The Major Historical Roots

Pragmatism

• Symbolic interactionism begins with Mead and has intellectual roots in pragmatism and psychological behaviorism.

• Pragmatism emphasizes that:

  • True reality is not “out there” but actively created through action in the world.

  • People base knowledge on what has been useful, altering what no longer works.

  • People define social and physical objects by their use.

  • Understanding actors requires focusing on what people actually do in the world.

• Three critical points for symbolic interactionism are:

  1. Focus on interaction between actor and world.

  2. Both actor and world are dynamic processes, not static structures.

  3. Importance of the actor’s ability to interpret the social world.

• John Dewey’s pragmatism is notable for viewing the mind as a thinking process with stages: defining objects, outlining conduct options, imagining consequences, eliminating unlikely options, and selecting optimal action.

• Dewey’s process-oriented view greatly influenced symbolic interactionism.

• David Lewis and Richard Smith argue Dewey (and William James) influenced symbolic interactionism more than Mead.

• They differentiate two pragmatism branches:

  • Philosophical realism (Mead)

  • Nominalist pragmatism (Dewey and James)

• Nominalist pragmatism holds:

  • Macro-level phenomena exist but do not independently determine individual consciousness or behavior.

  • Individuals are existentially free agents who accept, reject, or modify community norms and beliefs based on personal interests.

• Social realism emphasizes society’s control over individual mental processes, limiting freedom of actors.

• Mead aligns with the realist camp, contrasting with the nominalist direction of symbolic interactionism.

• Herbert Blumer, key to nominalist symbolic interactionism, claimed Meadian roots but was effectively a nominalist.

• Blumer’s psychical interactionism posits that meanings of symbols are individual and subjective, attached by receivers according to their own interpretations, unlike Mead’s view of more universal and objective meanings.

Behaviorism

• Mead was influenced by psychological behaviorism, which led him toward a realist and empirical approach.

• Mead termed his approach social behaviorism to differentiate it from radical behaviorism of John B. Watson, his former student.

• Radical behaviorists focused only on observable behaviors and stimuli-responses, largely ignoring covert mental processes between stimulus and response.

• Mead accepted the importance of observable behavior but emphasized covert aspects of behavior, aiming to extend empirical science to these covert processes.

• According to Bernard Meltzer, Mead’s unit of study was the “act,” encompassing both overt and covert aspects, including attention, perception, imagination, reasoning, and emotion—all parts of human activity.

• Mead argued a qualitative difference exists between human and animal behavior, based on humans’ mental capacities and use of language to mediate responses between stimulus and reaction.

• Mead simultaneously acknowledged his debt to Watsonian behaviorism but criticized its limitations, claiming his behaviorism was more adequate.

• Charles Morris highlighted three key differences between Mead and Watson:

  1. Mead viewed Watson’s focus on behavior as simplistic, isolating behavior from its broader social context.

  2. Mead criticized Watson’s refusal to extend behaviorism to mental processes and consciousness; Watson denied the existence of consciousness.

  3. Watson’s view portrayed the actor as a passive puppet, while Mead promoted a dynamic and creative actor image, influencing symbolic interactionists.

• Pragmatism and behaviorism, especially Dewey’s and Mead’s theories, were passed to University of Chicago graduate students in the 1920s, including Herbert Blumer, who founded symbolic interactionism.

• Other influential theorists for these students included Georg Simmel, whose focus on forms of action and interaction extended Meadian theory.

Between Reductionism and Sociologism

• Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism in 1937 and wrote key essays shaping its development.

• Mead aimed to distinguish symbolic interactionism from behaviorism, while Blumer saw symbolic interactionism challenged by two main fronts:

  1. Reductionist behaviorism (concern Mead had)

  2. Larger-scale sociologistic theories, especially structural functionalism

• Both behaviorism and structural functionalism focus on external causal factors (e.g., stimuli, norms) that determine human behavior.

• Blumer criticized these theories for ignoring how actors endow forces and behaviors with meaning.

• Behaviorists were seen by Blumer as psychological reductionists due to emphasis on external stimuli shaping behavior.

• Blumer also criticized psychological reductionism in the use of attitudes as internal, organized tendencies driving action, calling this a mechanistic view.

• For Blumer, the key is the defining process where actors forge their acts, not fixed attitudes.

• Blumer opposed theories focusing on conscious and unconscious motives as independent impulses controlling actors (e.g., Freudian theory with id and libido).

• He rejected any psychological theory ignoring the process of meaning construction and the fact that actors have selves and relate to themselves.

• Blumer’s critiques expanded beyond behaviorism to all forms of psychological reductionism.

• Blumer was also against sociologistic theories (like structural functionalism) that see individual behavior as determined by large-scale external social forces.

• Such sociological theories emphasize factors like social system, social structure, culture, status position, social role, custom, institution, collective representation, social situation, social norm, and values.

• Both psychological and sociological reductionist explanations bypass or subsume the meanings that things have for human actors.

• These theories focus solely on causal factors without addressing the meaning of things towards which humans act, thus ignoring the social construction of reality.

The Ideas of George Herbert Mead

The Priority of the Social

• Mead is the most important thinker in the history of symbolic interactionism.

• His book Mind, Self and Society is the most important single work in that tradition.

• Ellsworth Faris, in his review, argued Mead’s preference was “society first and then minds arising within that society,” inverting the book’s title.

• This reflects Mead’s priority to the social world over the individual in understanding social experience.

• Traditional social psychology starts with the individual to explain social experience, but Mead gives priority to the social whole.

• Mead’s view:

  • Social psychology does not build social group behavior from individual behaviors.

  • Instead, it starts with the complex social whole and analyzes individual behavior as elements of it.

  • The goal is to explain the conduct of the social group (whole), not the behavior of individuals (parts).

  • The whole (society) is prior to the part (individual); the part is explained in terms of the whole, not vice versa.

• In Mead’s theory, the social whole precedes the individual mind both logically and temporally.

• A thinking, self-conscious individual is logically impossible without a prior social group.

• The social group comes first, leading to the development of self-conscious mental states.

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

• Mead is the most important thinker in the history of symbolic interactionism.

• His book Mind, Self and Society is the key work in this tradition.

• Ellsworth Faris argued Mead’s preference was “society first and then minds arising within that society,” reversing the book’s title.

• This reflects Mead’s priority of society (the social whole) in his analysis.

• Traditional social psychology starts with the individual to explain social experience, but Mead gives priority to the social world.

• Mead’s approach:

  • Not building social group behavior from individual behavior.

  • Starting with a complex social whole and analyzing individual behavior as elements within it.

  • Aim is to explain the conduct of the social group (whole), not the behavior of individuals (parts).

  • The whole (society) is prior to the part (individual); parts are explained by the whole, not vice versa.

• The social whole logically and temporally precedes the individual mind in Mead’s theory.

• A thinking, self-conscious individual is logically impossible without a prior social group.

• The social group comes first and leads to the development of self-conscious mental states.

The Act

• Mead considers the act as the most “primitive unit” in his theory.

• In analyzing the act, Mead aligns closely with the behaviorist approach, focusing on stimulus.

• Mead identified four basic and interrelated stages in the act, which form an organic whole (dialectically interrelated).

• Both lower animals and humans perform acts; Mead is interested in their similarities and especially their differences.

Impulse

• The first stage of the act is the impulse, involving an “immediate sensuous stimulation” and the actor’s reaction or need to respond.

• Example of an impulse: hunger.

• Both nonhuman and human actors may respond immediately and unthinkingly to an impulse, but humans more often think about the appropriate response (e.g., eat now or later).

• In deciding how to respond, the actor considers the immediate situation, past experiences, and anticipated future results of the act.

• Hunger may arise from an inner state or be elicited by environmental stimuli (presence of food), often a combination of both.

• The hungry actor must find a way to satisfy the impulse even if food is not immediately available, indicating a problem in the environment (lack of food) to be overcome.

• Impulses involve an interaction between the actor and the environment, with social definitions sometimes influencing when it is appropriate to feel hungry.

Perception

• The second stage of the act is perception, where the actor searches for and reacts to stimuli related to the impulse (e.g., hunger) and the means to satisfy it.

• People perceive stimuli through senses like hearing, smell, taste, etc.

• Perception involves both incoming stimuli and the mental images they create.

• People do not respond immediately to stimuli but think about and assess them using mental imagery.

• Actors are not passive; they actively select characteristics of a stimulus and choose among sets of stimuli.

• A stimulus may have multiple dimensions, and the actor can select which aspects to focus on.

• People face many different stimuli and have the ability to choose which stimuli to attend to or ignore.

• Mead views perception and object as dialectically related; the act of perceiving an object makes it an object to the person, meaning perception and the object cannot be separated.

Manipulation

• The third stage is manipulation, where the actor takes action with or manipulates the perceived object after the impulse has manifested.

• Humans have an advantage over lower animals due to their hands with opposable thumbs, allowing subtle and precise manipulation.

• Manipulation serves as an important temporary pause before a response is enacted, allowing contemplation.

• Example: A hungry human sees a mushroom but first picks it up, examines it, and may check a guidebook before eating.

• Lower animals tend to act immediately, e.g., eating the mushroom without examination or deliberation.

• This pause allows humans to consider past experiences (e.g., eating poisonous mushrooms before) and future consequences (e.g., potential sickness or death).

• Manipulating the object becomes a form of mental experimentation, where the actor tests hypotheses about the outcomes of their actions.

Consummation

• The final phase of the act is consummation, which involves taking action to satisfy the original impulse, such as deciding to eat the mushroom (or not).

• Both humans and lower animals may consume the mushroom, but humans are less likely to eat a bad one due to their ability to manipulate and think through implications (e.g., reading about mushroom safety).

• Lower animals rely on a trial-and-error method, which is less efficient and more dangerous, making them more prone to die from consuming poisonous mushrooms.

• The four stages of the act—impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation—are often discussed sequentially but are actually dialectically interrelated and form one organic process.

• Each stage interpenetrates and influences the others throughout the act, rather than occurring strictly one after another.

• Later stages can affect earlier ones; for example, manipulating food might trigger the impulse of hunger and the perception that food is available to satisfy it.