Symbolic Interactionism

Origins

As a theoretical perspective, SI was originally developed in the early half of the 20th century by scholars at the University of Chicago and was grounded in the study of the meanings that people assigned to the objects and actions that surrounded their everyday experiences. SI was originally conceptualized by the University of Chicago philosopher George Herbert Mead, although he never used the [Page 723]term. The perspective was first given coherence after Mead's death in 1931 by his students at Chicago, who collected and in 1934 published their notes from his social psychology courses in a book titled Mind, Self, and Society. In 1937, Herbert Blumer, one of Mead's students, coined the term symbolic interactionism and subsequently consolidated much of Mead's work into a distinct sociological perspective. Blumer's 1969 book, Symbolic Interactionism, is a collection of his own essays, which is still widely acknowledged as a primary statement on the perspective.

Mead's own preferred description for his work was social behaviorism, which he contrasted with the radical behaviorist psychology of J. B. Watson. Watson argued that “mind” was a redundant metaphysical notion and that all action could be explained in terms of responses to stimuli. Mead objected that there was an important difference in the processing of incoming stimuli by humans compared with the animals studied by behaviorist psychologists. Animals treated stimuli as signs, information about the world that directly triggered behavioral responses. Humans mostly responded to stimuli as symbols, signals that required cognitive transformation before becoming the basis of action. Thus for Mead, “mind” represented the intervening process between the perception of a stimulus and a person's response to it. Further emphasizing a social, rather than psychological, dimension for the human mind, Mead also stressed the extent to which the meaning of acts was not derived from the actor's intention. An actor would design an act in imagined anticipation of the response of its projected recipient or audience. However, the meaning of that act would only emerge from the actual response and might be further revised by the producer's subsequent self-correction. The act of speech, for example, involves organizing utterances into blocks that stand for, or symbolize, the actor's imaginative projection of a hearer's response. For these blocks to function as potentially shareable communicative symbols, they must form part of an intersubjective cultural system, of which language is a familiar and oft-cited example. This system is socially constructed and is learned through the process of socialization. Many classic interactionist studies of deviance focused at least in part on the socialization process through which individuals learn new cultural systems and thereby how to attach unconventional meanings to social objects.

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