Learning Journal Unit 4

Briefly acquaint yourself with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry about George Herbert
Mead. 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

George Herbert Mead

First published Sun Apr 13, 2008; substantive revision Tue Aug 2, 2016

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), American philosopher and social theorist, is often classed with
William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey as one of the most significant figures in
classical American pragmatism. Dewey referred to Mead as “a seminal mind of the very first order”
(Dewey, 1932, xl). Yet by the middle of the twentieth-century, Mead's prestige was greatest outside
of professional philosophical circles. He is considered by many to be the father of the school of
Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and social psychology, although he did not use this
nomenclature. Perhaps Mead's principal influence in philosophical circles occurred as a result of his
friendship with John Dewey. There is little question that Mead and Dewey had an enduring influence
on each other, with Mead contributing an original theory of the development of the self through
communication. This theory has in recent years played a central role in the work of Jürgen
Habermas. While Mead is best known for his work on the nature of the self and intersubjectivity, he
also developed a theory of action, and a metaphysics or philosophy of nature that emphasizes
emergence and temporality, in which the past and future are viewed through the lens of the
present. Although the extent of Mead's reach is considerable, he never published a monograph. His
most famous work, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, was
published after his death and is a compilation of student notes and selections from unpublished
manuscripts.

1. Life and Influences

George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. His father,
Hiram Mead, a minister in the Congregational Church, moved his family from Massachusetts to Ohio
in 1869 in order to join the faculty of The Oberlin Theological Seminary. At Oberlin he taught
homiletics and held the chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology. Mead would attend Oberlin
College from 1879–1883, and matriculate at Harvard from 1887–1888. At Harvard he studied with
Josiah Royce, a philosopher deeply indebted to G.W.F. Hegel, who also left a lasting impression on
Mead. (Mead met William James at Harvard, although he did not study with him. Almost
immediately after graduation, Mead resided in William James's summer home tutoring his son
Harry.) Mead's mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings, was a devoutly religious woman, who taught at
Oberlin for two years after the death of her husband in 1881, and served as president of Mount
Holyoke College from 1890–1900. After his college years, Mead became a committed naturalist and
non-believer, but he had struggled for years with the religious convictions that he had inherited from
his family and community. For a period of time after college he even considered Christian Social
Work as a career, but 1884 he explained in a letter to his friend Henry Castle why this career path
would be problematic.

I shall have to let persons understand that I have some belief in Christianity and my praying be
interpreted as a belief in God, whereas I have no doubt that now the most reasonable system of the
universe can be formed to myself without a God. But notwithstanding all this I cannot go out with
the world and not work for men. The spirit of a minister is strong with me and I come fairly by it.
(Shalin 1988, 920–921)

Mead did indeed move away from his earlier religious roots, but the activist spirit remained with
him. Mead marched in support of women's suffrage, served as a treasurer for the Settlement House
movement, immersed himself in civic matters in Chicago, and generally supported progressive
causes. Jane Addams was a close friend. In terms of his transformation into a naturalist, no doubt
Darwin played a significant role. As a matter of fact, one can understand much of Mead's work as an
attempt to synthesize Darwin, Hegel, Dewey's functionalist turn in psychology, and insights gleaned
from James. Mead taught with Dewey at the University of Michigan from 1891–1894, and when
Dewey was made chair at the University of Chicago in 1894, he requested that Mead receive an
appointment. Mead spent the rest of his career at Chicago. But before he began teaching at
Michigan, Mead was directly exposed to major currents of European thought when he studied in
Germany from 1888–1891, taking a course from Wilhelm Dilthey and immersing himself in Wilhelm
Wundt's research.

2. Language and Mind

Dewey and Mead were not only very close friends, they shared similar intellectual trajectories. Both
went through a period in which Hegel was the most significant philosophical figure for them, and
both democratized and de-essentialized Hegelian ideas about the self and community. Nevertheless,
neo-hegelian organic metaphors and notions of negation and conflict, reinterpreted as the
problematic situation, remain central to their positions. The teleological also remains important in
their thought, but it is reduced in scale from the world historical and localized in terms of
anticipatory experiences and goal oriented activities.

For Mead, the development of the self is intimately tied to the development of language. To
demonstrate this connection, Mead begins by articulating what he learned about the gesture from
Wundt. Gestures are to be understood in terms of the behavioral responses of animals to stimuli
from other organisms. For example, a dog barks, and a second dog either barks back or runs away.
The “meaning” of the “barking gesture” is found in the response of the second organism to the first.
But dogs do not understand the “meaning” of their gestures. They simply respond, that is, they use
symbols without what Mead refers to as “significance.” For a gesture to have significance, it must
call out in a second organism a response that is functionally identical to the response that the first
organism anticipates. In other words, for a gesture to be significant it must “mean” the same thing
to both organisms, and “meaning” involves the capacity to consciously anticipate how other
organisms will respond to symbols or gestures. How does this capacity arise? It does so through the
vocal gesture.

A vocal gesture can be thought of as a word or phrase. When a vocal gesture is used the individual
making the gesture responds (implicitly) in the same manner as the individual hearing it. If you are
about to walk across a busy street during rush hour, I might shout out, “Don't walk!” As I shout, I
hear my gesture the way in which you hear it, that is, I hear the same words, and I might feel myself
pulling back, stopping in my tracks because I hear these words. But, of course, I don't hear them
exactly as you do, because I am aware of directing them to you. According to Mead, “Gestures
become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in the individual making them the same
responses which the explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals” (MSS, 47). He
also tells us that, “the critical importance of language in the development of human experience lies
in this fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the
other” (MSS, 69).

As noted, Mead was indebted to Hegel's work, and the notion of reflexivity plays a fundamental role
in Mead's theory of mind. Vocal gestures—which depend on sufficiently sophisticated nervous
systems to process them—allow individuals to hear their own gestures in the way that others hear
them. If I shout “Boo” at you, I might not only scare you, I might scare myself. Or, to put this in other
terms, vocal gestures allow one to speak to oneself when others are not present. I make certain
vocal gestures and anticipate how they would be responded to by others, even when they are not
present. The responses of others have been internalized and have become part of an accessible
repertoire. (Mead would agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein that there are no private languages.
Language is social all the way down.) According to Mead, through the use of vocal gestures one can
turn “experience” back on itself through the loop of speaking and hearing at relatively the same
instant. And when one is part of a complex network of language users, Mead argues that this
reflexivity, the “turning back” of experience on itself, allows mind to develop.

Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings to
others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like, emerges…. It is absurd
to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the individual human organism; for, although it
has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily
social. (MSS, 132–133)

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 individuals 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 of that
process in any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential
condition, within the social process, for the development of mind. (MSS, 134)

Mind is developed not only through the use of vocal gestures, but through the taking of roles, which
will be addressed below. Here it is worth noting that although we often employ our capacity for
reflexivity to engage in reflection or deliberation, both Dewey and Mead argue that habitual, non-
deliberative, experience constitutes the most common way that we engage the world. The habitual
involves a host of background beliefs and assumptions that are not raised to the level of (self)
conscious reflection unless problems occur that warrant addressing. For Dewey, this background is
described as “funded experience.” For Mead, it is the world that this there and the “biologic
individual.”

The immediate experience which is reality, and which is the final test of the reality of scientific
hypotheses as well as the test of the truth of all our ideas and suppositions, is the experience of
what I have called the “biologic individual.”…[This] term lays emphasis on the living reality which
may be distinguished from reflection…. Actual experience did not take place in this form but in the
form of unsophisticated reality. (MSS, 352–353)

3. Roles, the Self, and the Generalized Other

One of the most noteworthy features of Mead's account of the significant symbol is that it assumes
that anticipatory experiences are fundamental to the development of language. We have the ability
to place ourselves in the positions of others—that is, to anticipate their responses—with regard to
our linguistic gestures. This ability is also crucial for the development of the self and self-
consciousness. For Mead, as for Hegel, the self is fundamentally social and cognitive. It should be
distinguished from the individual, who also has non-cognitive attributes. The self, then, is not
identical to the individual and is linked to self-consciousness. It begins to develop when individuals
interact with others and play roles. What are roles? They are constellations of behaviors that are
responses to sets of behaviors of other human beings. The notions of role-taking and role playing are
familiar from sociological and social-psychological literature. For example, the child plays at being a
doctor by having another child play at being a patient. To play at being a doctor, however, requires
being able to anticipate what a patient might say, and vice versa. Role playing involves taking the
attitudes or perspectives of others. It is worth noting in this context that while Mead studied
physiological psychology, his work on role-taking can be viewed as combining features of the work of
the Scottish sympathy theorists (which James appealed to in The Principles of Psychology), with
Hegel's dialectic of self and other. As we will discover shortly, perspective-taking is associated not
only with roles, but with far more complex behaviors.

For Mead, if we were simply to take the roles of others, we would never develop selves or self-
consciousness. We would have a nascent form of self-consciousness that parallels the sort of
reflexive awareness that is required for the use of significant symbols. A role-taking (self)
consciousness of this sort makes possible what might be called a proto-self, but not a self, because it
doesn't have the complexity necessary to give rise to a self. How then does a self arise? Here Mead
introduces his well-known neologism, the generalized other. When children or adults take roles, they
can be said to be playing these roles in dyads. However, this sort of exchange is quite different from
the more complex sets of behaviors that are required to participate in games. In the latter, we are
required to learn not only the responses of specific others, but behaviors associated with every
position on the field. These can be internalized, and when we succeed in doing so we come to “view”
our own behaviors from the perspective of the game as a whole, which is a system of organized
actions.

The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called
“the generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole
community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the
generalized other in so far as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the
experience of any one of the individual members of it. (MSS, 154)

For Mead, although these communities can take different forms, they should be thought of as
systems; for example, a family can be thought of systemically and can therefore give rise to a
generalized other and a self that corresponds to it. Generalized others can also be found in
concrete social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations, which are all
actually functional social units, in terms of which their individual members are directly related to one
another. The others are abstract social classes or subgroups, such as the class of debtors and the
class of creditors, in terms of which their individual members are related to one another only more
or less indirectly. (MSS, 157)

In his Principles of Psychology, a book Mead knew well, William James discusses various types of
empirical selves, namely, the material, the social, and the spiritual. In addressing the social self,
James notes how it is possible to have multiple selves.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and
carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as
the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as
many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.
He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. (James 1890, 294)

From Mead's vantage point, James was on the right track. However, the notion of audience is left
undeveloped in James, as is the manner in which language is utilized in the genesis of the self and
self-consciousness. For Mead, James's audiences should be thought of in terms of systemically
organized groups, such as we find in certain games, which give rise to generalized others. Further,
we need an account of how we come to view ourselves from the perspective of these groups that
goes beyond the concept of “sympathetic attachments.” Such an account involves reflexivity, which
originates with the vocal gesture and is essential to taking roles and the perspective of the
generalized other. In addition, reflexivity helps make possible the capacity to “see” ourselves from
ever wider or more “universal” communities. Mead relates the latter capacity to cosmopolitan
political and cultural orientations. It's worth noting that for Mead a full account of the self should
address the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic.

4. The “I” and the “Me”

One of Mead's most significant contributions to social psychology is his distinction between the “I”
and the “Me.” It's worth emphasizing that while this distinction is utilized in sociological circles, it is
grounded philosophically for Mead. His target, in part, is no less than the idea of the transcendental
ego, especially in its Kantian incarnation. It is also important to note that the “I” and “Me” are
functional distinctions for Mead, not metaphysical ones. He refers to them as phases of the self (MSS
178, 200), although he more typically uses the word self to refer to the “Me” (Aboulafia 2016).

The self that arises in relationship to a specific generalized other is referred to as the “Me.” The
“Me” is a cognitive object, which is only known retrospectively, that is, on reflection. When we act in
habitual ways we are not typically self-conscious. We are engaged in actions at a non-reflective level.
However, when we take the perspective of the generalized other, we are both “watching” and
forming a self in relationship to the system of behaviors that constitute this generalized other. So,
for example, if I am playing second base, I may reflect on my position as a second baseman, but to
do so I have to be able to think of “myself” in relationship to the whole game, namely, the other
actors and the rules of the game. We might refer to this cognitive object as my (second baseman)
baseball self or “Me.” Perhaps a better example might be to think of the self in relationship to one's
family of origin. In this situation, one views oneself from the perspective of the various sets of
behaviors that constitute the family system.

To return to the baseball example, one may have a self, a “Me,” that corresponds to a particular
position that one plays, which is nested within the game as an organized totality. This self, however,
doesn't tell us how any particular play may be made. When a ball is grounded to a second baseman,
how he or she reacts is not predetermined. He reacts, and how he reacts is always to some degree
different from how he has reacted in the past. These reactions or actions of the individual, whether
in response to others or self-initiated, fall within the “sphere” of the “I.” Every response that the “I”
makes is somewhat novel. Its responses may differ only in small ways from previous responses,
making them functionally equivalent, but they will never be exactly the same. No catch in a ball
game is ever identical to a previous catch. Mead declares that, “The ‘I’ gives the sense of freedom, of
initiative. The situation is there for us to act in a self-conscious fashion. We are aware of ourselves,
and of what the situation is, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the
action takes place” (MSS, 177–178). The “I” is a “source” of both spontaneity and creativity. For
Mead, however, the “I” is not a noumenal ego. Nor is it a substance. It is a way of designating a locus
of activity.

The responses of the “I” are non-reflective. How the “I” reacts is known only on reflection, that is,
after we retrospect.

If you ask, then, where directly in your own experience the “I” comes in, the answer is that it comes
in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the “I” of the “me.” It is another
“me” that has to take that rôle. You cannot get the immediate response of the “I” in the process.
(MSS, 174)

In other words, once the actions of the “I” have become objectified and known, by definition they
have become a “Me.” The status of the “I” is interesting in Mead. In trying to differentiate it from the
empirical, knowable, “Me,” he states, “The ‘I’ is the transcendental self of Kant, the soul that James
conceived behind the scene holding on to the skirts of an idea to give it an added increment of
emphasis” (MSC in SW, 141). However, this statement should not to be interpreted as endorsing the
notion of a transcendental ego. Mead is seeking to emphasize that the “I” is not available to us in
our acts, that is, it is only knowable in its objectified form as a “Me.” This point is clarified by a
remark that directly follows the statement just cited. “The self-conscious, actual self in social
intercourse is the objective ‘me’ or ‘me's’ with the process of response continually going on and
implying a fictitious ‘I’ always out of sight of himself” (MSC in SW, 141). A transcendental ego is not
fictitious. But for Mead, since we are dealing with a functional distinction here, it is quite acceptable
to refer to the “I” as fictitious in a metaphysical sense.

Why, then, do we seem to experience what Mead refers to as a “running current of awareness,” that
is, an ego that appears to be aware of itself as it acts and thinks, if the “I” is not immediately aware
of itself (SS in SW, 144)? William James sought to explain this phenomenon in terms of
proprioception and the relationship between “parts” of the stream of consciousness. (James 1890,
296–307; James 1904, 169–183; James 1905, 184–194). Mead developed a unique explanation
based on the relationship of the “I” to the “Me.” As we have seen, the “I” reacts and initiates action,
but the actions taken are comprehended, objectified, as a “Me.” However, the “Me” is not simply
confined to the objectifications of the immediate actions of the “I.” The “Me” carries with it
internalized responses that serve as a commentary on the “I's” actions. Mead states, “The action
with reference to the others calls out responses in the individual himself—there is then another ‘me’
criticizing, approving, and suggesting, and consciously planning, i.e., the reflective self” (SS in SW,
145). The running current of awareness, then, is not due to the “I” being immediately aware of itself.
It is due to the running commentary of the “Me” on the actions of the “I.” The “Me” follows the “I”
so closely in time that it appears as if the “I” is the source of the “running current of awareness.”

Freud's super-ego could be conscious or unconscious. One might think of the “Me” as similar to the
conscious super-ego in the commentary that it provides, but one would have to be careful not to
carry this analogy too far. For Mead, the “Me” arises in relationship to systems of behaviors,
generalized others, and, therefore, is by definition multiple, although the behaviors of various
“Me's” can overlap. Further, Freud's model assumes a determinism that is not inherent in the
relationship of the “I” to the “Me.” Not only does the “I” initiate novel responses, its new behaviors
can become part of a “Me.” In other words, “Me's” are not static. They are systems that often
undergo transformation. This will become more apparent in the next section when we discuss
Mead's ideas regarding emergence. In this context it is enough to suggest the following: when a
ballplayer makes a catch in a manner that has never been made before—that is, makes a play that is
significantly different from prior catches—the new play may become part of the repertoire of the
team's behaviors. In other words, the play may alter the existing generalized other by modifying
existing behavioral patterns. In so doing, it gives rise to a modified or new self because the game as a
whole has been changed. Once again, this may be easier to see in terms of the transformations that
take place in families when new reactions occur as children and adults interact over time. New
selves are generated as family systems are transformed.

5. Sociality, Emergence, and The Philosophy of the Present

We have seen that the “I” introduces novelty in actions and in the interactions between human
beings. For Mead, novelty is not a phenomenon that can be accounted for in terms of human
ignorance, as it can for a determinist such as Spinoza. In the Spinozistic framework, even though
everything in nature is determined, as finite modes we must remain ignorant of the totality of
causes. In principle, however, an infinite Mind could predict every event. Mead, following in the
footsteps of Darwin, argues that novelty is in fact an aspect of the natural world, and that there are
events that are not only unpredictable due to ignorance, but are in principle impossible to predict. In
the latter category, for example, we find mutations that help to give rise to new species, as well as
the creative responses of baseball players, musicians, composers, dancers, scientists, etc.

In The Philosophy of the Present—a compilation based on the Carus Lectures delivered in late 1930
in Berkeley—Mead outlines his thoughts on nature and time. Mead did not have the opportunity to
develop his ideas into a book. (He passed away early in 1931.) In spite of the fact that these lectures
were hurriedly written due to obligations that he had as chair of the University of Chicago's
philosophy department, they contain ideas that illuminate his earlier work and indicate the direction
of his thought. On the first page of the lectures we are told that “reality exists in a present” and that
we do not live in a Parmenidean cosmos (PP, 1). “For a Parmenidean reality does not exist. Existence
involves non-existence: it does take place. The world is a world of events” (PP, 1). Our world is one in
which change is real and not merely a subjective, perceptual, phenomenon.
It seems to me that the extreme mathematization of recent science in which the reality of motion is
reduced to equations in which change disappears in an identity, and in which space and time
disappear in a four dimensional continuum of indistinguishable events which is neither space nor
time is a reflection of the treatment of time as passage without becoming. (PP, 19)

The universe doesn't just spin its wheels and offer motion without real novelty. Part of the impetus
behind The Philosophy of the Present was to argue against an interpretation of space-time, such as
Hermann Minkowski's, which eliminates the truly novel or the emergent. Emergence involves not
only biological organisms, but matter and energy; for example, there is a sense in which water can
be spoken of as emerging from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. [1] Nevertheless, biological
examples appear best suited to Mead's approach. It's worth noting at this juncture that Mead had
always been keenly interested in science and the scientific method. However, as a pragmatist, the
test of a scientific hypothesis for him is whether it can illuminate the world that is there. He certainly
was never a positivist.

As mentioned, Mead is a systemic thinker who speaks of taking the perspectives of others and of
generalized others. These perspectives are not “subjective” for Mead. They are “objective” in the
sense that they provide frames of reference and shared patterns of behavior for members of
communities. (This is not to say that every human community has an equally viable account of the
natural world. This is in part why we have science for Mead.) However, it is not only human
perspectives that are objective for Mead. While it is true that only human beings share perspectives
in a manner that allows them to be (self) conscious about the perspectives of others, there is an
objective reality to non-human perspectives. How can a non-human perspective be objective? In
order to answer this question, a few general remarks about Mead's notion of “perspective” are in
order. First, it is important to note that perspectives are not primarily visual for Mead. They are ways
of speaking about how organisms act and interact in environments. In the words of David Miller,

According to Mead, every perspective is a consequence of an active, selecting organism, and no

perspective can be built up out of visual experiences alone or out of experiences of the so-called
secondary qualities. A perspective arises out of a relation of an active, selective, percipient event and
its environment. It determines the order of things in the environment that are selected, and it is in
nature…. We make distinctions among objects in our environment, finally, through, contact. (Miller
1973, 213)

Mead has been referred to as a tactile philosopher, as opposed to a visual one, because of the
importance of contact experience in his thought. Perspectives involve contact and interaction
between organisms and their environments. For example, a fish living in a certain pond can be
thought of as inhabiting an ecosystem. The way in which it navigates the pond, finds food to eat,
captures its food, etc., can be spoken of as the fish's perspective on the pond, and it is objective, that
is, its interactions are not a matter of the subjective perceptions of the fish. Its interactions in its
environment shape and give form to its perspective, which is different from the snail's perspective,
although it lives in the same waters. In other words, organisms stratify environments in different
ways as they seek to meet their needs (Miller 1973, 207–217). The pond, in fact, is not one system
but many systems in the sense that its inhabitants engage in different, interlaced interactions, and
therefore have different objective perspectives. The fish, of course, does not comprehend its
perspective or localized environment as a system, but this doesn't make its perspective subjective.
Human beings, given our capacity to discuss systems in language, can describe the ecology of a pond
(or better, the ecologies of a pond depending on what organisms we are studying). We can describe,
with varying degrees of accuracy, what it is like to be a fish living in a particular pond, as opposed to
a snail. Through study we learn about the perspectives of other creatures, although we cannot share
them as we can the perspectives of the language bearing members of our own species.

For Mead, as noted, systems are not static. This is especially evident in the biological world. New
forms of life arise, and some of them are due to the efforts of human beings, for example, the
botanists who create hybrids. Mead argues that if a new form of life emerges from another form,
then there is a time when the new organism has not fully developed, and therefore has not yet
modified its environmental niche. In this situation the older order, the old environment, has not
disappeared but neither has the new one been born. Mead refers to this state of betwixt and
between as sociality.

When the new form has established its citizenship the botanist can exhibit the mutual adjustments
that have taken place. The world has become a different world because of the advent, but to identify
sociality with this result is to identify it with system merely. It is rather the stage betwixt and
between the old system and the new one that I am referring to. If emergence is a feature of reality
this phase of adjustment, which comes between the ordered universe before the emergent has
arisen and that after it has come to terms with the newcomer, must be a feature also of reality. (PP,
47)

Sociality is a key idea for Mead and it has implications for his sociology and social psychology. If we
think of the “Me” as a system, then there are times when the “I” initiates new responses that may or
may not be integrated into an existing “Me.” But if they come to be integrated, then there is a time
betwixt and between the old and new “Me” system. What makes this all the more interesting is that
human beings have a capacity for reflection. We can become aware of changes that are taking place
as we “stand” betwixt and between, which allows for the possibility of influencing the development
of a future self. We can even set up conditions to promote changes that we believe may transform
us in certain ways. Or to put this in another light, new problems are bound to arise in the world, and
because of our capacity for sociality, we can get some purchase on the courses of action available to
us as we reflect on the novel problems confronting us. Of course, because the problems are novel
means that we do not have ready solutions. However, the capacity to stand betwixt and between old
and (possible) new orders, as we do between old and new social roles, provides us with some
opportunity for anticipating alternatives and integrating new responses. As a matter of fact, Mead
links moral development with our capacity for moving beyond old values, old selves, in order to
integrate new values into our personalities when new situations call for them.

To leave the field to the values represented by the old self is exactly what we term selfishness. The
justification for the term is found in the habitual character of conduct with reference to these values.
…Where, however, the problem is objectively considered, although the conflict is a social one, it
should not resolve itself into a struggle between selves, but into such reconstruction of the situation
that different and enlarged and more adequate personalities may emerge. (SS in SW, 148) [emphasis
added]

It's worth noting here that Mead did not develop an ethics, at least not one that was systematically
presented. But his position bears a kinship to theorists of moral sentiment, if we understand “the
taking the perspectives of others” as a more sophisticated statement of sympathetic attachments. It
is important to emphasize that for pragmatic reasons Mead does not think that the idea of
compassion is sufficient for grounding an ethics. He argues for a notion of obligation that is tied to
transforming social conditions that generate pain and suffering. [2]

Returning to Mead's notion of sociality, we can see that he is seeking to emphasize transitions and
change between systems. This emphasis on change has repercussions for his view of the present,
which is not to be understood as a knife-edge present. In human experience, the present arises from
a past and spreads into the future. In a manner reminiscent of James's account of the stream of
thought, Mead argues that the present entails duration (James 1890, 237–283). It retains the
receding past and anticipates the imminent future. Yet because reality ultimately exists in the
present, Mead argues that the historical past, insofar as it is capable of being experienced, is
transformed by novel events. History is not written on an unchanging scroll. Novelty gives lie to this
way of seeing the past. By virtue of its originality, the novel event, the emergent, can not be
explained or understood in terms of prior interpretations of the past. The past, which by definition
can only exist in the present, changes to accommodate novel events.

It is idle, at least for the purposes of experience, to have recourse to a “real” past within which we
are making constant discoveries; for that past must be set over against a present within which the
emergent appears, and the past, which must then be looked at from the standpoint of the
emergent, becomes a different past. The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from
the past, but before it appears it does not, by definition, follow from the past. (PP, 2)

6. Concluding Comments on Determinism and Freedom

Mead's account of the “Me” and the generalized other has often led commentators to assume that
he is a determinist. It is certainly the case that if one were to emphasize Mead's concern with social
systems and the social development of the self, one might be led to conclude that Mead is a theorist
of the processes of socialization. And the latter, nested as they are within social systems, are beyond
the control of individuals. However, when one considers the role of the “I” and novelty in his
thinking, it becomes more difficult to view him as a determinist. But his emphasis on novelty only
seems to counter determinism with spontaneity. This counter to determinism in itself doesn't supply
a notion of autonomy—self-governance and self-determination—which is often viewed as crucial to
the modern Western notion of the subject. However, Mead was a firm booster of the scientific
method, which he viewed as an activity that was at its heart democratic. For him, science is tied to
the manner in which human beings have managed from pre-recorded times to solve problems and
transform their worlds. We have just learned to be more methodical about the ways in which we
solve problems in modern science. If one considers his discussions of science and problem solving
behavior, which entail anticipatory experience, the reflexivity of consciousness, the sharing of
perspectives and their objective reality, and the creativity of the “I,” then one begins to see how
Mead thought that our biological endowments coupled with our social skills could assist us in
shaping our own futures, as well aid us in making moral decisions. He did not work out the details of
this process, especially with regard to moral autonomy and the “I's” role in it. [3] There is, however,
little doubt that he thought autonomy possible, but the condition for its possibility depends on the
nature of the self's genesis and the type of society in which it develops.

Bibliography
Primary Sources

(Abbreviations are noted for cited primary texts.)

[MSC “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and

] Scientific Methods, IX, 1912, 401–406. Page references are to the reprinted edition in [SW]
below.

[SS] “The Social Self,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, X, 1913, 374–
380. Page references are to the reprinted edition in [SW] below.

[PP] The Philosophy of the Present, edited, with an Introduction, by Arthur E. Murphy, La Salle, IL:
Open Court, 1932.

[MSS] Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited, with an
Introduction, by Charles W. Morris, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition, edited by Charles W. Morris, annotated by
Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, edited, with an Introduction, by Merritt H.

Moore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936.

The Philosophy of the Act, edited, with an Introduction, by Charles W. Morris, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1938.

[SW] Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, ed. Andrew J. Reck, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964.

The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Works of George Herbert Mead, edited, with
an Introduction, by David L. Miller, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Essays in Social Psychology, edited, with an Introduction, by Mary Jo Deegan, New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2001.

The Philosophy of Education, eds. Gert J.J. Biesta and Daniel Troehler, Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 2011.

Secondary Sources

 Aboulafia, Mitchell, 1986, The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination, New
Haven: Yale University Press.

 ––– (ed.), 1991, Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead, Albany:
SUNY Press.
 –––, 2001, The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy, Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

 –––, 2010, Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism, Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

 –––, 2016, “George Herbert Mead and the Unity of the Self,” European Journal of
Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 8(1): 201–215; available online.

 Baldwin, John D., 2002, George Herbert Mead: A Unifying Theory for Sociology, Dubuque, IA:
Kendall Hunt.

 Blumer, Herbert, 2004, George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct, edited, with an
Introduction, by Thomas J. Morrione, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

 Burke, F. Thomas and Krzysztof P. Skowroński, eds., 2013, George Herbert Mead in the
Twenty-first Century, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

 Campbell, James, 1981, “George Herbert Mead on Intelligent Social

Reconstruction,” Symbolic Interaction, 4(2): 191–205.

 Cook, Gary A., 1993, George Herbert Mead, The Making of a Social Pragmatist, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.

 Deegan, Mary Jo, 2008, Self, War, and Society: George Herbert Mead's Macrosociology, New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

 Dewey, John, 1932, “Prefatory Remarks,” in George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the
Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy, La Salle, IL: Open Court.

 Fischer, Marilyn, 2008, “Mead and the International Mind,” Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society, 44(3): 508–531.

 Gillespie, A., 2005, “G. H. Mead: Theorist of the social act,” Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour, 35: 19–39.

 Habermas, Jürgen, 1987, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II, tr. Thomas McCarthy,
Boston: Beacon Press.

 –––, 1992, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead's Theory of

Subjectivity,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, tr. William Mark
Hohengarten, Cambridge: MIT Press, 149–204.

 Hanson, Karen, 1986, The Self Imagined: Philosophical reflections on the social character of
the psyche, New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

 Huebner, Daniel R., 2014, Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 James, William, 1890, The Principles of Psychology, Volume One, New York: Henry Holt & Co.
1890. Reprinted, New York: Dover Publications, 1950. (Reprint and the original have the
same pagination.)

 –––, 1904, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific

Methods, 1(18): 477–491. Page reference is to the reprinted edition in The Writings of
William James, ed. John J. McDermott, New York: Random House, 1968.

 –––, 1905, “The Notion of Consciousness,” Archives de Psychologie, 5(17). Page reference is

to the reprinted edition in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott, New York:
Random House, 1968. [This paper was first presented in French at the Fifth International
Congress of Psychology, Rome, April, 1905]

 Joas, Hans, 1985, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of his Thought, trs. Raymond
Meyer, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

 Martin, Jack, and Gillespie, A., 2010, “A neo-Meadian approach to human agency: Relating
the social and the psychological in the ontogenesis of perspective coordinating
persons,” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 44: 252–272.

 Martin, Jack, and Sokol, Bryan, 2011, “Generalized others and imaginary audiences: A neo-
Meadian approach to adolescent egocentrism,” New Ideas in Psychology, 29(3): 364–375.

 Martin, J., 2005, “Perspectival selves in interaction with others: Re-reading G. H. Mead's
social psychology,” The Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 35: 231–253.

 –––, 2006, “Re-interpreting internalization and agency through G. H. Mead's perspectival

realism,” Human Development, 49: 65–86.

 –––, 2007, “Interpreting and extending G. H. Mead's 'metaphysics' of selfhood and

agency,” Philosophical Psychology, 20: 441–456.

 Miller, David, 1973, George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World, Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1973. Page references are to the reprinted edition, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980.

 Natanson, Maurice, 1956, The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead, Introduction by Horace

M. Kallen, Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press.

 Pfuetze, Paul E., 1961, Self, Society, Existence: Human Nature and Dialogue in the Thought of
George Herbert Mead and Martin Buber, New York: Harper and Row, Torchbooks.

 Silva, Filipe Carreira da, 2008, Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic
Politics, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

 Stone, J. E., Carpendale, J. I. M., Sugarman, J., and Martin, J., 2012, “A Meadian account of
false belief understanding: Taking a non-mentalistic approach to infant and verbal false
belief understanding,” New Ideas in Psychology, 30: 166–178.
  Rigney, Ernest G. and Timothy C. Lundy, 2015, “From a Pragmatist's Point of View: George
Herbert Mead's Unattributed Review of Theodore Merz's A History of European Thought in
the Nineteenth Century,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 7(1):
191–203, available online.

 Rosenthal, Sandra B. and Patrick L. Bourgeois, 1991, Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a

Common Vision, Albany: SUNY Press.

 Shalin, Dmitri, 1988, “G.H. Mead and the Progressive Agenda,” American Journal of
Sociology, 93(4): 913–951.

 Waal, Cornelis de, 2001, On Mead, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

---------------------------------------------------

Afterward, read a couple of pages from these excerpts from Mind, Self, and Society by George
Herbert Mead. 

George Herbert Mead

From George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Mind, Self, and Society

Social Attitudes and the Physical World

The self is not so much a substance as a process in which the conversation of gestures has been
internalized within an organic form. This process does not exist for itself, but is simply a phase of the
whole social organization of which the individual is a part. The organization of the social act has been
imported into the organism and becomes then the mind of the individual. It still includes the
attitudes of others, but now highly organized, so that they become what we call social attitudes
rather than roles of separate individuals. This process of relating one's own organism to the others in
the interactions that are going on, in so far as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with
the conversation of the "I" and the "me," constitutes the self. [1] The value of this importation of the
conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual lies in the superior co-ordination gained
for society as a whole, and in the increased efficiency of the individual as a member of the group. It
is the difference between the process which can take place in a group of rats or ants or bees, and
that which can take place in a human community. The social process with its various implications is
actually taken up into the experience of the individual so that that which is going on takes place
more effectively, because in a certain sense it has been rehearsed in the individual. He not only plays
his part better under those conditions but he also reacts back on the organization of which he is a
part.

The very nature of this conversation of gestures requires that the attitude of the other is changed
through the attitude of the individual to the other's stimulus. In the conversation of gestures of the
lower forms the play back and forth is noticeable, since the individual not only adjusts himself to the
attitude of others, but also changes the attitudes of the others. The reaction of the individual in this
conversation of gestures is one that in some degree is continually modifying the social process itself.
It is this modification of the process which is of greatest interest in the experience of the individual.
He takes the attitude of the other toward his own stimulus, and in taking that he finds it modified in
that his response becomes a different one, and leads in turn to further changes

Fundamental attitudes are presumably those that are only changed gradually, and no one individual
can reorganize the whole society; but one is continually affecting society by his own attitude because
he does bring up the attitude of the group toward himself, responds to it, and through that response
changes the attitude of the group. This is, of course, what we are constantly doing in our
imagination, in our thought; we are utilizing our own attitude to bring about a different situation in
the community of which we are a part; we are exerting ourselves, bringing forward our own opinion,
criticizing the attitudes of others, and approving or disapproving. But we can do that only in so far as
we can call out in ourselves the response of the community; we only have ideas in so far as we are
able to take the attitude of the community and then respond to it.

Mind as the Individual Importation of the Social Process

I have been presenting the self and the mind in terms of a social process, as the importation of the
conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual organism, so that the individual organism
takes these organized attitudes of the others called out by its own attitude, in the form of its
gestures, and in reacting to that response calls out other organized attitudes in the others in the
community to which the individual belongs. This process can be characterized in a certain sense in
terms of the "I" and the "me," the "me" being that group of organized attitudes to which the
individual responds as an "I."

What I want particularly to emphasize is the temporal and logical pre-existence of the social process
to the self-conscious individual that arises in it. [2] The conversation of gestures is a part of the social
process which is going on. It is not something that the individual alone makes possible. What the
development of language, especially the significant symbol, has rendered possible is just the taking
over of this external social situation into the conduct of the individual himself. There follows from
this the enormous development which belongs to human society, the possibility of the prevision of
what is going to take place in the response of other individuals, and a preliminary adjustment to this
by the individual. These, in turn, produce a different social situation which is again reflected in what I
have termed the "me," so that the individual himself takes a different attitude.

Consider a politician or a statesman putting through some project in which he has the attitude of the
community in himself. He knows how the community reacts to this proposal. He reacts to this
expression of the community in his own experience--he feels with it. He has a set of organized
attitudes which are those of the community. His own contribution, the "I" in this case, is a project of
reorganization, a project which he brings forward to the community as it is reflected in himself. He
himself changes, of course, in so far as he brings this project forward and makes it a political issue.
There has now arisen a new social situation as a result of the project which he is presenting. The
whole procedure takes place in his own experience as well as in the general experience of the
community. He is successful to the degree that the final "me" reflects the attitude of all in the
community. What I am pointing out is that what occurs takes place not simply in his own mind, but
rather that his mind is the expression in his own conduct of this social situation, this great co-
operative community process which is going on.

I want to avoid the implication that the individual is taking something that is objective and making it
subjective. There is an actual process of living together on the part of all members of the community
which takes place by means of gestures. The gestures are certain stages in the co-operative activities
which mediate the whole process. Now, all that has taken place in the appearance of the mind is
that this process has been in some degree taken over into the conduct of the particular individual.
There is a certain symbol, such as the policeman uses when he directs traffic. That is something that
is out there. It does not become subjective when the engineer, who is engaged by the city to
examine its traffic regulations, takes the same attitude the policeman takes with reference to traffic,
and takes the attitude also of the drivers of machines. We do imply that he has the driver's
organization; he knows that stopping means slowing down, putting on the brakes. There is a definite
set of parts of his organism so trained that under certain circumstances he brings the machine to a
stop. The raising of the policeman's hand is the gesture which calls out the various acts by means of
which the machine is checked. Those various acts are in the expert's own organization; he can take
the attitude of both the policeman and the driver. Only in this sense has the social process been
made "subjective." If the expert just did it as a child does, it would be play; but if it is done for the
actual regulation of traffic, then there is the operation of what we term mind. Mind is nothing but
the importation of this external process into the conduct of the individual so as to meet the
problems that arise.

This peculiar organization arises out of a social process that is logically its antecedent. A community
within which the organism acts in such a co-operative fashion that the action of one is the stimulus
to the other to respond, and so on, is the antecedent of the peculiar type of organization we term a
mind, or a self. Take the simple family relation, where there is the male and the female and the child
which has to be cared for. Here is a process which can only go on through interactions within this
group. It cannot be said that the individuals come first and the community later, for the individuals
arise in the very process itself, just as much as the human body or any multi-cellular form is one in
which differentiated cells arise. There has to be a life-process going on in order to have the
differentiated cells; in the same way there has to be a social process going on in order that there
may be individuals. It is just as true in society as it is in the physiological situation that there could
not be the individual if there was not the process of which he is a part. Given such a social process,
there is the possibility of human intelligence when this social process, in terms of the conversation of
gestures, is taken over into the conduct of the individual--and then there arises, of course, a
different type of individual in terms of the responses now possible. There might conceivably be an
individual who simply plays as the child does, without getting into a social game; but the human
individual is possible because there is a social process in which it can function responsibly. The
attitudes are parts of the social reaction; the cries would not maintain themselves as vocal gestures
unless they did call out certain responses in the others; the attitude itself could only exist as such in
this interplay of gestures.

The mind is simply the interplay of such gestures in the form of significant symbols. We must
remember that the gesture is there only in its relationship to the response, to the attitude. One
would not have words unless there were such responses. Language would never have arisen as a set
of bare arbitrary terms which were attached to certain stimuli. Words have arisen out of a social
interrelationship. One of Gulliver's tales was of a community in which a machine was created into
which the letters of the alphabet could be mechanically fed in an endless number of combinations,
and then the members of the community gathered around to see how the letters arranged after
each rotation, on the theory that they might come in the form of an Iliad or one of Shakespeare's
plays, or some other great work. The assumption back of this would be that symbols are entirely
independent of what we term their meaning. The assumption is baseless: there cannot be symbols
unless there are responses. There would not be a call for assistance if

there was not a tendency to respond to the cry of distress. It is such significant symbols, in the sense
of a sub-set of social stimuli initiating a co-operative response, that do in a certain sense constitute
our mind, provided that not only the symbol but also the responses are in our own nature. What the
human being has succeeded in doing is in organizing the response to a certain symbol which is a part
of the social act, so that he takes the attitude of the other person who co-operates with him. It is
that which gives him a mind.

The sentinel of a herd is that member of the herd which is more sensitive to odor or sound than the
others. At the approach of danger, he starts to run earlier than the others, who then follow along, in
virtue of a herding tendency to run together. There is a social stimulus, a gesture, if you like, to
which the other forms respond. The first form gets the odor earlier and starts to run, and its starting
to run is a stimulus to the others to run also. It is all external; there is no mental process involved.
The sentinel does not regard itself as the individual who is to give a signal; it just runs at a certain
moment and so starts the others to run. But with a mind, the animal that gives the signal also takes
the attitude of the others who respond to it. He knows what his signal means. A man who calls "fire"
would be able to call out in himself the reaction he calls out in the other. In so far as the man can
take the attitude of the other--his attitude of response to fire, his sense of terror--that response to
his own cry is something that makes of his conduct a mental affair, as over against the conduct of
the others. [3] But the only thing that has happened here is that what takes place externally in the
herd has been imported into the conduct of the man. There is the same signal and the same
tendency to respond, but the man not only can give the signal but also can arouse in himself the
attitude of the terrified escape, and through calling that out he can come back upon his own
tendency to call out and can check it. He can react upon himself in taking the organized attitude of
the whole group in trying to escape from danger. There is nothing more subjective about it than that
the response to his own stimulus can be found in his own conduct, and that he can utilize the
conversation of gestures that takes place to determine his own conduct. If he can so act, he can set
up a rational control, and thus make possible a far more highly organized society than otherwise.
The process is one which does not utilize a man endowed with a consciousness where there was no
consciousness before, but rather an individual who takes over the whole social process into his own
conduct. That ability, of course, is dependent first of all on the symbol being one to which he can
respond; and so far as we know, the vocal gesture has been the condition for the development of
that type of symbol. Whether it can develop without the vocal gesture I cannot tell.

I want to be sure that we see that the content put into the mind is only a development and product
of social interaction. It is a development which is of enormous importance, and which leads to
complexities and complications of society which go almost beyond our power to trace, but originally
it is nothing but the taking over of the attitude of the other. To the extent that the animal can take
the attitude of the other and utilize that attitude for the control of his own conduct, we have what is
termed mind; and that is the only apparatus involved in the appearance of the mind.

I know of no way in which intelligence or mind could arise or could have arisen, other than through
the internalization by the individual of social processes of experience and behavior, that is, through
this internalization of the conversation of significant gestures, as made possible by the individual's
taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward what is being thought about.
And if mind or thought has arisen in this way, then there neither can be nor could have been any
mind or thought without language; and the early stages of the development of language must have
been prior to the development of mind or thought.

NOTES

1. According to this view, conscious communication develops out of unconscious communication

within the social process, conversation in terms of significant gestures out of conversation in terms
of non-significant gestures; and the development in such fashion of conscious communication is
coincident with the development of minds and selves within the social process.

2. The relation of mind and body is that lying between the organization of the self in its behavior as a
member of a rational community and the bodily organism as a physical thing.

The rational attitude which characterizes the human being is then the relationship of the whole
process in which the individual is engaged to himself as reflected in his assumption of the organized
roles of the others in stimulating himself to his response. This self as distinguished from the others
lies within the field of communication, and they lie also within this field. What may be indicated to
others or one's self and does not respond to such gestures of indication is, in the field of perception,
what we call a physical thing. The human body is, especially in its analysis, regarded as a physical
thing.

The line of demarcation between the self and the body is found, then, first of all in the social
organization of the act within which the self arises, in its contrast with the activity of the
physiological organism (MS).

The legitimate basis of distinction between mind and body is be tween the social patterns and the
patterns of the organism itself. Education must bring the two closely together. We have, as yet, no
comprehending category. This does not mean to say that there is anything logically against it; it is
merely a lack of our apparatus or knowledge (1927) .

3. Language as made up of significant symbols is what we mean by mind. The content of our minds is
(1) inner conversation, the importation of conversation from the social group to the individual (2) . . .
. imagery. Imagery should be regarded in relation to the behavior in which it functions (1931).

Imagery plays just the part in the act that hunger does in the food process (1912).

Bibliographical Notes

1. Mead's major articles can be found in: Andrew J. Reck (ed.), Selected Writings: George Herbert
Mead (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

2. The volumes were: The Philosophy of the Present (1932); Mind, Self, and Society (1934);
Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936); and The Philosophy of the Act (1938). An
excellent brief introduction to Mead's social psychology can be found in an edited abridgement of
his works: Anselm Strauss (ed.), The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1956). The major critical work dealing with Mead's position is: Maurice Natanson,
The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead (Washington, D.C. Public Affairs Press, 1956) .

3. Several varieties of Symbolic Interactionism exist today; cf., Manford Kuhn, "Major Trends in
Symbolic Interaction Theory," Sociological Quarterly, 5 (1964), 61-84; and Bernard Meltzer and John
W. Petras, "The Chicago and Iowa Schools of Symbolic Interactionism," in T. Shibutani (ed.), Human
Nature and Collective Behavior: Papers in Honor of Herbert Blumer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1970).
The best known variety of symbolic interactionism today is represented by the position of Mead's
student Herbert Blumer; cf., Herbert Blumer, "Sociological Implications of the Thought of George
Herbert Mead," American Journal of Sociology, 71 (1966), 534-544; and Herbert Blumer, Symbolic
Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

For a variety of studies done by members of this school, see: Arnold Rose (ed.), Human Behavior and
Social Processes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); J. G. Manis and B. N. Meltzer (eds.), Symbolic
Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967); and Gregory P. Stone
(ed.), Social Psychology through Symbolic Interaction (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970).
Numerous modern theoretical approaches also owe a great debt to the work of Mead, for example,
Walter Coutu, Emergent Human Nature: A New Social Psychology (New York: Knopf, 1949) .

__________________________________________________

Please discuss this reading assignment in light of the reading materials for this unit.

Reference:

Mead, G. H. (2016). Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved March 24, 2022

from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mead/

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. University of
Chicago Press. https://web.archive.org/web/20070814013629/http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/
~lridener/DSS/Mead/MINDSELF.HTML

Research Material

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

 Describe how major sociological perspectives view race and ethnicity

 Identify examples of culture of prejudice

Theoretical Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

We can examine race and ethnicity through three major sociological perspectives:
functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. As you read through these
theories, ask yourself which one makes the most sense and why.

Functionalism

Functionalism emphasizes that all the elements of society have functions that promote
solidarity and maintain order and stability in society. Hence, we can observe people from
various racial and ethnic backgrounds interacting harmoniously in a state of social balance.
Problems arise when one or more racial or ethnic groups experience inequalities and
discriminations. This creates tension and conflict resulting in temporary dysfunction of the
social system. For example, the killing of a Black man George Floyd by a White police
officer in 2020 stirred up protests demanding racial justice and changes in policing in the
United States. To restore the society’s pre-disturbed state or to seek a new equilibrium, the
police department and various parts of the system require changes and compensatory
adjustments.

Another way to apply the functionalist perspective to race and ethnicity is to discuss the way
racism can contribute positively to the functioning of society by strengthening bonds between
in-group members through the ostracism of out-group members. Consider how a community
might increase solidarity by refusing to allow outsiders access. On the other hand, Rose
(1951) suggested that dysfunctions associated with racism include the failure to take
advantage of talent in the subjugated group, and that society must divert from other purposes
the time and effort needed to maintain artificially constructed racial boundaries. Consider
how much money, time, and effort went toward maintaining separate and unequal educational
systems prior to the civil rights movement.

In the view of functionalism, racial and ethnic inequalities must have served an important
function in order to exist as long as they have. This concept, sometimes, can be problematic.
How can racism and discrimination contribute positively to society? Nash (1964) focused his
argument on the way racism is functional for the dominant group, for example, suggesting
that racism morally justifies a racially unequal society. Consider the way slave owners
justified slavery in the antebellum South, by suggesting Black people were fundamentally
inferior to White and preferred slavery to freedom.

Interactionism

For symbolic interactionists, race and ethnicity provide strong symbols as sources of identity.
In fact, some interactionists propose that the symbols of race, not race itself, are what lead to
racism. Famed Interactionist Herbert Blumer (1958) suggested that racial prejudice is formed
through interactions between members of the dominant group: Without these interactions,
individuals in the dominant group would not hold racist views. These interactions contribute
to an abstract picture of the subordinate group that allows the dominant group to support its
view of the subordinate group, and thus maintains the status quo. An example of this might
be an individual whose beliefs about a particular group are based on images conveyed in
popular media, and those are unquestionably believed because the individual has never
personally met a member of that group.

Another way to apply the interactionist perspective is to look at how people define their races
and the race of others. Some people who claim a White identity have a greater amount of skin
pigmentation than some people who claim a Black identity; how did they come to define
themselves as Black or White?

Conflict Theory

Conflict theories are often applied to inequalities of gender, social class, education, race, and
ethnicity. A conflict theory perspective of U.S. history would examine the numerous past and
current struggles between the White ruling class and racial and ethnic minorities, noting
specific conflicts that have arisen when the dominant group perceived a threat from the
minority group. In the late nineteenth century, the rising power of Black Americans after the
Civil War resulted in draconian Jim Crow laws that severely limited Black political and
social power. For example, Vivien Thomas (1910–1985), the Black surgical technician who
helped develop the groundbreaking surgical technique that saves the lives of “blue babies”
was classified as a janitor for many years, and paid as such, despite the fact that he was
conducting complicated surgical experiments. The years since the Civil War have showed a
pattern of attempted disenfranchisement, with gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts
aimed at predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Intersection Theory

Feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1990) further developed intersection theory,

originally articulated in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which suggests we cannot separate the
effects of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes (Figure 11.4). When we
examine race and how it can bring us both advantages and disadvantages, it is important to
acknowledge that the way we experience race is shaped, for example, by our gender and
class. Multiple layers of disadvantage intersect to create the way we experience race. For
example, if we want to understand prejudice, we must understand that the prejudice focused
on a White woman because of her gender is very different from the layered prejudice focused
on an Asian woman in poverty, who is affected by stereotypes related to being poor, being a
woman, and her ethnic status.

Figure 11.3 Our identities are formed by dozens of factors, sometimes represented in

intersection wheels. Consider the subset of identity elements represented here. Generally, the
outer ring contains elements that may change relatively often, while the elements in the inner
circle are often considered more permanent. (There are certainly exceptions.) How does each
contribute to who you are, and how would possible change alter your self-defined identity?

Culture of Prejudice

Culture of prejudice refers to the theory that prejudice is embedded in our culture. We grow
up surrounded by images of stereotypes and casual expressions of racism and prejudice.
Consider the casually racist imagery on grocery store shelves or the stereotypes that fill
popular movies and advertisements. It is easy to see how someone living in the Northeastern
United States, who may know no Mexican Americans personally, might gain a stereotyped
impression from such sources as Speedy Gonzalez or Taco Bell’s talking Chihuahua.
Because we are all exposed to these images and thoughts, it is impossible to know to what
extent they have influenced our thought processes.

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