Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract

Symbolic interactionism is a type of social theory that explains how the self and social reality emerge from the meanings people build, interpret, and negotiate in everyday interaction. Rooted in the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley and named by Herbert Blumer, it holds that people act toward things according to what those things mean to them, that meaning arises in interaction, and that meaning is reworked through interpretation. Its structural descendant, identity theory, recast the self as a hierarchy of role identities ordered by salience and anchored by commitment, while identity control theory modelled identity as a feedback loop that keeps perceived meanings matched to an internal standard. Three demonstrations trace a self converging on reflected appraisal, salience governing which identity is enacted, and a control system correcting a disturbance.

Keywords: symbolic interactionism, identity theory, the self

Symbolic interactionism is the tradition in social theory that treats meaning, rather than instinct or external structure, as the raw material of social life. Its central wager is that a human being becomes a self only by learning to see itself through the responses of others, and that social order is not imposed from above but assembled, moment by moment, out of the interpretations people place on one another's acts. The perspective began as a philosophical account of mind and grew into a working research programme with formal models, measurement instruments, and a continuing empirical literature (Blumer, 1969; Carter & Fuller, 2016). It remains one of the three major theoretical frameworks in sociological social psychology and the one most concerned with how meaning mediates between the person and the group (Stryker, 2008).

## What Symbolic Interactionism Is

Symbolic interactionism is the framework that explains social conduct by the meanings actors assign to objects, people, and situations, and treats those meanings as products of interaction rather than as fixed properties of the world. It stands apart from frameworks that explain behaviour by drives, reinforcement schedules, or macro-structures: for the interactionist the decisive variable is interpretation, the active work by which a person reads a situation and constructs a line of action. Because meaning is the currency, the same physical act can be many different social acts depending on how it is defined, and the definition of the situation — the interpretation participants arrive at — becomes as consequential as any objective fact about it. The point was crystallised in what came to be called the Thomas theorem: if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, so the meanings actors impute to a situation shape its outcome regardless of any observer's view of the facts (Thomas & Thomas, 1928).

The tradition is deliberately open-textured. Blumer contrasted the sensitizing concept, which points a researcher toward what to look for while leaving its content to be filled in by the case at hand, with the definitive concepts of variable-driven science, and argued that a science of interpreted conduct needs the former (Blumer, 1969). That methodological stance made the perspective hospitable to ethnography and close observation, and it is why symbolic interactionism has exerted a lasting influence on qualitative and mixed-methods research even where the label itself is not invoked (Carter & Montes Alvarado, 2019).

## The Three Premises

Blumer distilled the tradition he inherited from Mead into three premises, and they remain the most compact statement of what the perspective claims. Table 1 sets them out with the working consequence each carries for how social behaviour is explained. The premises are cumulative: the first locates the cause of action in meaning, the second denies that meaning is intrinsic and traces it to interaction, and the third insists that meaning is not merely applied but continuously handled and revised through an interpretive process (Blumer, 1969).

## The Social Genesis of the Self

The philosophical core of the tradition is Mead's account of how mind and self arise within, not prior to, the social process. A child becomes a self by role-taking — imaginatively adopting the attitude of another toward its own conduct — and so learns to become an object to itself, the defining feature Mead assigned to selfhood. As role-taking widens from single others to the organised attitudes of the whole community, the child internalises what Mead called the generalized other, an internal representation of shared expectations that lets it regulate conduct even when no particular onlooker is present (Mead, 1934). Charles Horton Cooley had already captured the interpersonal mechanism in the image of the looking-glass self: a person imagines how they appear to another, imagines that other's judgement of the appearance, and feels a self-feeling such as pride or mortification in response. On this account the self is literally reflected back from the social mirror, and each person's imagined reflected appraisal — the estimate of how one is seen — becomes an input to their self-concept (Cooley, 1902).

The demonstration below turns Cooley's image into an updating rule. A self-appraisal is nudged, round after round, toward the reflected appraisal a person imagines others hold, at a rate set by how sensitive they are to that imagined judgement.

Erving Goffman gave the interactionist self its most vivid empirical form. His dramaturgy treats social life as a theatre in which people stage performances for audiences, engaging in impression management — the selective control of the cues they give off — to sustain a workable definition of who they are in a setting. The self, in this analysis, is less a possession carried into interaction than an effect produced by it, dependent on the tact and cooperation of others to hold together (Goffman, 1959). The interactionist claim that reality itself is assembled through interaction was generalised beyond the self by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, whose account of the social construction of reality argued that the world people treat as objectively given is produced and maintained through habitualised, institutionalised practices and then transmitted to newcomers as simply the way things are (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

## From Interaction to Structure: Identity Theory

Mead's insight that the self is social was powerful but hard to test, and a second generation set out to give it a structural, measurable form. Sheldon Stryker's identity theory — the core of what became known as the Indiana school of structural symbolic interactionism — recast the self as a collection of internalised role identities rather than a single undivided entity. Each identity is a set of meanings attached to a position in the social structure, and the identities are organised into a hierarchy of identity salience, defined as the readiness with which a given identity is invoked across situations. Salience, in turn, is driven by commitment: the extent to which a person's important relationships depend on being a particular kind of person. The more one's social ties presuppose an identity, the higher its salience, and the more likely it is to be enacted when a situation leaves room for choice (Stryker, 2008; Serpe & Stryker, 2011).

The framework earned its standing empirically. Burke and Reitzes showed that the link between an identity and role performance runs through the meanings the identity carries, so that behaviour follows commitment to an identity rather than mere occupancy of a role (Burke & Reitzes, 1981). Reviews of the field came to treat identity as having several distinct faces — the role-based identities of structural interactionism, the group-based identities of social identity theory, and person-based identities — that a mature theory must integrate rather than conflate (Owens et al., 2010). The demonstration below makes the salience hierarchy concrete: adjusting the commitment behind each of several identities reweights their salience and, with it, the probability that each is the one enacted.

## Identity Control Theory

Where Stryker asked which identity a person will enact, Peter Burke and Jan Stets asked what an identity does once activated, and answered with a cybernetic model. In identity control theory an identity is a control system with four parts: an identity standard, the set of self-meanings that define who one is in a role; a perceptual input, the meanings one perceives about oneself in the situation, including reflected appraisals from others; a comparator that registers any discrepancy between the two; and behavioural output that works to reduce the discrepancy. When a disturbance pushes perceived meanings away from the standard, the person adjusts conduct to bring perceptions back into line — behaviour is, in effect, a means of controlling perceptions rather than an end in itself (Stryker & Burke, 2000).

The model made emotion and self-esteem endogenous to the self-process. A sustained match between perception and standard yields positive feeling and reinforces the identity, while a persistent mismatch generates distress and pressure to change either the situation or, more slowly, the standard; from this Cast and Burke built an identity-based theory of self-esteem in which esteem is both a resource for and a product of successful identity verification (Cast & Burke, 2002). Extending the same machinery to moral conduct, Stets and Carter treated the moral self as an identity whose standard, when violated, produces guilt and shame that motivate repair, grounding a sociology of morality in the identity process (Stets & Carter, 2012). The demonstration below runs the loop: a disturbance knocks the perceived meaning away from the standard, and the control output drives it back.

Figure 1

The Identity Control Loop

## Worked Example

Identity salience can be made concrete as a simple share, which is what the second demonstration computes. Suppose a person holds three role identities with differing degrees of commitment, measured on a common scale by how far their valued relationships depend on each identity. Let the commitments be 8 for a parent identity, 5 for a professional identity, and 2 for an athlete identity. Salience is the normalised share of total commitment, so with a total of 8 + 5 + 2 = 15 the salience of the parent identity is 8 / 15 = 0.533, the professional identity 5 / 15 = 0.333, and the athlete identity 2 / 15 = 0.133. When a situation permits more than one identity to be enacted and imposes no external constraint, the probability that each is the one invoked is proportional to its salience, so the parent identity is enacted just over half the time and the athlete identity roughly one time in eight.

The ordering is not fixed. Suppose the person takes up serious amateur competition and their athletic commitment rises from 2 to 6, lifting the total to 8 + 5 + 6 = 19. The salience of the athlete identity becomes 6 / 19 = 0.316, the professional identity falls to 5 / 19 = 0.263, and the parent identity, though its own commitment is unchanged, falls in relative terms to 8 / 19 = 0.421. A rise in commitment to one identity has reordered the hierarchy and made the athlete identity more likely to be enacted than the professional one, without anyone deciding to care less about work. The magnitudes are illustrative of the mechanism, not measurements of any individual, but they capture Stryker's central claim precisely: commitment drives salience, and salience governs enactment (Stryker, 2008).

## Discussion

The trajectory of symbolic interactionism is a case study in how a humanistic perspective can be formalised without being emptied. Blumer's insistence on interpretation and sensitizing concepts once made the tradition look, to its critics, unfit for cumulative science; identity theory answered that charge by specifying commitment, salience, and verification as measurable quantities linked by testable propositions, while keeping meaning at the centre (Stryker & Burke, 2000). The two wings of the tradition — the interpretive, ethnographic Chicago style and the structural, quantitative Indiana style — are best read not as rivals but as complementary treatments of the same core claim that the self is social and meaning is negotiated (Serpe et al., 2020).

The perspective's reputation has recovered accordingly. Gary Alan Fine's much-cited assessment described a tradition that had been prematurely written off, only to see its concepts quietly absorbed into the mainstream of sociology and social psychology — a demise that never came, followed by a diffusion so thorough that the influence outran the label (Fine, 1993). David Snow argued that Blumer's programme, read generously, rests on a small set of orienting principles — interactive determination, symbolisation, emergence, and human agency — broad enough to organise a great deal of contemporary work well beyond its original boundaries (Snow, 2001). What the tradition still lacks is a full reconciliation of its role-based, group-based, and person-based accounts of identity, which continue to develop on partly separate tracks (Owens et al., 2010).

## Current Directions

Recent work has extended the identity process into new substantive domains and tightened its measurement. The sociology of morality has become a proving ground: treating the moral self as a verifiable identity has let researchers predict when moral violation produces guilt and corrective action, moving moral behaviour from a matter of disposition to a matter of identity control (Stets & Carter, 2012). Identity control theory has also been connected to concepts once thought external to it, as in work showing that role-specific self-efficacy is both a precedent and a product of successful identity verification, so that competence beliefs and identity processes reinforce one another over time (Brenner et al., 2018).

A synthetic literature has also taken stock of the tradition as a whole. A comprehensive review traced the past, present, and likely future of symbolic interactionism, documenting its persistence as a living framework and its spread into studies of emotion, social movements, and mediated interaction (Carter & Fuller, 2016). Methodologically, interactionist commitments continue to shape qualitative inquiry across the health and social sciences, where attention to meaning-making and the definition of the situation is treated as a design principle rather than a slogan (Carter & Montes Alvarado, 2019). The through-line of these developments is a move from broad orientation toward specified, testable mechanism — the same maturation that identity theory began, now carried into morality, emotion, and method.

Common Misconceptions

Symbolic interactionism is purely qualitative and cannot be tested.

Its structural wing, identity theory, is thoroughly quantitative: commitment, identity salience, and identity verification are operationalised and used to predict role performance and emotion in survey and experimental designs (Burke & Reitzes, 1981; Stryker & Burke, 2000). The interpretive and the measurement traditions coexist within the perspective.

It denies that social structure matters.

Structural symbolic interactionism was built precisely to connect the self to social structure, treating role identities as internalised positions and commitment as the structural anchor of salience (Serpe et al., 2020). Structure enters the theory through the pattern of relationships in which identities are embedded, not as a rival to it.

The perspective faded after its mid-century heyday.

Reports of its decline were premature; its concepts diffused so widely into mainstream sociology and social psychology that the influence became hard to see under the original name (Fine, 1993). It remains an active research programme with a current synthetic literature (Carter & Fuller, 2016).

Glossary

Commitment.

In identity theory, the extent to which a person's valued relationships depend on holding a particular identity; the structural force that raises an identity's salience.

Definition of the situation.

The interpretation participants arrive at as to what a social situation is and what it calls for; consequential because people act on the meaning they assign rather than on brute fact.

Dramaturgy.

Goffman's analysis of social life as theatrical performance, in which people stage a self for audiences and depend on their cooperation to sustain it.

Generalized other.

Mead's term for the organised attitudes of a whole community, internalised by the individual and used to guide conduct even when no particular person is present.

Identity control theory.

Burke and Stets's model of an identity as a feedback loop that adjusts behaviour to keep perceived self-relevant meanings matched to an internal standard.

Identity salience.

The readiness with which a given role identity is invoked across situations; its position in the hierarchy that organises the self.

Identity standard.

The set of self-meanings that define who a person is in a role, serving as the reference value a control system works to maintain.

Identity theory.

Stryker's structural version of symbolic interactionism, in which the self is a hierarchy of internalised role identities ordered by salience and anchored by commitment.

Impression management.

The selective control of the cues one gives off in order to shape how one is perceived by others; central to Goffman's dramaturgy.

Looking-glass self.

Cooley's image of the self as formed by imagining how one appears to others, imagining their judgement of that appearance, and feeling a resulting self-feeling.

Reflected appraisal.

A person's estimate of how they are seen and judged by another, treated as an input to the self-concept.

Role-taking.

Imaginatively adopting the attitude of another toward one's own conduct; the process by which, for Mead, a self becomes an object to itself.

Sensitizing concept.

Blumer's term for a concept that suggests directions in which to look while leaving its specific content to be filled in by the case, contrasted with a definitive concept.

Social construction of reality.

Berger and Luckmann's thesis that the everyday world treated as objectively given is produced and sustained through habitualised, institutionalised social practices.

Symbolic interactionism.

The perspective, named by Blumer, that people act toward things on the basis of meanings that arise in social interaction and are modified through interpretation.

Key Researchers

Herbert Blumer (1900-1987). Sociologist at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, Berkeley, who coined the term symbolic interactionism and codified its three premises. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Peter J. Burke (ORCID 0000-0002-4594-2603). Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, and co-developer, with Jan Stets, of identity control theory. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia

Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929). Sociologist at the University of Michigan whose concept of the looking-glass self grounded the study of the social self. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Gary Alan Fine James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, ethnographer of small-group culture, and author of an influential reassessment of symbolic interactionism's standing. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Erving Goffman (1922-1982). Sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose dramaturgical analysis of face-to-face interaction transformed the study of the presented self. Wikipedia - Wikidata

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). Philosopher and social psychologist at the University of Chicago whose account of the social genesis of mind and self founded the tradition. Wikipedia - Wikidata

David A. Snow Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, who extended and broadened Blumer's conceptualisation and linked interactionism to social movement research. Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Jan E. Stets Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, co-developer of identity control theory and a leader in the sociology of emotions and of morality. Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Profile

Sheldon Stryker (1924-2016). Sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington who founded structural symbolic interactionism and identity theory, formalising identity salience and commitment. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Frequently Asked Questions

What is symbolic interactionism?
It is the perspective, named by Herbert Blumer and rooted in the work of George Herbert Mead, that people act toward things on the basis of meanings, that those meanings arise in social interaction, and that they are handled and modified through an interpretive process (Blumer, 1969).

What are Blumer's three premises?
That people act toward things on the basis of the meanings the things have for them; that such meanings arise out of social interaction; and that meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretive process the actor uses in dealing with what is encountered (Blumer, 1969).

What is the looking-glass self?
Cooley's image of self-formation, in which a person imagines how they appear to another, imagines that other's judgement of the appearance, and experiences a self-feeling such as pride or shame in response, so the self is reflected back from the social world (Cooley, 1902).

What is the generalized other?
Mead's term for the organised attitudes of an entire community that a person internalises through role-taking, providing an internal standard that regulates conduct even when no particular onlooker is present (Mead, 1934).

What is identity theory?
Stryker's structural development of symbolic interactionism, which treats the self as a hierarchy of internalised role identities ordered by salience, with commitment determining how salient each identity is and therefore how likely it is to be enacted (Stryker, 2008).

What is identity control theory?
Burke and Stets's cybernetic model in which an identity is a control loop: behaviour works to keep the meanings a person perceives about themselves matched to an internal identity standard, with emotion arising from the degree of match (Stryker & Burke, 2000).

How is symbolic interactionism different from behaviourism?
Behaviourism explains conduct by the association of stimuli and responses; symbolic interactionism inserts interpretation between them, holding that the person responds to the meaning assigned to a stimulus rather than to the stimulus itself (Blumer, 1969).

Is symbolic interactionism still used today?
Yes. Its concepts diffused widely into mainstream sociology and social psychology, and it remains an active framework shaping research on identity, emotion, morality, and qualitative method (Fine, 1993; Carter & Fuller, 2016).

References