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Social Psychology
2
Social Psychology
Linking the Self and Society
Finding a sense of Self and of Place!
Central Contributors to Social Psychology
A Social Science of Interpretation.
Introduction
Herbert Mead
George Herbret Mead
(DOB: 1863 - DOD: 1931), He wrote over 80 articles. Half of his articles focused on reform issues: such as immigration, settlement houses, women's sufferage, labor, education, and democracy. Mead is well known for writing Mind, Self, and Society this text is dividied among four (4) domains: 1) The Self, 2) Self-Inteaction, 3) The Development of Self and, 4) Symbolic Meaning.
Herbert Blumer
Herbert Blumer
(DOB: 1900 - DOD: 1987). Blumer studied under H. Mead as a graduate student he took courses offered by Mead. Blumer would also audit Mead's class. During the last quarter of Mead teaching, at the University of Chicago, Blumer asked to continue his work, where he was able to continue Mead's work twenty-five years latter. Blumer wrote an influential book Symbolic-Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman
(DOB: 1922 - DOD: 1982). Goffman's work has been very influential within sociology, his writing influenced sociologists like Peter Blau, Randall Collins. Like Blumer, Goffman had been influenced by Herbert Mead's work. Goffman believes people are active and knowledgeable actors. Stigma offers an explanation of how deviants or stigmatized persons manage to preserve their sense of self.
Intellectual Roots
Max Weber may be considered a contributor to Symbolic-Interaction when he spoke of verstehen (interpretive understanding or subjective meaning).
Influence
Interpretive Sociology
Interpretive Sociology
"Sociology is a science which attempts the understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. In 'action' is included in all human behavior when insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it" (Weber's The Theory of Social and Economic Organization).
Georg Simmel
Human Linkages
"That people look at one another and are jealous of one another; that they exchange letters or dine together,...that gratitude for altruistic acts makes for inseparable union; that one asks another man after a certain street, and that people dress and adorn themselves for another--the whole gamut of relations that play from one person to another and that may be momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, ephemeral or grave consequence" (Simmel's Sociality).
Symbolic-Interactionism
Symbolic-Interactionism
"My scheme of treatment is first to outline the nature of symbolic-interactionism, next to identify the guiding principles of methodology in the case of empirical science, and finally to deal specifically with the methodological position of symbolic-interactionism. SI rests in the last analysis on three simple premises (Blumer, 2).
Premise #1
3 Premises
"[H]uman beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them" (2).
--Physical Objects,
--Other Human Beings,
--Institutions,
--Independence,
--Freedom,
--and so on.
Premise #2
"[M]eaning of such things is derived from, or araises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows" (ibid).
Premise #2
Premise #3
"[M]eanings are handle in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he (or she) encounters" (ibid)
Premise #3
Blumer's Warning
"The position of symbolic-interactionism, in contrast, is that the meanigs that things have for humans beings are central in their own right. To ignore the meaning of the things toward which people act is seen as falsying the behavior under study. To bypass the meaning in favor of factors alleged to produce the behavior is seen as a grievious neglect of the role of meaning in the formation of behavior" (3).
Blumer's Warning
Herbert Mead
The Development of Self
Mead believes that there are three related processes in how the self is developed.
Mead
Stage #1
3 Stages
Preplay stage:
Around the age of two, is marked, according to Mead, is marked by meaningless, imatative acts. Meaning, as defined by Mead, is the object of thought, arises in experince through the individual stimulatine himself (or herself) to take the attitude of the other in his (or her) reaction toward the object" (Mead's Mind, Self and Society).
Stage #2
Game Stage:
Stage #2
This is where two or more children or people interact with each other. This happens in complex, organized games in which the team member must anticipate all the attitudes and roles of all the other players.
Stage #3
The Generalized Other:
Stage #3
Includes the organized attitudes of the whole commuity. "The mature self arises when the generalized other is internalized so that the community exercises control over the conduct of its individuals...The structure, then, on which the self is built is the response which is common to all, for one has to be a member of a community to be a self" (ibid)