Human Behavior and Social Processes

An Interactionist Approach

Arnold M. Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415177856
• eBook ISBN: 9781136276019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is Volume VI in of eighteen a series on the Sociology of Behaviour and Psychology. Originally published in 1962, this book offers the interactionist approach when looking at human behaviour and social processes. This book shows that interaction theory can provide us with a body of significant testable propositions regarding the relationship of self and society.

Part One

Theory for Social Psychology

1

A Systematic Summary of Symbolic Interaction Theory

Arnold M. Rose

University of Minnesota

Symbolic interactionist theory, which guides many of the expositions and studies presented in this volume, had its American origin around the turn of the century in the writings of C. H. Cooley, John Dewey, J. M. Baldwin, W. I. Thomas and others. Much of the theory had an independent origin in Germany in the writings of Georg Simmel and Max Weber. Its most comprehensive formulation to date is the posthumously published volume by George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934). Perhaps because of the complex and unintegrated character of these writings, and their failure to use truly operational language, the theory has not had the understanding and testing which it merits. This first chapter attempts to restate the theory in simple, systematic, and researchable form.

Because of its diversified origins, interactionist theory cannot claim complete agreement in concepts, premises, and propositions among all those who consider themselves its adherents. Thus, the author has to take responsibility for the specific formulation offered, and agree that at a few points he has made statements for which equivalents are not to be found in the writings of the leading exponents of symbolic interaction theory.

Much of existing psychological theory is grounded on assumptions about vertebrate behavior in general and has sought confirmation in research on animals other than man — whether these be the rats studied by the behaviorists or the apes studied by the Gestaltists.* The result is that we know a good deal about man’s behavior insofar as the principles governing his behavior are also applicable to other animals. When psychologists of the behaviorist and Gestaltist schools have studied man’s behavior, they have either limited their study to those aspects of man’s behavior which he shares with the other animals, or they have substituted middle-range theories in the place of large-scale theories. The frustration-aggression theory of the Yale neo-behaviorists, and the group-influence theory of the “group dynamics” Gestaltists are examples of such middle-range theories. Insofar as these excellent researches and theories can be linked up to large frameworks of theory they make no reference to man’s distinctive characteristics which make his behavior different from that of the other vertebrates.

It would seem valuable to have a social psychological framework of theory — as distinct from a general psychological theory — grounded on assumptions about man’s distinctive characteristics and on researches dealing with man himself. This would not be in opposition to the behaviorist and Gestaltist theories, but supplementary to them. Both psychoanalytic and symbolic interactionist theories seek to do this. The present essay seeks to set forth symbolic interactionist theory in a systematic fashion as grounded on man’s distinctive characteristics. The attempt is made to state the theory in terms that will fit the frame of reference of the behaviorist or Gestaltist so as to make it more; generally understandable. (It is not suggested that the theory is reducible to behaviorist or Gestaltist propositions.) Only assumptions, definitions, and general propositions are presented; specific hypotheses deduced¹ from the theory are set forth in other contributions to this book.

ASSUMPTION 1. Man lives in a symbolic environment as well as a physical environment and can be “stimulated” to act by symbols as well as by physical stimuli. A symbol is defined as a stimulus that has a learned meaning and value for people, and man’s response to a symbol is in terms of its meaning and value rather than in terms of its physical stimulation of his sense organs.² To offer a simple example: a “chair” is not merely a collection of visual, aural, and tactile stimuli, but it “means” an object on which people may sit; and if one sits on it, it will “respond” by holding him up; and it has a value for that purpose. A meaning is equivalent to a “true” dictionary definition, referring to the way in which people actually use a term in their behavior. A value is the learned attraction or repulsion they feel toward the meaning. A symbol is an incipient or telescoped act, in which the later stages — involving elements of both meaning and value — are implied in the first stage. Thus, the symbol “chair” implies the physical comfort, the opportunity to do certain things which can best be done while sitting, and other similar “outcomes” of sitting in a chair. It should be understood, as Mead points out, that “language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or the appearance of that situation or object, for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created.” (5, p. 180)

Practically all the symbols a man learns he learns through communication (interaction) with other people, and therefore most symbols can be thought of as common or shared meanings and values.³ The mutually shared character of the meanings and values of objects and acts give them “consensual validation,” to use a term of Harry Stack Sullivan (although it must be recognized that the consensus is practically never complete). “Meaning is not to be conceived as a state of consciousness,” says Mead, “ . . the response of one organism [or object] to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of that gesture, and also is in a sense responsible for the appearance or coming into being of the new object — or new content of an old object — to which the gesture refers through the outcome of the given social act in which it is an early phase.”

Man has a distinctive capacity for symbolic communication because he alone among the animals (a) has a vocal apparatus which can make a large number and wide range of different sounds, and (b) has a nervous system which can store up the meanings and values of millions of symbols. Not all symbols are words or combinations of words that are transmitted through hearing — symbols are also transmitted through sight, such as gestures, motions, objects. But for most individuals and for men as a species, sound symbols precede sight symbols. In other words, man is distinctive in having language, which is based (in the “necessary” not the “sufficient” sense of causation) on certain anatomical and physiological characteristics such as a complex brain and a vocal apparatus, and this permits him to live in a symbolic environment as well as a physical environment.

ASSUMPTION 2. Through symbols, man has the capacity to stimulate others in ways other than those in which he is himself stimulated. In using symbols, man can evoke the same meaning and value within himself that he evokes in another person but which he does not necessarily accept for himself. We may oversimplify and say that a man communicates to another in order to evoke meanings and values in the other that he “intends” to evoke.⁴ Studies indicate that communication among other animals is based on observation of the body movements or sounds of another, and invariably evokes the same body response in the observer as in the stimulator. Following Mead, we may say that man’s communication can involve role-taking — “taking the role of the other” (also called “empathy”)—as well as more spontaneous expression that happens to evoke in the other a feeling tone and body response which are present in himself. The learned symbols which require role-taking for their communication Mead called significant symbols, as distinguished from natural signs, which instinctively evoke the same body responses and feeling tones in the observer as in the original expresser. An animal expresses natural signs whether another animal is around or not, but the human individual does not express significant symbols unless another person is around to observe them (except when he wishes to designate a meaning or value to himself or to a spiritual force imagined to be present); yet both signs and symbols are means of communication.

In communication by natural signs, the communicator controls the behavior of the attender, whether by intention or not, for the body of the attender invariably responds in a specific way to the impact of stimuli on his sense organs. In communication by significant symbols, on the other hand, the communicator may influence the behavior of the attender, but he cannot control it, for the symbol communicates by its content of meaning and value for the attender. While the communicator emits the sound or the visible gesture, it is the attender who ascribes the meaning and value to the sound or sight. Thus the symbolic communication is a social process, in which the communicator and the attender both contribute to the content of the communication as it impinges on the nervous system and behavior of the attender. This is true even when the attender appears to be perfectly passive, and it does not become more true when the attender responds with a new communication directed to the original communicator.

For example, a bee that has discovered a source of honey wriggles in a kind of rhythmic dance. Other bees, observing this, tend to follow the wriggling bee to its discovery and so aid in carrying the honey to the hive, but each bee discovering a source of honey will wriggle whether other bees are around to observe it or not. The tension in the body of one animal, usually occurring in the presence of presumed danger, will transmit itself to observing animals of the same species; and we note in man also the tendency for emotion expressed in the manner or voice of one individual to be transmitted to other individuals. These are examples of natural-sign communication, and may have had the original biological function of alerting the observing individual, or otherwise preparing him to act quickly in response to dangers in the environment or to attack from the emotion-emitting individual. Communication by means of significant symbols, on the other hand, involves words or gestures intended to convey meaning from the communicator to the observer. It is not the noise of the words or the physical movement of the gesture itself which communicates, but the meaning for which the noise or physical movement stands as a symbol. Both the communicator and the observer have had to learn the meaning of the words or gestures in order to communicate symbolically, but the communication by natural signs takes place instinctively and spontaneously.

Role-taking is involved in all communication by means of significant symbols; it means that the individual communicator imagines — evokes within himself — how the recipient of his communication understands that communication.⁵ Man can take the role not only of a single “other,” but also of a “generalized other” — in which he evokes within himself simultaneously the diverse behaviors of a number of persons acting in concert in a team, a group, a society.

ASSUMPTION 3. Through communication of symbols, man can learn huge numbers of meanings and values — and hence ways of acting — from other men. Thus, it is assumed that most of the modern adult’s behavior is learned behavior, and specifically learned in symbolic communication rather than through individual trial and error, conditioning, or any other purely psychogenic process. Man’s helplessness at birth — his “need” to learn from others — as well as the relatively lengthy proportion of his life in which he is immature are biological facts which also aid this learning process. It is to be noted that this social learning process, while slow in the young infant, becomes extremely rapid. Through tests with readings or lectures using new material, it has been found that a normal, alert person can learn over a hundred new meanings within the space of an hour, and that most of this new learning can be retained for weeks without reinforcement. In most human learning involving trial and error (except for learning manual skills), it has been found that only one failure is enough to inhibit the false response, and usually one success is enough to fix the correct response — unlike trial-and-error learning among other animals, where many failures and successes are necessary to fix the new correct response.

All this is another way of saying that man can have a culture — an elaborate set of meanings and values — shared by members of a society, which guides much of his behavior.

GENERAL PROPOSITION (DEDUCTION) 1. Through the learning of a culture (and subcultures, which are the specialized cultures found in particular segments of society), men are able to predict each other’s behavior most of the time and gauge their own behavior to the predicted behavior of others. This general proposition is deduced from the previous assumptions about role-taking with common symbols, as the predictions are based on expectations for behavior implied in the common meanings and values. A society can be said to exist only when this proposition is true. In this sense and only in this sense, society is more than a collection of individuals: it is a collection of individuals with a culture, which has been learned by symbolic communication from other individuals back through time, so that the members can gauge their behavior to each other and to the society as a whole.⁶

There is thus no need to posit a “group mind” or “folk soul” to explain concerted behavior or social integration, as some psychologists (like William McDougall and Wilhelm Wundt and others) have done. There is also no need to posit a “tendency” for society to have functional integration as some sociologists and anthropologists of the functionalist school have done.

ASSUMPTION 4. The symbols — and the meanings and values to which they refer — do not occur only in isolated bits, but often in clusters, sometimes large and complex. The evocation of a lead meaning or value of a cluste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part One: Theory for Social Psychology
• Part Two: The Individual and Social Organization
• Part Three: Studies in Social Process
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects