GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

George Herbert Mead is one of the few American thinkers who have helped to
shape the character of modern social science.

Mead’s father was a Puritan clergyman who taught homiletics at Oberlin,

where Mead got his undergraduate training. His mother was president of Mount
Holyoke College, after her husband’s death. He graduated from Harvard where
he worked with Josiah Royce & William James & was converted to pragmatic
philosophy.

In Europe he studied under Wilhelm Wundt in Berlin. On returning home,

Mead taught for two years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he
met his intellectual friends, John Dewey & Charles Horton Cooley. When
Dewey moved to the University of Chicago, Mead decided to follow him & he
taught in the philosophy department there until his death in 1931.

Meads forte was teaching. Though he published a number of articles, his books
were published posthumously, taken from the lecture notes of his students who
gathered them for publication. The most famous is entitled, ‘Mind, Self &
Society’ and is the chief source for the basic component of Mead’s theory. The
four basic elements of Mead’s theory are – The Self, Self Interaction, The
Development of the Self & Symbolic Meaning.

The Self

Mead’s view of the self is central to Symbolic Interactionism. He sees the self
as an acting organism, not as a passive receptacle that simply receives &
responds to stimuli. Mead stresses people’s ability through the mechanism of
self-interaction to form & guide their own conduct.

According to Mead, individuals act on their own environment & in doing so

create the objects that people see. He distinguishes between ‘things’ or stimuli
that exist prior to & independent of the individual, & ‘objects’ which exist only
in relation to acts, ‘things’ are converted to ‘objects’ through the acts of
individuals. E.g. a tomato is an object of nutrition if eaten & an object of an
expression of anger if it is thrown. The individual by acting on it designates the
tomato as food in an instance & as a weapon in another. The tomato is not
intrinsically either of these; it is simply ‘a thing’ before the individual acts on
it.
Mead outlines two ‘phases’ of the self. One phase is ‘I’, which Mead sees as
the unorganized response of the organism to the attitudes of others or an
impulse to act. The other phase is ‘Me’ which is a set of organized attitudes of
others that the individual himself assumes in turn i.e. those perspectives or
opinions of oneself that the individual has learned from the others.

Thus, the self is comprised of – the acting ‘I’ when the self is the subject & the
acted upon ‘Me’ when the self is the object.

Self Interaction

Mead offers scientists a perspective that enables them to analyse behaviour that
is ‘unstructured’ and not affected by previously established conventions called
‘a novel experience’. Self interaction for Mead takes the form of ‘internal
conversations’, one has with oneself. These conversations are the means by
which human beings take things into account & organize themselves for action.
Self interaction is also the basis for role taking. Mead’s description of role
taking underlines the importance of individuals putting themselves in others
shoes. This result in the control an individual exercises over his own response
in similar situations.

Self interaction makes sense in terms of one’s daily experiences. Talking to

oneself helps one remind oneself about things to do or refrain from doing
certain things.

Development of the Self

Mead outlines the stages by which the self develops in his writings on – the
play, the game & the generalized other.

The first stage of self development is the ‘pre play’ stage at about age two. It is
marked by meaningless, imitative acts. The second stage, ‘the play stage’
appears later in childhood. Here the children act out others parts in simple role-
taking e.g. playing teacher or games such as hide & seek that involve only one
or two roles or participants. At this stage the player has only one alternative
role in mind at a time, yet he begins to form a self by taking the roles of others.

At the game stage, several players are in action together. This happens in
complex organized games in which the team member must anticipate the
responses of the others in the game. Here the relevant ‘other’ is an organization
of the attitudes of all involved in the game.

The last stage is the generalized other – where the game stage is applied in a
wider context i.e. the generalized other includes the organized attitudes of the
whole community.
Symbolic Meaning

The meaning of symbol is derived from Mead’s definition of gesture, which is

not only the first element of an act but also a sign for the whole act.

Mead defines a symbol as ‘the stimulus whose response is given in advance’

e.g. when a smoker reaches for a pack of cigarettes, a non smoker might leave
the room, open all windows, or prohibit the smoker from smoking. According
to Mead, gestures, thus, internalized are significant symbols because they have
the same meaning for all individual members of a given society or group. They
arouse the same attitudes in both sets of individuals – those making them or
responding to them.

Thus, Mead defines a symbol as the stimulus whose response is given in

advance. Significant symbols according to Mead are gestures that possess
meaning. A significant symbol is that part of an act that calls out for a response
from the other.