SOCB43H3 Lecture : George Herbert Mead.docx
Document Summary
He studied philosophy and became a teacher of sociology (social psychology). His followers created the school of thought called symbolic. It was an attempt to see how the way we think of ourselves is developed in connection with our interaction with others. The dominant school of thought of that time was behaviourism. * science restricts itself to what is observable. Behaviourism all we can observe is peoples actions and how they respond to stimuli. Mead divided an action into 4 parts: impulse a need that needs to be satisfied. There is always a dynamic relationship between you and your situation. Interaction: gestures movements of the first organism which act as specific stimuli calling for specific appropriate responses from the other organism, conversation of gestures there is a communication of interactions. This usually happens with no thought in between: significant gestures/significant symbols a gesture must have a higher level of sophistication.