SOCIAL SELF THEORY

George Herbert Mead

by Jason M. Lawan
 Biography
• George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts to a successfully
middle-class and intellectual family. Mead himself enrolled in Oberlin College in 1879 and
received his bachelor’s degree in 1883. After graduating, Mead briefly taught grade school
and worked as a surveyor for a railroad company before enrolling at Harvard in 1887 to
continue his education. At Harvard, Mead studied philosophy and psychology with the
renowned pragmatist philosopher, William James, who would greatly influence Mead’s
thought. After receiving a second bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Mead went to Germany to
study psychology under the famous psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who also greatly influenced
Mead’s later ideas about symbolic gestures, society, and the self.
• Mead never completed his Ph.D. studies, but was still hired at the University of Michigan in
1891. That same year he married Helen Castle. At Michigan, the prominent sociologist Charles
Cooley and philosopher John Dewey were two great scholars who would also greatly affect
Mead’s thinking. In 1894, Mead left Michigan for the University of Chicago, where he stayed
for over 30 years until his death.
 Biography
• Throughout his career, Mead was most concerned with theorizing how
the mind and the self-arise out of social interaction and experience. He
was a strong critic of psychological behaviorism, a highly individualistic
understanding of human behavior prominent at the time, and advocated
a social behaviorism that took human responses to social objects like
gestures, language, and other symbolic phenomena as hugely important
to understanding human thought and action in the world.
• Mead died in 1931 at the age of 68. One of the most prominent social
philosophers of his own time, Mead remains a foundational theorist of
social psychology, action, and the sociology of the self.
Social Self Theory
 Social Self Theory
• Mead's theory of the social self is based on the perspective that the
self emerges from social interactions, such as:
• observing and interacting with others
• responding to others' opinions about oneself
• and internalizing external opinions and internal feelings
about oneself

• According to Mead, the self is not there from birth, but it is

developed over time from social experiences and activities.
 Social Self Theory
• According to Mead, three activities develop the self: language, play, and games.

Preparatory or Play Stage Game Stage

Language Stage -Generalized

-Imitation -Pretend play Others

-Role Playing -Multiple Roles
Significant
Others
 Social Self Theory
• Mead defines the "me" as "a conventional, habitual individual,"
and the "I" as the "novel reply" of the individual to the
generalized other (Mind, Self and Society 197).
• ." The "me" is the internalization of roles which derive from such
symbolic processes as linguistic interaction, playing, and
gaming; whereas the "I" is a "creative response" to the
symbolized structures of the "me" (that is, to the generalized
other).
 Social Self Theory
• According to Mead, three activities develop the self: language, play, and games.

•Language develops self by allowing individuals to

respond to each other through symbols, gestures,
words, and sounds. Language conveys others'
attitudes and opinions toward a subject or the
person. Emotions, such as anger, happiness, and
confusion, are conveyed through language.
 Social Self Theory
• According to Mead, three activities develop the self: language, play, and games.

•Play develops self by allowing individuals to take on

different roles, pretend, and express expectation of
others. Play develops one's self-consciousness
through role-playing. During role-play, a person is
able to internalize the perspective of others and
develop an understanding of how others feel about
themselves and others in a variety of social
situations.
 Social Self Theory
• According to Mead, three activities develop the self: language, play, and games.

•Games develop self by allowing individuals to

understand and adhere to the rules of the
activity. Self is developed by understanding
that there are rules in which one must abide by
in order to win the game or be successful at an
activity.
Social Self Theory

I ME
Response to ME Generalized Others
 Social Self Theory
• The self and the mind is a social process of 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”.
 Social Self Theory
•Two phases (or poles) of the self:
(1) that phase which reflects the attitude of the
generalized other and

(2) that phase which responds to the attitude of

the generalized other.
 Social Self Theory
• According to George Herbert Mead’s “Mind, Self and Society”,
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.
• 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.