Symbolic interactionism is about how people see the world around them and how they make sense of it. As people go about their daily lives, they constantly observe other people as well as objects and events around them. For example, they see a crowd of people protesting, they speak with someone face to face, they hear about a new event, or they are working with a coworker on a project.
The point of symbolic interactionism is that people do not observe these situations objectively. Instead, people interpret and define what they see subjectively. Rather than objectively analyzing what someone else is doing, people have certain beliefs about what that person is doing. What is important is how they give meaning to this, because it helps them determine their own behavior.
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An Example of Humans as Active Interpreters of Situations: Crime
An example of how people interpret situations is in the case of criminal behavior. Suppose that I live in a high-crime neighborhood. My friends and all of the people that I look up to commit crime. They drive fancy cars, wear expensive jewelry, and have high status. Their words, gestures, and signs are symbols, and even though crime is against the law and can have a lot of negative consequences, seeing the people around me shows me that it is a positive thing to engage in and can stand for positive things, such as high status and being looked up to. Thus, I assign a label to it, namely that committing crime is positive and that it is associated with high status. As a consequence, I may start to engage in it, too.
In other words, what we do is often not based on what is true objectively but on what we believe to be true subjectively. This implies that to a large extent, people construct their own realities. They give meaning to what they see around them and the things they do themselves. When people encounter a particular situation, they do not respond to that situation automatically. Instead, they respond indirectly: they first give meaning to what is happening based on what they believe is happening, and in turn, that determines how they respond.
Symbolic interactionism sees people as active beings who are defining their own world instead of merely responding to situations. According to George Herbert Mead, who is the philosopher considered to be the founder of symbolic interactionism, people are influenced by their social environment, but they’re not passive in this. Instead, people play an active role in giving meaning to that social environment.
At the heart of symbolic interactionist theory, therefore, is the idea that people constantly interpret social situations. This is different from, e.g., more internal perspectives that focus on how the biology of our body or the psychology of our mind determines our behavior. It is also different from more external perspectives that focus on how our culture or our society determines our behavior. Instead, symbolic interactionism emphasizes the importance of the immediate situation that we’re in and how we interpret and interact with it.
Three Central Principles of Symbolic Interactionism
Herbert Blumer, who was an American sociologist who actually coined the term “symbolic interactionism”, defined three central principles of symbolic interactionism:
- The first of these is that people behave toward other people and things based on the meanings they assign to them. For example, because of my experiences with my friends and the people in my neighborhood that I look up to, I might associate robbing someone with being cool and having high status. Thus, when I come across a situation in which I could rob someone, I decide to do it.
- The second principle is that the meanings that people ascribe to things result from social interactions. For example, one day, my mom is the victim of a robbery, and I see the other side of crime. Language and gestures are important here. I hear the way she talks about it and the gestures and signs that she uses, which show me that stealing has very negative consequences to the victims. For her, crime is not positive at all and not associated with people being cool and having high status. For her, robbery is a symbol for something else, like sadness and fear.
- The third principle is that people use interpretation to manage and change the meanings they assign to things. In this way, they make sense of their world and make decisions about their own responses to the situations they encounter. So, seeing the effect that a robbery can have on the victims, it suddenly gets a different meaning to me. Whereas before it was something that I assigned a positive meaning to, I am now confronted with the negative meaning of it. As a consequence, I may decide to stop committing robberies. Thus, people’s beliefs can change based on their interactions with the outside world. New meanings are developed and changed on a continuous basis.
Summing up, people have beliefs and assign meaning to situations, they interpret social situations, and they behave based on their beliefs and interpretations.
The Self and Identity Processes in Symbolic Interactionism: The Looking-Glass Self
One of the major themes in symbolic interactionism is the self. People are constantly reflecting on themselves. Just like people define and interpret social situations, they also define and interpret themselves and their own behavior.
A famous concept in this regard is the “looking-glass self” by American sociologist Charles Cooley. The looking-glass self proposes that the way we see ourselves depends on the way we think other people see us. In turn, this can determine how we actually behave. We try to live up to the image that we think other people have of us, which then shows in our behavior. Some have compared this to a self-fulfilling prophecy: we imagine how other people see us and then we behave and develop the way we see ourselves accordingly.
The concept of the “looking-glass self” has been around since the early 1900s, but it’s recently received new attention because of its relevance in social media. Because most social media enable users to like or post comments to other people’s posts, people are getting very real feedback on how others see themselves, and they may change their self-perception accordingly, or even change the way in which they portray themselves on social media.
Symbolic Interactionism: The Chicago School and Criticism
Symbolic interactionism is grounded historically in the famous Chicago School of Sociology and found its way into various important university departments. It has also contributed to another theory that has been very important in criminology, which is labeling theory.
However, it has also received criticism. For example, it has been argued that symbolic interactionism does not devote enough attention to the larger structural forces in society, like culture and politics. Symbolic interactionism focuses on interactions in situations, not so much on the larger scale factors that influence our lives.
Nevertheless, symbolic interactionism is a major theory in sociology and social psychology. It focuses on the active role that people play in constructing their own reality, and in that way, it helps us understand how interactions can shape people’s experiences and behavior.
Further Reading
Blumer, H. (1986). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California.
Reviews of symbolic interactionism:
Carter, M. J., & Fuller, C. (2016). Symbols, meaning, and action: The past, present, and future of symbolic interactionism. Current Sociology, 64(6), 931-961. doi: 10.1177/0011392116638396
Stryker, S. (2008). From Mead to a structural symbolic interactionism and beyond. Annu. Rev. Sociol, 34, 15-31. doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134649