Interactionism

Conceptual Overview

Current application of interactionist thinking is consistent with the science of complexity and the phenomena of emergence. The historical antecedents of interactionism encompass the major threads in Western thought up to and including Georg Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Charles Darwin. Interactionism has its roots in both pragmatism and activity theory. These schools, born respectively in the United States and Europe and Russia, explored the new landscape that post-Darwinian thought opened up in the social sciences. The most significant contributor to the body of ideas making up what is now called interactionism is George Herbert Mead.

Mead's work outlined the fundamentally reciprocal and interactive nature of human behavior and emergent human consciousness—enacting both gestures and responses toward the environment as a whole. His work on the development of the self (and consciousness) through and by language stands as the definitive theoretical foundation for interactionism. However the work of John Dewey and William James can also be interpreted through an interactionist lens. In Dewey's case, the work is indexed under the rubric of the “transactional.” It is unfortunate that Dewey defined transactional in opposition to interactional; however, a close reading of Dewey's work reveals substantive ties with Mead. The similarities of the work of William James are noted in his general explication of radical empiricism.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

Mead's work was a significant effort to link the evolution of biological forms with behavior in general. Specifically Mead argued that all forms exist in a social context that gives birth to individuality, specialization of function, and eventually, for humans, consciousness and selfhood. The processes of linked and coordinated behaviors in a social context define the core ideas of interactionism. Mead's early development of ideas associated with what is now called complexity is remarkable. Mead analyzed the emergent behaviors of ants, bees, and flocks of birds in his effort to make sense of human behavior, sociality, and language. His work anticipated the formal study of emergent behavior, self-organization, and complex adaptive systems.

Underlying the ideas of interactionism is the gesture-and-response cycle. The movement of the organism in the environment is considered the basis for the gesture. The intrinsic responsiveness of the environment to this movement is the basis for the fundamental response. Ecological psychology terms this interactive relationship the affordance and sees this phenomenon as central to the behavior of all organisms. Mead's particular interest was in how the universal gesture and response cycles of biological organisms evolved into significant symbols (language) and stable social acts. A significant element of Mead's thought involved taking into account the [Page 697]recursive nature of human development in the context of a preexisting social system. While individuals are partially formed by their social environment they, in turn, partially form it. This idea of the output of a process being part of the input to the same process (thought at a different time) is one of the central ideas of interactionism and, of course, a central tenet of nonlinear functions and dynamical systems of all kinds.

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