Symbolic Interactionism- a framework of sociological theory- is a standpoint of understanding human behavior through the analysis of the symbolic meanings developed by individuals during social interactions. This perspective was introduced by George Herbert Mead in the 1920s, but the principles of symbolic interactions trace back to earlier assertions by Max Weber, who provided that people act according to the interpretation of the meanings they deduce from the world around them. Symbolic interactions are built on various theoretical ideas, each underlining the different ways in which meanings deduced from interactions define behaviors. Two notable theoretical ideas include the concept of ‘self’ and the concept of 'role making and role-taking.' The concept of self classifies a person either as an object or a subject to the meanings deduced from situations. It underscores the understanding that individuals behave according to what they believe but which may not always be objectively true. Role making and role-taking, on the other hand, is a presentation of human behaviors as a product of social roles. Generally, individuals make interpretations of the behaviors of the people and situations around them, and it is these interpretations that define their social bonds of interactions.
Theoretical Ideas
The Concept of Self
The capacity of human beings to exert control over their conducts- or simply to coordinate their behaviors with that of others to create complex social attitudes and social objects, is linked to a unique phenomenon of possessing a ‘self’. According to Mead’s (1934) developments, the concept of self gives primacy to the ability of individuals to view themselves either as objects or subjects in any situation.
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Mead (1934) argued that ‘self as an object’ describes the ability of a person to see their own attributes from another person’s standpoint. Viewing oneself as an object, therefore, is comparable to taking a second or third party’s perception of our own situation. It is more or less like taking a person out of a situation and letting them react to the very situation with the assumptions that the person’s needs and preferences do not matter anymore. Once individuals imagine themselves in the position of others, argues Mead (1934), they no longer react to circumstances in a manner that satisfies their views alone; rather, they try to strike a balance between what they think and what others think of them. Social behaviors that reflect empathy fall under this aspect of symbolic interactionism ( Mead, 1934) . The significance of identifying self as an object is to suffice the coordination of group activities. Group actions can be more flexible and precise if every individual could identify their role, not by relying on individual thoughts and feelings alone, but by considering alternative thoughts of what someone else thinks and feels of the same situation.
Self as a subject is the wholesomeness of a person's feelings, without paying attention to the responses of everyone else around them. The subject self is built on a person’s own beliefs and personal interpretation of a situation based on what they perceive to be true. In this case, a person will assume the role of a subject, who has the total control of a situation; wherefore, any third party involved in the circumstances where an individual has taken the role of a subject inadvertently become the objects ( Mead, 1934) .
Mead (1934) used the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘Me’ to capture the subject and object phases of self respectively. Usually, “I” connotes the immediate, spontaneous, and impulsive reaction that initiates human conduct whenever a person confronts a situation for the first time. The initial part of any conduct, regardless of the type of impulse involved, involves a ‘subject’ who is becoming aware of the surrounding environment and the objects within it. Often, the action of the ‘subject’ is directed to the ‘objects’ within this environment ( Mead, 1934) . The initial response to the environment also marks the beginning of the ‘me’ aspect of self. The recognition that the objects in the environment also have their own view about ‘me’ is what makes the ‘subject’ take themselves into account as ‘objects’. Mead (1934) emphasized that individuals constantly switch from the states of ‘I’ and ‘me’ in any ongoing conduct, and it is these alternations that enable people to have control of their behaviour in society.
‘ I’ and ‘we’ play significant roles in the regulation of conduct as elaborated in the description herein. The thought of ‘I’ suggests that there is an impulse that has stimulated a person to act. When this is followed by the thought of ‘me’, the individual becomes reflective of the situation and gets to imagine the responses that their conducts would attract. The reflection then leads the individual into imagining alternative actions that can be taken to avoid acting in a manner that would otherwise attract undesirable actions. Eventually, the back and forth alternations between the ‘I’ self and the ‘me’ self leads the person to settle on a specific line of conduct throughout the situation ( Mead, 1934) .
Role Making and Role Taking
These aspects of symbolic interactionism portray social conduct as an outcome of social roles given to people ( Blumer & Rose, 1962) . Role making captures the essence of modifying a person’s response to a situation or an external activity to reflect the person’s perceived role in society. However, Blumer and Rose (1962) emphasized that society can only provide a framework inside of which social actions take place. Blumer and Rose’s (1962) emphasis are an indication that in as much as society defines the context of an individual’s roles, it does not determine the exact action that an individual takes. This theory gives rise to the concept of role-taking.
Role taking, according to Blumer and Rose (1962) , refers to a person’s attempt to imaginatively occupy the role of another, and to look at a situation at hand from that vantage point before engaging in role making. The essence of role-taking is to let a person get a meaning to a situation from a viewpoint other than that which is afforded by his or her actual role. Role taking gives a person an alternative perspective of the norms, standards, expectations, and ideas that are shared by every member of a social group.
Evaluating Ideas
The concept of self is both advantageous and disadvantageous in society. The most basic strength of ‘self’, especially on the aspect of self as a subject, is the nurturing of assertiveness in society. Understanding the relationship between a person’s own thoughts, emotions, and subsequent actions they take enables people to develop unique self-identities. When People then get to understand that they are unique, and this eliminates the false notions that a person is usually at fault whenever their emotions and thoughts do not align to expectations in society. The uniqueness of a person’s self as a subject is what Blumer and Rose (1962) attempted to reinforce in the statement: “structural features such as culture, social groups, social stratifications, and social roles merely set conditions for the action of people, but do not determine their actions. This assertion reveals that the uniqueness of actions is determined by the uniqueness of ‘subject self’ embracing the impulse to act on the situations around them.
The second advantage of symbolic interactionism relates to the object or ‘me’ self. The ‘me’ self helps an individual to develop positive social relationships. People develop positive social relationships because the act of considering other people’s view is the first step towards developing emotions of empathy and sympathy over other people’s plight. Through this, people avoid the tendency to blindly react to whatever transpires around them without considering the likelihood that they may hurt someone else. The need to avoid harm to or from the other person is, in most cases, a key regulator of social composure. Here, the imagination that by acting impulsively, we get to harm ourselves is a sufficient signal to condition one’s actions.
On the negative, the concept of self, especially the emphasis placed on the ‘object’ self makes members of a society to behave in certain ways and possibly forcing them to please others at the expense of disregarding personal values. The ‘object’ self fails to distinguish the need to embrace the differences between people or groups of people in society. The insistence on considering alternative perspectives or looking at issues from a vantage point means that individuals are continually encouraged to overlook their own pleasures, likes, and sometimes boundaries, for fear of criticism and for the need to satisfy the opinions of those around them. According to this concept, people do not fully enjoy the privilege or right to make unique decisions for the mere fact that their interaction with society impacts wrong judgements. For instance, why would a teenage high school student go ahead and smoke tobacco despite the widespread medical evidence on the risks of doing so! The response to this could be the student’s need to cultivate a positive object self and evade the fear of negative judgement. Teenagers are not ignorant of the health hazards of smoking, but they are also trapped in the imagination that their peers or even secret lovers would think otherwise. They think that avoiding smoking is not cool, and they do not want to project a negative image that would conflict the perceptions of their peers. In this example, the need to fit into the perceptions of others about smoking overrides the student’s very own understanding of the risks of smoking.
The most significant strength of role making is in shaping people’s reality as perceived by the broader society by pre-determining an individual’s judgment before the person builds self-identity. When Blumer and Rose (1962) highlighted that human behaviors are a construct of societal roles assigned to each person, they were simply making emphasis that the social structures such as norms and culture do not dictate a person’s actions per se, rather, they put these actions within context. An example is the issue of marriage. There is a certain value that society gives to marriage, but society does not push everyone to marry, nor does it make choices for an individual. Whether an individual chooses to marry or not is not dictated by society, but society only serves to portray marriage as an acceptable norm of a people. Therefore, a person grows up with the expectation to be married, and when they come of age, they automatically feel the need to play the role of a married individual.
Another advantage of role making and role-taking is in its lack of rigidity. Societal roles assigned upon people are usually non-structured and allows individuals the freedom of choice (Blumer and Rose, 1962) . They, therefore, provide members of a society with moral responsibilities rather than having them externally motivated by the fixed norms.
One big disadvantage of all the theoretical concepts of symbolic interactionism is on losing sight of the bigger societal issues by focusing so much on the interactions at the individual levels. The extremely narrow focus of symbolic interactionism is a neglect of the macro-level of social interpretation. It, therefore, means that when one tries to understand a society on the basis of symbolic interactions alone, they may miss out on more significant issues by concentrating on issues at the individual level. It is more like concentrating too much on the trees that the observer fails to take notice of the forest. In the case of teenage smoking, for instance, the ‘me’ perspective may have failed to identify the huge role played by the media in shaping the perceptions of society about smoking as seen in advertisements or in movies and series.
Applying Ideas
On a personal level, I can relate a majority of theoretical concepts of symbolic interactionism to some of the fundamental aspects of my social experiences. One prime example that applies directly to my individual experiences is the concept of self. 'Self' is something that I was not born with. I have only acquired the view of myself as an 'object', and as a 'subject' through the feedback- both positive and negative- that have I have been receiving from the people around me since childhood. It is through these feedbacks that I developed the perception of acceptable and unacceptable qualities. Part of my self-identity has been shaped by how my parents responded to my abilities, and through this, I subconsciously became dependent on them for opinions and approval. Considering that they always wanted the best for me, I scarcely encountered discouraging feedbacks- this despite how inadequate my social competency was. However, growing up into adolescence presented a whole lot of social symbols to react to. I had gotten dependent on the outsiders’ opinions to shape my behaviors, for this case my parents, but I never received the same kindness from amongst my peers as I had been receiving from them. I remember developing a year-long stint of low self-esteem following a series of negative comments from my companions. It is something that I was not used to, but one which struck me hard considering that I gave more value to the ‘self as an object’ aspect of symbolic interactionism. Regardless, I coped and learnt how to absorb and react to various situations that stem from social interactions. Today I can look back and tell how the ability to alternate between the subject self and the object sled is essential for the social development of a person.
Currently, my profound knowledge of the various concepts of symbolic interactionism presents me with a better understanding of human behavior- both good and bad. For me, the concept of constructivism has been key in understanding and relating to people’s viewpoints or behaviors; for which reason, I have been able to withstand behaviors even from the most radical groups of groups of people without starting a scuffle. Constructivism as an extension of symbolic interactionism points that reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be ( Denzin, 2016) . In simple terms, reality is a creation of the human mind, and people attach reality to that which they are consciously aware of or have been made to believe is real. It also means that people are likely to believe that something is not real, despite the thing being real, just because they have not interacted with it or have not been made aware of its existence. Thus, individuals develop social constructs of reality based on the interactions they have with others, and if the constructs last over time, the meanings that they convey get widely agreed-upon by most within society. It is through this understanding that I have come to understand the reasons why discriminative members of society actually feel comfortable while discriminating.
Take, for instance, the sexist trend in our universities. It was one of my biggest turn off from interacting with sexist colleagues during my early days in school. This discrimination concerning gender has usually attached different powers to ‘man’ and ‘woman’, with students routinely rating the male instructors more highly than the female professors. I came to realize that this phenomenon plays out as constructivism in the sense that the students use socially constructed meanings about gender to help them determine, sometimes inaccurately, the proficiency of their instructors. Having realized this, I became a little comfortable around the sexist colleagues, something I could not do barely three years ago. Constructivism has also enabled me to understand that racial discriminations have no biological bases at all; rather, they are social constructs that can be understood through the lens of symbolic interactionism.
Conclusion
To sum up, symbolic interactionism still remains a foundation of most modern sociological theories being used to explain human interactions. Theoretical concepts such as the 'self' and 'role taking and role making' have been essential in understanding the development of human behavior through social interactions. Despite their effectiveness, each of these paradigms has merits and demerits. Therefore, one may be efficient or cost effective in examining a social element, but that it does not make the other theories wrong. Perhaps one of the biggest understanding that these concepts have given me is on the need to give society a broader view. Society can be understood at both micro-level and macro-level. However, symbolic interactionism tends to look at society through the micro-level alone- emphasizing mainly on interactions at individual level. This perspective has been criticized for rejecting micro-level events in society. I take this criticism as a lesson to try and integrate both micro and macro levels of interactions whenever I am attempting to understand human behavior.
References
Blumer, H., & Rose, A. (1962). Human behavior and social process: an interactionist approach. Human Behavior and Social Process: An Interactionist Approach .
Denzin, N. K. (2016). Symbolic interactionism. The international encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy , 1-12.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society (Vol. 111). University of Chicago Press.: Chicago.
