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Lesson 11
George Herbert Mead
Robert Wonser
SOC 368 – Classical Sociological Theory
Spring 2014
George Herbert Mead
 Born in South Hadley, Massachusetts on Feb
27, 1863
 Studied philosophy and its application to social
psychology
 Studied at Harvard and Universities of Berlin
Leipzig.
 Never received any graduate degrees.
 1894 – At John Dewey’s request moved to
University of Chicago.
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 In 1900 he began teaching a course whose
stenographic notes became the basis for Mind,
Self and Society.
 Enormous difficulty writing which troubled him.
 Also believed science could be used to deal with
social problems.
 Involved in social reform and research at the
University of Chicago Settlement House which
was modeled after the Hull House.
Intellectual Influences
Three traditions of thought were
particularly important for the development
of Meads’ ideas:
Pragmatism
Behaviorism
Darwinism
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Pragmatism
the idea of an “objective reality” is turned
into a major question
individuals create their own world
what the world is how it is interpreted
interpretations and actions are pragmatic
or “practical”
Science is seen as optimum way to solve
social problems. Pragmatists reject
absolute truths.
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Two Types of Pragmatism
 One of the primary debates during Mead’s time:
 Nominalist pragmatism (structure) vs. philosophical
realism (agency)
 Nominalists: societal phenomena exist but not
independently of people and don’t determine
individual consciousness and behavior
 Social realists emphasize society’s controlling of
individuals’ mental processes.
 Mead has elements of both and they’re reciprocal,
the dialectic strikes again!
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 Social Realism:
the social environment is primary
emergent properties provide a context for the
development of human beings
 Psychological Nominalism:
individual action is primary
individuals are active in the construction of their
own world
 Is Mead a social realist or a psychological
nominalist?
He calls himself a social behaviorist.
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Pragmatism’s influence on Mead
Truth doesn’t exist ‘out there’ but is
instead ‘actively created’
People remember their past and use what
proved useful before.
People define ‘objects’ that they encounter
in terms of their use for them.
In order to understand actors, we must
base our understanding of what they
actually do in the real world.
Behaviorism
 Broadest sense: “simply an approach to the
study of the experience of the individual from
the point of view of his conduct.”
 Individual behavior and thought is the product
of stimulus-response conditioning
 Individuals come to like something when they
are rewarded
 Individuals dislike something when they are
punished
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Behaviorism…
 John B. Watson, one of Mead’s students, (1924)
wrote:
 “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and
train him to become any type of specialist I might
select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant- chief,
and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless
of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors"
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Behaviorism
Watson: people are little more than
“organic machines”
Applied animal psychology to humans with
no regard for our obvious mental abilities
difference with animals.
According to Mead, “John B. Watson’s
attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in
Wonderland—’Off with their heads!’”
(1934/1962:2-3)
Darwinism
human beings are animals
all animals adapt and adjust to their
environment
human beings have an adaptive
mechanism that makes them distinct:
conscious thought
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The Theories of George H. Mead
Instead of studying the mind
introspectively, Mead focuses on the act,
or if others are involved, the social act.
This is a modification of behaviorism’s
stimulus-response model. What does he
include that Watson omits?
The theory of the act:
Impulse  perception  manipulation 
consummation
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The Theory of the Act
 Impulse: involves “immediate sensuous
stimulation” and the actor’s reaction to the
stimulation, the need to do something about it 
 Perception: actor searches for, and reacts to],
stimuli that relate to the impulse (eg hunger) 
 Manipulation: after impulse has manifest and
perceived, taking action with regard to it 
 Consummation: the taking of action satisfies the
original impulse
Gestures
 The gesture is the basic mechanism in the social
act and social process more generally.
 Gestures are “movements of the first organism
which act as specific stimuli calling forth the
(socially) appropriate responses of the second
organism”
 “Significant” gestures (only humans are capable
of; require thought before reaction to) vs
“nonsignificant” gestures (like in boxing)
Social Acts
Two types of social acts:
1) “conversations of gestures”
Ex: The clucking of chickens
Ex: The barking of dogs
2) interaction through “significant
symbols”
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Significant Symbols
Significant symbol – “that which calls
out the same response in the receiver as it
does in the sender”
Significant symbols make possible:
conscious thought
meaning
shared meaning
symbolic interaction
and ultimately, society itself
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Mead and Meaning
 Mead argues that meaning can only be
produced through significant symbols
is the product of social interaction
must involve conscious reflection
and is the product of role-taking
(taking-the-role-of-the-other)
 In conversation of gestures, only the gestures
themselves are communicated, with language,
their gestures and meanings are conveyed.
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Thinking as “simply internalized or implicit
conversation of the individual with himself
by means of such gestures.”
“thinking is the same talking to other
people”
Thinking involves talking to oneself
Significant symbols make possible
symbolic interaction
Intelligence
 People are different than animals in that
intelligence makes possible mutual adjustment
of acts of organisms.
 Conscious thought through significant symbols,
particularly language, intervenes between the
stimulus and the response (to inhibit action
temporarily or to delay reactions to a stimulus).
 Makes possible:
Delayed reactions
Mentally test out different courses of action
Ability to choose amongst best stimuli, not simply first
available.
Triadic Matrix
The Triadic
Matrix (basic
unit of
interaction):
1. emission
2. response
3. adjustment
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Mead expanded Cooley’s ideas about the
development of the self.
Mead also believed that the self was
created through social interaction and that
this process started in childhood (that
children began to develop a sense of self
at about the same time that they began to
learn language).
The acquisition of language skills
coincides with the growth of mental
capacities, including the ability to think of
ourselves as separate and distinct, and to
see ourselves in relationship to others.
Child Development
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Development of the Self: Play and Game
Stage
Play
1 significant other at a time
Game
several significant others
Generalized other
a whole community of attitudes
The Generalized Other
The Generalized Other:
- Mead’s term referring to a conception of
the attitudes and expectations held in
common by the members of the organized
groups with whom they interact.
When we imagine what the group expects
of us, we are taking the role of the
generalized other.
Mead and the Self
 The self is the ability to take oneself as an
object
 For Mead, the self is a product of social
interaction.
 The self is both:
a social process
a “social structure”
 How does the self develop?
 Mead’s simple answer:
 “by acquiring the ability to take the role of the
other.”
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The Self and Self Control
In order to have a self one must be a
member of a community.
Whereas play requires only pieces of
selves, the game requires a coherent self.
Self makes possible coordinated activities,
group activities, and ultimately society.
Phases of the Self: I and Me
 “I” (the self in action):
 self in process, in the

moment
 the impulsive,
spontaneous, and

indeterminate part of the
self

 non-reflective
 the part of the self that

produces individuality
 “Me” (the self as an object
in the world):
the structured and
determinate part of the
self
a product of interaction
and conscious reflection
we know the “I” only
through the “me”
the result of “reflected
appraisals”
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“I” and “Me”

1)
2)
3)
I is most important for Mead:
Key source of novelty in the social process
Our most important values reside in the “I”
“I” constitutes something we all seek—
realization of the self. The I permits the
development of a definite personality.
4) Evolutionary process at work: primitive
societies dominated by the “Me” where in
modern societies there’s a greater component
of “I.”
“I” and the “Me”
 “I” reacts against the “Me” which is the “organized set of
attitudes of others which one himself assumes”
 The “Me” is the adoption of the generalized other.
 People are conscious of the “Me”, it involves conscious
responsibility. It’s a conventional, habitual individual.
 Conformists are dominated by the “Me”
 It is through the “Me” that society dominates the
individual.
 Social control then is the dominance of the expression of
the “me” over the expression of the “I”
 “And thus it is that social control, as operating in terms of selfcriticism, exerts itself so intimately and extensively over individual
behavior or conduct, serving to integrate the individual and his
actions with reference to the organized social process of experience
and behavior in which he is implicated. The physiological
mechanism of the human individual's central nervous system makes
it possible for him to take the attitudes of other individuals' and the
attitudes of the organized social group of which he and they are
members, toward himself, in terms of his integrated social relations
to them and to the group as a whole; so that the general social
process of experience and behavior which the group is carrying on
is directly presented to him in his own experience, and so that he is
thereby able to govern and direct his conduct consciously and
critically, with reference to his relations both to the social group as a
whole and to its other individual members, in terms of this social
process. Thus he becomes not only self-conscious but also selfcritical; and thus, through self-criticism, social control over individual
behavior or conduct operates by virtue of the social origin and basis
of such criticism. That is to say, self-criticism is essentially social
criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially
behavior controlled socially. Hence social control, so far from
tending to crush out the human individual or to obliterate his selfconscious individuality, is, on the contrary, actually constitutive of
and inextricably associated with that individuality” (Mead,
1934/1962: 255)
Mead and the Mind
 For Mead, once the self is created as an object in
the world it is possible to “talk to one’s self.”
 Defines the mind in functional rather than idealist
terms. I.e. what it does, the role it plays in the act,
rather than some transcendental, subjective
phenomenon.
 Mead describes the mind as:
an internalized conversation
an “imaginative rehearsal”
a process of self-reflection
an internal process of role-taking
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Mead and Society
 Society – the ongoing social process that
precedes both mind and the self.
 The weakest part of Mead’s theory, though it
is clear that society must exist before both
selves and minds.
 However, society cannot exist without either
selves or minds.
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 Social structures exist as the “common
response of the community”
 Culture exists as a “generalized other”
Since society is represented by the “me”
we carry society with us wherever we go,
giving us the ability through self-criticism,
to control themselves.
The Priority of the Social
 Not mind and then society, but society first and then minds
arising with that society (Faris).
 “We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of
the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate
individuals composing it …We attempt, that is, to explain the
conduct of the individual in terms of the organized 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,
1934/1962:7 italics added)
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Criticisms
 Little emphasis on macro level of society.
 Some vague and fuzzy concepts
 Inconsistent definition of concepts (eg
intelligence)
 Difficulty in clearly distinguishing one concept
from another
 Lack of concern for emotional and unconscious
aspects of human conduct
 Only source of social change appears to be
through the individual, the “I”