George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) developed the theory of social behaviorism to explain how social experience develops an individual’s personality.

The Self

Mead’s central concept is the self, the part of an individual’s person- ality composed of self-awareness and self-image. Mead’s genius was in seeing the self as the product of social experience.

• First, said Mead, the self is not there at birth; it develops. The self is not part of the body, and it does not exist at birth. Mead rejected the idea that personality is guided by biological drives (as Freud asserted) or biological maturation (as Piaget claimed).
• Second, the self develops only with social experience, as the individual interacts with others. Without interaction, as we see from cases of isolated children, the body grows, but no self emerges.
• Third, Mead continued, social experience is the exchange of symbols. Only people use words, a wave of the hand, or a smile to create meaning. We can train a dog using reward and punishment, but the dog attaches no meaning to its actions. Human beings, by contrast, find meaning in almost every action.
• Fourth, Mead stated that seeking meaning leads people to imagine other people’s intentions. In short, we draw conclusions from people’s actions, imagining their underlying intentions. A dog responds to what you do; a human responds to what you have in mind as you do it. You can train a dog to go to the hallway and bring back an umbrella, which is handy on a rainy day. But because the dog doesn’t understand intention, if the dog cannot find the umbrella, it is incapable of the human response: to look for a raincoat instead.
• Fifth, Mead explained that understanding intention requires imagining the situation from the other’s point of view. Using symbols, we imagine ourselves “in another person’s shoes” and see ourselves as that person does. We can therefore anticipate how others will respond to us even before we act. A simple toss of a ball requires stepping outside ourselves to imagine how another will catch our throw. All social interaction involves seeing ourselves as others see us—a process that Mead termed taking the role of the other.
• Mead’s sixth point is that by taking the role of the other, we become self- aware. Another way of saying this is that the self has two parts. One part of the self operates as the subject, being active and spontaneous. Mead called the active side of the self the “I” (the subjective form of the personal pronoun). The other part of the self works as an object, that is, the way we imagine others see us. Mead called the objective side of the self the “me” (the objective form of the personal pronoun). All social experience has both components: We initiate an action (the I-phase, or subject side, of self), and then we continue the action based on how others respond to us (the me-phase, or object side, of self).

Development of the Self

• According to Mead, the key to developing the self is learning to take the role of the other. Because of their limited social experience, infants can do this only through imitation. They mimic behavior without understanding underlying intentions, and so at this point, they have no self.
• As children learn to use language and other symbols, the self emerges in the form of play. Play involves assuming roles modeled on significant others, people, such as parents, who have special importance for socialization. Playing “mommy and daddy” is an important activity that helps young children imagine the world from a parent’s point of view.
• Gradually, children learn to take the roles of several others at once. This skill lets them move from simple play (say, playing catch) with one other to complex games (such as baseball) involving many others. By about age seven, most children have the social experience needed to engage in team sports.
• Everyday life demands that we see ourselves in terms of cultural norms as any member of our society might. Mead used the term generalized other to refer to widespread cultural norms and values we use as references in evaluating ourselves.
• As life goes on, the self continues to change along with our social experiences. But no matter how much the world shapes us, we always remain creative beings, able to react to the world around us. Thus, Mead concluded, we play a key role in our own socialization.