Essays on Social Psychology

George Mead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351325509
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) is a central, founding figure of modern sociology, comparable to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Mead's early work, prior to his posthumous publications that appeared after 1932, is believed to be a series of articles contemporary scholarship defines as disconnected. A previously unknown, never published set of galleys for a book of essays by Mead, written between 1892 and 1910, unites these articles into a logical perspective. Essays on Social Psychology, Mead's "first" book, clearly locates him within a significantly different tradition and network than documented in his posthumous volumes. The discovery of this work is a major scholarly event. Instead of being abstract and unemotional, as some scholars argue, Mead's early scholarship focused on the significance of emotions, instincts, and childhood as well as political issues underlying political problems in Chicago. During these early years, he was involved with the emerging Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago which was then the center of progressive education. These early topics, interpretations, and scholarly networks are dramatically different in these writings from those of Mead as a mature scholar. They demonstrate that he was clearly making a transition from psychology to social psychology at a time when the latter was in its infancy. Mary Jo Deegan, a world-renowned Meadian scholar, has comprehensively edited this volume, footnoting now obscure references and authors. Her introduction explains how this previously lost manuscript affects contemporary Meadian scholarship and how it reflects the city and times in which he lived. Unlike the posthumous volumes, assembled from lecture notes, Essays in Social Psychology is the only book actually written by Mead and challenges most current scholarship on him. The selections are highly readable, surprisingly timely yet historically significant. Psychologists, sociologists, and educators will find it immensely important. George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) taught at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1931. His posthumous volumes are The Philosophy of the Present, Mind, Self, and Society, and The Philosophy of the Act. Mary Jo Deegan is professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is the author of Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918, named by Choice as among the outstanding academic books of 1989.

Part I

The Biologic Individual

1

The Social Character of Instinct¹

The primitive instincts of the human animal are practically all social. It is at best a difficult task to isolate and define human instincts, but whatever group one gathers together is bound to refer to conduct that is determined by the movements of other individuals whose conduct is like our own. In fact, the earlier history of the race and the history of childhood shows us that primitive consciousness even of the physical world is social, and only becomes a physical consciousness with the growing powers of reflection.

A recently published list of human instincts, that of William McDougall [1908] in his Introduction to Social Psychology, enumerates flight, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity, subjection, self-assertion, the parental instinct, that of reproduction, the gregarious instinct, and the instincts of acquisition, and construction. If the objects of instinctive flight and curiosity were defined, their predominantly social character would be evident. Excepting the questionable instincts of acquisition and construction, we find the instinctive conduct here presented taking place within a social environment. This conduct might be more sharply defined as that which is mediated by the movements of other individuals, to which our own movements are instinctively adjusted, though this definition does not necessarily imply the presentation of such individuals as objects. This is, as has already been suggested, the type of conduct which earliest appears in the infancy of the form or the race. The earliest adjustments of the child are to the movements of the mother, and for primitive people the changes of the whole surrounding world are socially interpreted before they can be scientifically determined. And yet psychologists, such as [James Mark] Baldwin [1897],² have suggested that the child early distinguishes the social object from the physical by its unreliability.

Within this field of social consciousness arise gradually objects—social objects, the selves, the me, and the others. I wish to discuss for a few moments the process by which these objects arise. That these instinctive social processes are intimately connected with the emotions, that many of the so-called expressions of the emotions are vestiges or early stages of instinctive reactions, has been recognized in all psychological treatment of the emotions and the instincts, but, so far as I know, the function which these expressions of the emotions may have in the process of mediating social conduct and then in forming the objects within social consciousness has not been adequately studied.

I will assume the point of view given in Dewey’s [1894, 1895a, b] articles on the emotions, in the first and second volumes of the Psychological Review—or rather the still more admirable and succinct statement of this position in [James Rowland] Angell’s Psychology [e.g., 1907].³ The so-called expressions of the emotions are physiologically traced either to the valuable instinctive activities themselves or to evidences of preparation on the part of the system, through blood-flow, the rhythm of breathing, and like organic changes, for such instinctive processes. This theory assumes that such a physiological explanation could be offered for all the expressions of the emotions, and that [Charles] Darwin’s [1872] own position could be rendered more consistently Darwinian than the form in which he left it. It assumes further that emotional situations which are responsible for the so-called expressions of the emotions imply some break—some barrier to action—and that this break or inhibition of immediate overt action is due to the conflict of impulses mediated by the same situation. At this point the interpretation of the James-Lange [Lange and James, 1967/c. 1922]⁴ theory of the emotions demands that we account for the emotional consciousness by the stimulation of those expressions of the emotions, the preparation for the act and the earlier stages of the act itself. These physiological processes themselves produce the emotion—or rather the emotion is the feel of these physiological processes. Over against this bald statement Dewey and Angell insist that in the process of recognizing and building up of the object as fearful, for example, our consciousness of the physiological processes are essential. A cold-blooded attitude would never lead to the presentation of an object of emotion. Our own physiological condition is, then, evidence to us of how fearful the object is. Thus, at least to the individual who experiencing the emotion, this theory recognizes that the so-called expressions of the emotions are valuable functionally, even when they may be vestiges of acts no longer executed. But this revelation of the emotional nature of the situation to the subject himself is not the only mediating function which these expressions of the emotions may perform. As already indicated, they are all of them early stages in the act or evidences of organic preparations for instinctive acts. As evidences of an on-going act, they are of the highest value as the very cues to which other individuals in the group respond.

We have already defined social conduct as that in which the acts are adjusted to the movements of others. Perfection of adjustment implies response to the earliest indications of the overt act. Just as the fencer reads in the eye of his opponent the coming thrust and is ready with the parry before the thrust is made, so we are continually reading from the attitude, the facial expressions, the gestures, and the tones of the voice the coming actions of those with reference to whom we must act. Such beginnings of acts, and organic preparations for action, which have been called expressions of emotion, are just the cues which have been selected and preserved as the means of mediating social conduct. Before conscious communication by symbols arises in gestures, signs, and articulate sounds, there exists in these earliest stages of acts and their physiological fringes the means of co-ordinating social conduct, the means of unconscious communication. And conscious communication has made use of these very expressions of the emotion to build up its signs. They were already signs. They had been already naturally selected and preserved as signs in unreflective social conduct before they were specialized as symbols.

To recur to the situation out of which the emotion arises, we find it one in which inhibition through conflicting impulses makes readjustment necessary. The situation is a social situation. Its readjustment will be a social readjustment. The first objects that must be presented are social objects. What will be the material out of which these social objects will be constructed? As our physical objects later come to be built up out of sensuous stuff, and fundamentally out of the sensuous experiences of contact, so must we not assume that the stuff out of which selves are constructed is emotional consciousness?

In the first place, the emotional consciousness belongs at the beginning of the reflective process. It comes before the possibility of thought or of reflective action. It arises immediately upon the inhibition of the act. It is the earliest stuff out of which objects can be built in the history of presentative consciousness, and this earliest instinctive consciousness is primarily social. The first objects that must be presented are then social objects. The first adjustments and readjustments must be made to social stimulations, and these social stimulations must be first constructed into social objects. Secondly, introspection reveals that our thoughts and our volitions are referred to selves whose content is affective. Thought and volition develop and interpret the situation that is first of all emotional. It is the emotion that is most particular, most definitely referred to, or rather made a part of the individual self and the other selves. Thought and action demand universality for their own validity. To generalize and universalize the emotion deprives it of the very content which enables it to function.

It is, then, further through these cues of social conduct, these socalled expressions of the emotions, that the social objects are first differentiated. These were the instinctive means of organizing social conduct. The earliest readjustments had to be in terms of those stimulations. We find them in our experience in the value which human faces and attitudes and facial expressions have for us, when the individuals are complete strangers, when we would be unable to define intellectually one of the values to which we instinctively respond. We go to strange cities and move about among unknown men without perhaps presenting to ourselves the ideas of one of them, and yet successfully recognize and respond to each attitude and gesture which our passing intercourse involves. There is in all of us a fund of unexplored social organization which enables us to act more surely in a social environment than in the physical. This content of consciousness is one of feeling. It is not sensuous. What we see in the faces and attitudes of others is not the face or the body. It is the indication of certain sorts of conduct, and the evidence of the feeling that conduct involves. We see the coming acts and feel the values which express themselves in those actions.

We feel, first of all, to be sure, the tendency to respond to the social stimulus and the emotional content that accompanies it, when momentarily checked. The presentation of the social stimulus to this response follows, first of all, in terms of the response itself. It is the organization of the response or the various responses that determines the construction of the object—the social stimulus. The social object is then constructed out of this emotional material which accompanies the inhibited social impulses in their earlier phases. It follows from this that the self loses its peculiar content when intellectualized. The average man, the economic man, the man in the street are not selves in the meaning of our social consciousness. These selves have the same immediacy as the “me.” They are made out of the same stuff.

The distinction between the me and the alteri is given in the nature of the instinct. In the instinct of pugnacity the object is a hateful one, i.e., the content of the emotion arising from the checking of the hostile impulse. The primitively hateful individual is the one who, at least for the moment, successfully checks the instinct to attack. Just what that content will be depends upon the ground of the inhibition. If indications of superior prowess check the attack, the content of the alter is the objectified emotional content of one’s impulse to escape from certain indications of dangerous action surcharged with that emotional content which answers to the inhibited pugnacity, i.e., anger built around the indications of prowess and vulnerability, and the me is the consciousness of the inhibited efforts both to escape and attack in terms of the same emotional contents. The alter in this social consciousness is quite as immediate as the me. There is no projection nor ejection of subjectivity from the self into the other. It is only a secondary process which leads to the projection of oneself into the other, putting oneself in his place. The object self of the protective instinct is the objectified group of social indications of the action of the child or the helpless member of the family or larger group, placed for the moment at least beyond our fostering care and surcharged with the tender emotion. A detailed analysis is, of course, in place here that must be postponed.

To sum up. We find a great group of primitive instincts which are social in the sense that the responses arise in answer to indications of various movements in other individuals of the group. That these indications are all the early stages in activities which when checked give rise to emotional experiences, in the individual, and answering responses in other members of the group. Their importance as indications of socially important conduct is vital, and has led to their selection and preservation and final development into the language of signs and articulate speech. Furthermore, the earliest stage in the reflective process, the earliest objectification in the child and the race, has been among theses social instincts, and here the objectification has been mediated by those early stages in the act which inevitably give rise to emotion, so that the content of the object is and must be emotional, and that these indications of the on-going act have both the function of stimulating the social response and indicating the import of the act to the individual and the socii [other selves]. I would convert the proposition and insist that all objects whose content is emotional are selves—social objects—for which position the psychology of art, the theory of Einfühlung [feeling], would afford abundant illustration.

2

Social Psychology as Counterpartto Physiological Psychology¹

There is the widest divergence among psychologists as to the nature of Social Psychology. The most recent text-book under this title—the Social Psychology [1908, l]² of Professor [E.A.] Ross—opens with this sentence: “Social Psychology, as the writer conceives it, studies the psychic planes and currents that come into existence among men in consequence of their association” That is, it must confine itself to the “uniformities in feeling, belief, or volition—and hence in action—which are due to the interaction of human beings” (ibid.). Here we find a certain field of human experience cut off from the rest, because men and women influence each other within that field. There result certain uniformities from this interaction and this makes the subject-matter of the science of social psychology. In the same manner one might investigate the psychology of mountain tribes because they are subject to the influence of high altitudes and rugged landscape. Sociality is for Professor Ross no fundamental feature of human consciousness, no determining form of its structure.

In the Introduction to Social Psychology of [William] McDougall [1908],³ which appeared but a few months before the treatise we have just mentioned, human consciousness is conceived of as determined by social instincts, whose study reveals sociality not as the result of interaction but as the medium within which intelligence and human emotion must arise.

If we turn to standard treatises on psychology, we find the social aspect of human consciousness dealt with in very varying fashion. [Josiah] Royce, both in his psychology and in the volume, Studies in Good and Evil [1898], makes out of the consciousness of oneself over against other selves the source of all reflection. Thought, according to Professor Royce, in its dependence upon symbolic means of expression, has arisen out of intercourse, and presupposes, not only in the forms of language, but in the meanings of language, social consciousness. Only through imitation and opposition to others could one’s own conduct and expression gain any meaning for one’s self, not to speak of the interpretation of the conduct of others through one’s own imitative responses to their acts. Here we stand upon the familiar ground of Professor [James Mark] Baldwin’s [1895, 1897] studies of social consciousness. The ego [the self] and the socius [the self of the other] are inseparable, and the medium of alternative differentiation and identification is imitation. But from the point of view of their psychological treatises we feel that these writers have said too much or too little of the form of sociality. If we turn to the structural psychologists, we find the social aspect of consciousness appearing only as one of the results of certain features of our affective nature and its bodily organism. The self arises in the individual consciousness through apperceptive⁴ organization and enters into relation with other selves to whom it is adapted by organic structure. In Professor [William] James’s [1890, vol. 1, chapter 10] treatise the self is brilliantly dealt with in a chapter by itself. Within that chapter we see that, as a self, it is completely knit into a social consciousness, that the diameter of the self waxes and wanes with the field of social activity, but what the value of this nature of the self is for the cognitive and emotional phases of consciousness we do not discover. In the genetic treatment given by Professor [James Rowland] Angell [1907], the last chapter deals with the self. Here, indeed, we feel the form of sociality is the culmination, and the treatment of attention, of the impulses, and the emotions, and finally of volition involves so definite in a social organization of consciousness, that in the light of the last chapter, the reader feels that a rereading would give a new meaning to what has gone before. If we except Professor [Charles H.] Cooley,⁵ in his Human Nature and the Social Order [1902], and his Social Organization [1909] the sociologists have no adequate social psychology with which to interpret their own science. The modern sociologists neither abjure psychology with [Auguste] Comte [1853], nor determine what the value of the social character, of human consciousness is for the psychology which they attempt to use.

To repeat the points of view we have noted, some see in social consciousness nothing but uniformities in conduct and feeling that result from the interaction of men and women, others recognize a consciousness that is organized through social instincts, others still find in the medium of communication and the thought that depends upon it a social origin for reflective consciousness itself, still others find the social aspect of human nature to be only the product of an already organized intelligence responding to certain social impulses, while others find that an organized intelligence in the form of a self could arise only over against other selves that must exist in consciousness as immediately as the subject self, still others are content to recognize necessary social conditions in the genesis of volition and the self that expresses itself in volition.

Now it is evident that we cannot take both positions. We cannot assume that the self is both a product and a presupposition of human consciousness, that reflection has arisen through social consciousness, and that social intercourse has arisen because human individuals had ideas and meanings to express.

I desire to call attention to the implications for psychology of the positions defended by McDougall, by Royce and Baldwin respectively, if they are consistently maintained. The positions I have in mind are the following: that human nature is endowed with and organized by social instincts and impulses; that the consciousness of meaning has arisen through social intercommunication; and finally that the ego, the self, that is implied in every act, in every volition, with reference to which our primary judgments of valuation are made, must exist in a social consciousness within which the socii, the other selves, are as immediately given as is the subject self.

[William] McDougall [1908] lists eleven human instincts: flight, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity, subjection, self-display, the parental instinct, the instinct of reproduction, the gregarious instinct, the instinct of acquisition, and the instinct of construction. Six of these are social, without question: pugnacity, subjection, self-display, the parental instinct, the instinct of reproduction, and the gregarious instinct. These would probably be the instincts most widely accepted by those who are willing to accept human instincts at all. Four of the others, repulsion, curiosity, acquisition, and construction, would be questionable, or conceivably to be resolved into other instincts. The fact is that McDougall has his doctrine of instincts so essentially bound up with a doctrine of emotions a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: George Herbert Mead’s First Book
• Part I: The Biologic Individual
• Part II: The Beginning of the Social Act
• Part III: Education from the Kindergarten to the University
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index