context of social experience... Mind arises
  through communication by a conversation of
  gestures in the social process or context of
  experience. Mead 1964

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Meads Unit of Analysis

• For Mead, the unit of study is the act, which
  comprises both overt and covert aspects of human
  action. Within the act, all the separated
  categories of the traditional, orthodox
  psychologies find a place. Attention,
  perception, imagination, reasoning, emotion, and
  so forth, are seen as parts of the act... the
  act, then encompasses the total process involved
  in human activity. Bernard Meltzer 1964

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The Generalized Other

• The Generalized Other is the norm against which
  we measure ourselves.
• The problem of the generalized other in the
  modern world is that mass media provides
  continual feedback, but is not mutual. The world
  of language is no longer tied to a distinct
  community, as boundaries of the cultural world
  break down. Hence, the Generalized Other becomes
  more open to invasion by foreign symbols (profit
  originated)

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The Individual

• The social unit precedes the individual-
  logically and temporally.
• The social group comes first, and it leads to the
  development of self-conscious mental states.

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Understanding the Act

• The act is the most primitive unit in theory.
• Four Basic and Inter-related stages of the Act.
• 1) Impulse
• 2) Perception
• 3) Manipulation
• 4) Consummation

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Impulse

• Immediate sensuous stimulation and the actors
  reaction.
• Hunger- the impulse must be satisfied.

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Perception

• The actor searches for, and reacts to, stimuli
  that relate to the impulse, in this case hunger.
  We use our perceptions to find ways to satisfy
  our impulse.

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Manipulation

• Once the impulse has manifested itself, and the
  object has been perceived, the next step is
  manipulating the object. You take some action
  with regard to it.
• You find a mushroom. You consider whether or not
  it is safe to eat.

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Consummation

• On the basis of these deliberations, the actor
  may decide to satisfy the impulse in this way or
  not. Consummation is the action that satisfies
  the original impulse.

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Mead on Gestures

• When a social act involves more than one person,
  gestures are necessary.
• Gestures refer to movements of the first
  organism which act as specific stimuli calling
  forth the (socially) appropriate response of the
  second organism. The Dog Fight Example
• The act of each dog becomes the stimulus to the
  other dog for his response The very fact that
  the dog is ready to attack another becomes a
  stimulus to the other dog to change his positions
  or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this
  than the change of attitude than the second dog
  in turn causes the first dog to change his
  attitude. Mead, 1934

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Significant Symbols

• A gesture that only humans can make. Gestures
  become significant symbols when they arouse in
  the individual who is making them the same kind
  of response (it need not be identical) as they
  are supposed to elicit from those to whom the
  gestures are addressed.
• Significant symbols make the mind, mental
  processes, and so on, possible.

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Mead and the Development of the Self

• The self is the ability tot take oneself as an
  object the self is the peculiar ability to be
  both subject and object.
• The self presupposes a social process
  Communication among humans. The self is
  developed through social processes.
• It is by means of reflexiveness-the turning-back
  of the experience of the individual upon
  himself-that the whole social process is thus
  brought into the experience of the individual
  involved in it it is by such means, which
  enable the individual to take the attitude of the
  other toward himself, that the individual is able
  consciously to adjust himself to that process,
  and to modify the resultant process in any given
  social act in terms of his adjustment to it.
  Mead, 1934

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Child Development and the Self

• The Play Stage- children learn to take the
  attitude of particular others to themselves.
• Game Stage- The child must take the role of
  everyone else involved in the game.
• Generalized Other- One learns to take the
  attitudes of the organized social group to which
  he/she belongs.

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The I and the Me

• The I is the immediate response of an individual
  to others. It is the incalculable,
  unpredictable, and creative aspect of the self.
  People dont know in advance what their I will
  be. We only know I after the act has been
  carried out.
• Me- is the organized set of attitudes of others
  which one himself assumes.

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The Importance of I

• It is a key source of novelty in the social
  process.
• The I is where our most important values are
  located.
• The I constitutes something that we seek- the
  realization of the self.
• The development of the I as part of the
  evolutionary process. Primitive societies are
  dominated more by the me.

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Erving Goffman

• Born Alberta, Canada on June 11, 1922. Died in
  1982.
• He dad advanced degrees from the University of
  Chicago.
• Focused on studying how society forces people to
  present a certain image of themselves... Because
  it forces us to switch back and forth between
  many complicated roles, it is also making us
  always somewhat untruthful, inconsistent, and
  dishonorable.
• His work shaped symbolic interationism and
  ethnmethodology.
• It was Goffman who pioneered the close empirical
  study of everyday life, although he had done it
  with his bare eyes, before the days of tape
  recorders and video recorders. Many key
  ethnomethodologists studied under Goffman at
  Berkeley.
• When he died in 1982 at the age of only 60 he was
  at the peak of his fame and largely regarded as a
  cult figure.

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The Looking Glass Self

• The idea of a looking glass self has 3 components
• 1) We imagine how we appear to others
• 2) We imagine what their judgment of that
  appearance must be.
• 3) We develop some self-feeling, such as pride
  or mortification, as a result of our imagining
  others judgments.

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Dramaturgy

• Goffman focused on dramaturgy, or a view of
  social life as a series of dramatic performances
  akin to those performed on the stage.
• A dramturgical approach to the self
• To Goffman, the self is not an organic thing
  that has a specific location In analyzing the
  self then we are drawn from its possessor, from
  the person who will profit or lose most by it,
  for he and his body merely provide the peg on
  which something of collaborative manufacture will
  be hung for a time The means of producing and
  maintaining selves do not reside inside the peg.
  Goffman, 1959

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Front and Back Stages

• The front is that part of the performance that
  generally functions in rather fixed and general
  ways to define the situation for those who
  observe the performance.
• The Setting- the physical scene necessary for
  performance.
• The Personal Front- Items of expressive
  equipment that the audience identifies with the
  performers and expects to find in the setting.
• Backstage is the staging area. Mistakes are
  hidden.

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Impression Management

• Is oriented to guarding against a series of
  unexpected actions, such as unintended gestures,
  inopportune intrusions, and faux paux.

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Role Distance

• Deals with the degree to which an individual
  embraces a given role.
• What is the degree to which individuals separate
  themselves from the roles they are in.