Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

Philosopher and social psychologist

George Herbert Mead was born in Hadley, Massachusetts. In 1879, he enrolled at Oberlin College as an [Page 908]intellectually advanced sixteen-year-old student. Mead graduated from Oberlin at the age of twenty and worked for four years as a teacher, tutor, and railroad surveyor. In 1887, he returned to academic life, pursuing graduate studies in philosophy and psychology at Harvard University and the University of Berlin. Four years later, Mead was hired to teach in the philosophy department at the University of Michigan, where he befriended John Dewey (1859–1952), a prominent pragmatist philosopher, and Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), a Ph.D. student in economics. Through their friendship and regular intellectual exchanges, Mead, Dewey, and Cooley developed a common orientation to social psychology. This orientation later became known as symbolic interactionism, and Mead became recognized as its founder. He gained this recognition primarily because of the insights he shared in a social psychology graduate course he taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was hired (along with John Dewey) in 1893.

Building upon the ideas of Dewey and Cooley, Mead demonstrated how and why people's sense of selfhood is rooted in community. Mead proposed that the self emerges and becomes established through social relationships and interactions. Through these interactions, we learn to take on the role of others; that is, we learn to see and respond to ourselves as others do. In the process, we learn to see ourselves as social objects. This capacity is the essence of selfhood. Most important, Mead pointed out that as young children we develop and refine our role-taking abilities through participating in play and games. As we take part in more complex forms of play, such as organized games, we learn to adopt a variety of perspectives and to formulate our actions in relation to those perspectives. We begin to see and respond to ourselves through the eyes of a group or community. In essence, we learn to take the role (or the perspective) of the “generalized other.” According to Mead, the generalized other refers to the perspectives and expectations of a broader network of others, or of the community as a whole. When assuming this perspective, we respond to ourselves from the vantage point of the community and its shared standards. The outlooks and standards of the community thus become our own; that is, they become incorporated into our identities and our concepts of ourselves.

In addition to revealing how the self emerges and gets linked to the community through the process of role taking, Mead explained how and why our experiences of community were likely to change in the future. Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Mead was optimistic about the possibilities for community in the modern world. He proposed that growing world ties in politics, religion, and finance would bring us closer to other peoples than before, resulting in greater international-mindedness and the development of selves connected to broader, global networks. Mead suggested, then, that the increased interdependence of the world would encourage us to take the role of the generalized other on an international scale and to recognize the common interests we share with other members of the world community. Yet Mead realized that this global form of role taking and consciousness would not simply emerge on its own. To foster it, he recognized the need to provide all citizens with an education in critical thinking, democracy, and international points of view.

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