The evolutionary approach to animal and human behavior lay behind the development of Mead’s behavioral theory of the Mead. He studied the biologically inherited components of animal behavior in order to explain the roots of human behavior.  Throughout his work, Mead integrated evolution, physiology, and theories of animal behavior with the other elements of his unified theory in order to create a unified, non-dualistic model. Mead frequently presented examples of animal behavior at various phylogenetic levels: unicellular organism, ants, bees, termites, chicks, and so forth Most of the examples of animal behavior were used to illustrate the evolutionary steps leading up to human behavior. Evolutionary theory clearly views humans as animals that are interacting with a physical environment. Mead’s evolutionary perspective did not portray animals including humans-in passive roles, as if solely the products of evolutionary forces or genetic determinism.  A special selects the subsets of its environments to which it will respond: and its actions alter that environment, thereby modifying its own habitat.  Thus, evolution has produced active organisms that select, change, and modify their world.

The neural pathways of the human brain give us the potential for language, internal conversation, and reflective intelligence; but only through social experience does the individual develop that potential and acquire symbolic mental faculties. Through social processes – through symbolic social interaction with others – does a person learn language and learn to carry on the inner conversation that we identify as mind. Therefore we need to study social behavior and interaction – the whole of an individual’s acts – to explain mental experience.

Evolutionary theory placed humans-mind and body together-in nature, to be studded scientifically. In Mead’s non-dualistic theory, there is no split between biological and mental or social processes.  Although Mead distinguished between the “biologic individual” and the “socially self-conscious individual,” he pointed out that “ they are not on separate planes, but play back and forth into each other, and constitute, under most conditions, an experience which appears to be cut by no lines of cleavage “ Although evolutionary theories of the universe and life on earth led Mead to acknowledge the insignificantly small role of human life in the whole cosmos, he concluded that the scientific perspective makes humans more” at home” in nature than had prior dualistic world-views that separated mind from body and focused more attention on  mind than on the body and its physical environment

The comparative approach to animal behavior was the foundation for Mead’s methodological behaviorism to trace the behavioral evolution of early humans.  Among his points were these. Early languages evolved from grunts and groans that were made from sudden changes of breathing. Mead often compared children with primitive people, noting, for example, that awareness’s of other “arise earlier than the self, in the child.Mead used modified versions of the theory of natural selection when developing his own theories about mental and social events that appeared to be selective processes.

For Mead, human conduct springs from impulses that reflect modified versions of instincts: “Self-conscious conduct arises out of controlled and organized impulse, and impulses arise out of social instincts. Mead identified two components in the instinctive act: internal emotional responses and externally visible gestures. The internal physiological responses serve as the biological component of subjectively experienced emotions.  Second, the external components of instinctive acts consist of stereotyped gestures, which are the primary means of communication – such as smiles, laughter, blushing, and crying. Mead used instincts and impulses in his explanations of numerous complex social phenomena, such as the origins of the family, clans, nations, and various types of social organization.

Act

There are two models of the act in Mead's general philosophy:

•         the model of the act-as-such, i.e., organic activity in general (which is elaborated in The Philosophy of the Act), and
•         the model of the social act, i.e., social activity, which is a special case of organic activity and which is of particular (although not exclusive) relevance in the interpretation of human experience.

Act

Mead described the act as an organic unity consisting of four major components, none of which is independent of the others.  Each part is interrelated with the others to produce a unified, organic whole. Dewey, (1896) and Mead (1903:1938) stressed the “wholeness: and “unity” of all parts of the act.

The four main parts of the act are the (1) impulse, (2) perception, (3) manipulation, and (4) consummation. When a dog is hungry, hunger is the impulse to look for something to eat.  Looking is a form of selective perception, as the dog selectively scans the environment for things to eat.  If food is found, the dog manipulates it-perhaps pulling it a part with its mouth and paws- and then the dog consumes it.

“Our conduct is made up of a series of steps which follow each other, and the later steps may be already started and influence the earlier ones.  The things we are going   to do is playing back on what we are doing now”.

The impulse of hunger brings up sense imagery of various types of food, along with motor imagery of manipulating and consuming the food.  The sense imagery guides selective perception, as we look for relevant stimuli.  The motor imagery consists of a “readiness to respond” that influences the type of manipulation that will be done later.

Social act

The social act is a collective act involving the participation of two or more individuals; and the social object is a collective object having a common meaning for each participant in the act. There are many kinds of social acts, some very simple, some very complex. These range from the (relatively) simple interaction of two individuals (e.g., in dancing, in love-making, or in a game of handball), to rather more complex acts involving more than two individuals (e.g., a play, a religious ritual, a hunting expedition), to still more complex acts carried on in the form of social organizations and institutions (e.g., law- enforcement, education, economic exchange). The life of a society consists in the aggregate of such social acts.

Communication and Intelligence

Mead was critical of scientists who claimed that physiological mechanisms alone could explain mental process that involve language and symbolic though, clearly cognitive processes cannot develop until an individual learns language and inner speech through symbolic social interaction. These two positions are not contradictory.  For Mead, the central nervous system was a necessary but no sufficient condition for symbolic thought, His criticism were directed at physiologists who claimed that the  central nervous system was not only  necessary but sufficient for explaining thought, and who therefore neglected the role of social, symbolic experience.

Mead begins by articulating what he learned about the gesture from Wundt. Gestures are to be understood in terms of the behavioral responses of animals to stimuli from other organisms. For example, a dog barks, and a second dog either barks back or runs away. The “meaning” of the “barking gesture” is found in the response of the second organism to the first. But dogs do not understand the “meaning” of their gestures. They simply respond, that is, they use symbols without what Mead refers to as “significance.” For a gesture to have significance, it must call out in a second organism a response that is functionally identical to the response that the first organism anticipates. In other words, for a gesture to be significant it must “mean” the same thing to both organisms, and “meaning” entails the capacity to consciously anticipate how other organisms will respond to symbols or gestures. This capacity arises through the vocal gestures.

Therefore, the communicational process involves two phases: (1) the "conversation of gestures" and (2) language, or the "conversation of significant gestures."

Mead criticized Darwin for limiting his treatment of gestures to the expression of internal feelings for psychological states. He argued that gestures are the primary means of communication in animals. As such, they have important social functions, and hence should not be described as only expressing internal emotional states. In Mead’s theory, the social functions played a much more important role than the expression of emotions.

Although all types of gestures are capable of having meaning and communicating information to other individuals, only certain forms of gestures can communicate the same meaning to both the sender and receiver. When vocal gestures are used, the sender and the receiver hear the same stimuli. However, do they make response to a given significant symbol, absolutely identical responses are unlikely. For example, a word such as “dog” can call up different responses in different people.

When we use significant symbols with others, we hear our own world and the sounds call up in ourselves ideas that we are similar to the ideas that the words call up in others. According to Mead, “Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in the individual making them the same responses which the explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals” Language, in Mead's view, is communication through significant symbols.

“But it is not necessary that we should talk to another to have these ideas. We can talk to ourselves, and this we do in the inner forum of what we call thought”. The inner conversation is conducted with the same significant symbols used in social communication.

According to Mead language is the primary social foundation of the self. The principle basic to human social organization is that of communication involving participation in the other . It is language that has made human society possible . Language is communication with symbols; it is the ultimate use of symbols.

Mead traced the development of this “inward conversation” as it emerges in childhood. As the child learns to talk with others, the child gains the ability to talk with self. “The child will converse for hours with himself, even constructing imaginary companions, who function in the child’s growing self-consciousness as the processes of inner speech – of though and imagination – function in the consciousness of the adult”. By adulthood, “the features and intonations of the dramatis personae fade out and the emphasis falls upon the meaning of the inner speech, the imagery becomes merely the barely necessary cues”. However, at all ages, “the very process of thinking is, of course, simply an inner conversation…” It is this inner thought, this inner flow of speech and what it means…that…constitutes the mind…”

Mead recognized that consciousness[1] exits in different degrees in different species. In essence, there are various levels of consciousness and awareness, ranging from simple feelings in primitive animals to increasingly sophisticated perceptual consciousness in advanced species, to abstract and symbolic consciousness in humans. “There can be no hard and the more abstracted processes of so-called reasoning”

Although verbal description produces a consciousness of meaning, there is a higher form of consciousness that arises from the use of significant symbols: Mead called it “reflective consciousness” or “reflective intelligence.” People experience that form of consciousness whenever they confront problems and use an inner conversation of significant symbols to work toward a solution. Mead did not claim that all human acts were conscious; “Only portions of the response appear in consciousness as such” “Unconsciousness is frequently part of our conduct. Stimuli occur in that field, the act follows, but there is no precept. (For consciousness) there must be conflict. This results in inhibition, the throwing up in consciousness of past experience.” Reflective consciousness evaluates possible future events based on past experience. Because all gestures are predictive stimuli, they carry information about the future – about the results of the acts they presage. This chapter summarized Mead’s theory of the structure and properties of the communicative stimuli used by nonhuman animals and humans.  Only when humans evolved the biological mechanisms for language and developed significant symbols did our species acquire the type of vocal gesture that can have the same meaning for the speaker and listener. Significant symbols allow people to communicate more effectively than can other species and to carry out inner conversations with themselves in the privacy of their own heads. The inner conversation, in turn, gives rise to higher levels of consciousness about the past, present, and future.

Although part of early socialization involves the parents’ explicitly training and instructing the child the socialization process is not only merely something that society does do the child. The child is not a passive receptacle, waiting to be filled with social contents. Rather, children actively investigate and interact with their social and physical worlds, acquiring information from the interaction of their own behavior and the environment. Through this interaction, children develop increasingly sophisticated mental and behavioral capacities.

Emergence of Self

A person’s self consists of the person’s thoughts about the unified whole of his or her own body, thoughts, emotions, personality and actions. Thus, it is part of the person’s private world of thoughts. However, as Mead repeatedly emphasized the self is inherently social in nature; thus it must be considered as part of the whole social process. Thus, “the self involves a unity” of body, behavior, and environment and it is not to be conceived dualistically, as something separate from social processes. The self can come into existence only in terms of society and interaction with other selves therefore; it owes its existence to the micro and macro social environment. All through life, a person’s self develops through social interaction and is influenced by micro and macro social processes. There is a continuous, dynamic interplay between self and society in which both self and society influence and change each other.  There is no mind-body dualism implied in Mead’s view of the self: Descartes and other dualists had conceived of the self as a type of psychical substance that had no functional relationship to the physical and social environment; but Mead viewed the self as a natural part of the human social world, a phase of social processes.

Mead provided both evolutionary and developmental perspectives on the emergence of the self. “Lower animals do not have selves”. “Selves have appeared late in vertebrate evolution”. Selves could only emerge after humans evolved to the point of using significant symbols: Significant symbols allow a person to take the role of the listener and thereby get the objective, outsider’s view of his or her own self as a social object.

Second, the self arises only slowly in childhood through symbolic social interaction. “The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process.

“In infancy we can see the beginning of the self arising”. It takes years for the self to emerge, as the infant gradually acquires an objective view of his or her own body and behavior. “Self arises in conduct, when the individual becomes a social object in experience to himself.”

For children to obtain a clear view of themselves as selves, they need to take the role of others so they can view themselves as social objects, as others do.

Mead's account of the social emergence of the self is developed further through an elucidation of three forms of inter-subjective activity:

•         early use of significant symbols,
•         play, and
•        the game.

These forms of "symbolic interaction" (i.e., social interactions that take place via shared symbols such as words, definitions, roles, gestures, rituals, etc.) are the major paradigms in Mead's theory of socialization and are the basic social processes that render the reflexive objectification of the self possible.

Firstly, for self to emerge there has to be a means by which “the individual should thus take an objective, impersonal attitude toward himself, that he should become an object to himself”. When children begin to use language, they gain access to the simplest form of role taking, in which they hear their own significant symbols in an objective manner and get an objective view of their own thoughts and utterances. It is via the use of significant symbols and role taking “that we have behavior in which the individuals become objects to themselves”. “The self can exist for the individual only if he assumes the roles of the others”. “We appear as selves in our conduct insofar as we ourselves take the attitude that others take toward us.

“Self consciousness involves the individual’s becoming an object to himself by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within an organized setting of social relationships, and that unless the individual had thus become an object to himself he would not be self conscious or have a self at all”.

Secondly, after children begin role-play, they further develop their personality and selves. When children play the roles of others, they use parts of those roles “in building a self”. While playing house, children take the roles of mother and father, thereby acquiring aspects of their parents’ interest and selves. “It is only as the child does this that he comes to have a full self”. The roles that children play (e.g., parent, teacher, policeman) “control the development of their own personality”.The child’s consciousness of its own self is quite largely the reflection of the attitudes of others toward him”. The perception of the parents comes first; and that perception influences the child’s view of self. 

In playing roles, we take the perspective of the other. For Mead, if we were simply to take the roles of others, we would never develop selves or self-consciousness. We would have a nascent form of self-consciousness that parallels the sort of reflexive awareness that is required for the use of significant symbols. How then does a self arise? Here Mead introduces his well-known concept, “the generalized other”. When children or adults take roles, they can be said to be playing these roles in dyads. However, this sort of exchange is quite different from the more complex sets of behaviors that are required to participate in games. In the latter, we are required to learn not only the responses of specific others, but behaviors associated with every position on the field. These can be internalized[2], and when we succeed in doing so we come to “view” our own behaviors from the perspective of the game as a whole, which is a system of organized actions.

Thirdly, games facilitate the further development of an integrated, unified personality. Before reaching the game phase of socialization, the child “is not organized into a whole. The child has no definite character, no definite personality”. However, as children begin playing games, they learn to synchronize with larger groups and organize their own responses in relation to the rules of the game and the actions of the whole group. “The game, in other words, requires a whole self, whereas play requires only pieces of the self” of the role that is being played out, without understanding the whole role; but games demand a more organized self if the child is to coordinate with others. Games, with their rules and structure help the child develop a more organized self. As the child plays games, “he is becoming an organic member of society”. Because games help the child think in terms of the generalized other, the child can increasingly “see himself as the whole group sees him,” which helps the child acquire a “unity of personality” “And it is this generalized other in his experience which proves him with a self”. Games provide an important transition to adulthood in large, complex societies. After the child can relate to the generalized other of games, the child gradually learns to conceive of the generalized other in terms of broader social institutions. “The individual possesses a self only in relation to the selves of other members of his social group; and the structure of his self expresses or reflects the general behavior pattern of this social group to which be belongs, just as does the structure of the self of every other individual belonging to this social group”. In fact, the structure of the whole mind reflects the structure of society. Each individual’s socialization structures the mind and self in two important and complementary ways, producing (1) common traits that are shared with others, and unique, personal traits that make the person a distinctive individual. The same socialization process that fosters similarities among individuals also generates differences. “The common social origin and constitution of individuals also generates differences. Because no two people have exactly the same roles or locations in the social structure, they have different socialization and develop different selves.  People like to know how they are different from others. “Since it is a social self, it is a self that is realized in its relationship to others. Mead’s discussion of multiple selves reflects his structural view of the self. Taking the role of the generalized other and the larger community, people tend to perceive themselves as unified beings. When we change from one set of social roles to another, different parts of our selves are emphasized.

First, the complexity of the self depends in part on a person’s ability to take the role of others and view the self from the perspective of others.

Second, problematic situations provide important experiences for the development of the self. Conflicts and problems cause us to stop and reflect on the possible solutions to the problems, which may necessitate establishing new relationships between our self and others, society, or the environment.

Third, the structural complexity and integration of a person’s society influence the level of development of the self. “The consciousness of the individual in a sense is a reflection of the complex social situation in which he lives.

“I” And “ME”

Mead divided the self into two distinctive parts: the “I” and the “me”.

• The “I” is the subject; the “me” is the self that we see as an object.
• The “I” is the self that acts; the “me” is the self that we see as an object when we observe our self from the role of the other.
• When we talk with someone, it is the “I” who does the talking. As soon as we hear our own words, we have responded to our self as an object of observation, hence as a “me”.
• "me" is inconceivable without an "I.
• The “I” and “Me” are functional distinctions for Mead, not metaphysical ones.

Thus, consciousness of the “me” arises through role taking. The “me” is a composite view of the self as seen from the perspectives of the people we know ( significant others) and the others (generalized others). “The individual sees himself from the point of view of other individuals and they form the point of view of himself”. We can never observe the part of our self called the “I”. Any attempt to observe the “I” only reveals a “me” – that is, the self we see through self-observation. Therefore, it follows that “the self cannot appear in consciousness as an ‘I’, that it is always an object, i.e., a ‘me’. Only the “me” can be brought directly into awareness. “The ‘I’ lies beyond the range of immediate experience.”

In essence, the self of the present instant is the “I”. As soon as the “I” acts, the act slips into the past where we can observe it in our memory of the previous moment as a part of the “me”. “The ‘I’ is his action… and it gets into his experience only after he has carried out the act. Then he is aware of it”. “the real self that appears in that act awaits the completion of the act itself.” Thus, the “me” is “the reflective self”. As we reflect back on our actions, we see the version of our self as object called the “me”. We do not know until after we act what the “I” is, what its actual capacities are. “It is only after we have done the thing that we are going to do that we area aware of what we are doing”.

As we can never completely know our own selves or the selves of others, our “explanations” or “accounts” for the behavior of self and others are always to some degree inaccurate. We are always partially unconscious of the nature of our actions.

The “I” and the “me” serve different functions, both for the individual and for the society. The “I” is the source of spontaneity and innovative actions. The ‘me” is the vehicle of self-regulation and social control. The “I” is creative. The “me” sets limits and imposes structure based on social values. Because we can never directly observe the “I”, we can never be certain exactly what it will do next. “The ‘I’ is something that is more or less uncertain”. The “I” is unpredictable. Thus, “the” ‘I’ gives the sense of freedom, of initiative.” “Exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action takes place”. The ‘me’ is a conventional, habitual individual”, whereas the “I” is the source of novel responses that break away from convention and habitual patterns. The qualities of the “I” relate closely to Mead’s views on emergence. In our world, novel things are always emerging and the “I” is the source of the emergent in human conduct.

Mead did not describe the “I” as inherently wild or antisocial. The “I” is merely the source of unexpected, emergent acts. Some of these innovations may be valuable, creative contributions that benefit the society; others may be socially useless or deleterious. One of the functions of the “me” is to evaluate the innovations of the “I” from the perspective of society, encouraging socially useful innovations while discouraging undesirable actions. “If we use a Freudian expression, the ‘me’ is in a certain sense a censor”. As a censor, the “me” provides support for the socially useful contributions of the “I” while keeping the problematic facets of the “I” under control.

Our thoughts about the “me” reflect the views of the generalized other- from games and institutions- and give us a form of self control needed to be good team players and fit into society. The “me” represents “that groups of attitudes which stand for others in the community, especially that organized group of responses which we have detailed in discussing the game on the one hand and social institutions on the other”.

The “me” is the source of social concern. As we reflect on our actions, we ask if we are helping or hurting others. Thus, the “me” provides an internal system of social control. “Social control is the expression of the ‘me’ over against eh expression of the ‘I’. It sets the limits…” The type of social control arising from the “me” is “not simply the social control that results from blind habit, but a social control that comes from the individual assuming the same attitude toward himself that the community assumes toward him.”

Thus, social control from the “me” does not operate via unthinking obedience to society. People know their duties and rights and use reflective intelligence to select the best path of action, as they see if from their particular perspective on the social process. At times, reflective intelligence reveals that one’s duties to others are more important than one’s rights to pursue purely personal interests. At other times, personal rights outweigh duty to others.

Thus, there are degrees of self-imposed social control. “Social control depends, then, upon the degree to which the individuals in society are able to assume the attitudes of the others who are involved with them in common endeavor”.

Mead saw society as needing a balance of creative diversity on one hand, and shared meanings and common responses on the other. The “I” provides the creativity; and the “me” the communalities. A society that encourages people to be creative and different may benefit from these individuals who make creative contributions to art, literature, science, politics and practical affairs. Nevertheless, for society to function as an integrated whole, all the unique selves must coordinate to some degree. “Society is the interaction of these selves, and an interaction that is only possible if out of their diversity unity arises. We are indefinitely different from each other, but our differences make interaction possible. Society is unity in diversity. However there is always present the danger of its miscarriage”. Too much diversity can lead to chaos and disorganization. The “me” provides the common interests and social concern that helps people organize their creative diversity in a constructive manner.

People have different mixtures of the strengths of “I” or the “me”. A person may develop the strengths of the “I” or the “me” – or both, or neither. Some people emphasize one facet of the self-either the “I” or the “me” – more than the other. Mead saw the “I” and “me” functioning smoothly together in the fully developed individual. “Both aspects of the ‘I’ and ‘me’ are essential to the self in its full expression.

Self and identity

While Mead never spoke of identity as such, his theory of the self offers a set of more fruitful insights in the process of identity building. Self theory is the logical place to begin an analysis of identity formation as this occurs in relation to social and cultural differences. However, an even stronger starting point, and one that certainly includes the self, is Mead's important concept of sociality. This concept provides an understanding of difference as an inherent feature of social relations and change. Sociality as a concept was developed in his last and groundbreaking work, Philosophy of the Present (1932).

For Mead, role-taking is internalized through a symbolic process taking place reflexively[3] in the self. Mead sees the person as forming attitudes and dispositions taken from others, which become a basis of how one sees oneself as a social entity as well as a means for developing an identity. Mead does not seem to understand self-conception as "essential," that is, innate, but neither does he deny that it occupies an important and substantial place in one's interior sense of self. In fact, for Mead self-conception was materially based in the perceived social responses of significant others, which became part of a person's perception of and relationship to self.

Sociality is in the words of Mead  "the capacity of being several things at once," then the individual is necessarily multiply positioned. Mead would thus see relations of difference as the temporal intersections of history giving structure to the self. But Mead would understand these relations of difference as constituting identity. Mead would have argued that difference are located outside rather than inside identity, dispersing it in heterogeneity. Mead understands multiplicity, as the underlying structuring principle of identity. The social situations are subjectively internalized by the individual as the elements, from which self-identity is being continually formed.

Thus, the naturalistically and symbolically based pragmatist social psychology of Mead provides the tools for theorizing how identity develops within a social process.

Diagrammatic representation of Mead’s Unified Theory

A biological individual (a) is born into social and physical environments (b, c, and d). From those environments (e, f and g) the individual acquires an increasingly complex repertoire of covert and overt behavior (h). As the person gains increasing skill, the person has increasing influence (i, j and k) on both micro and macro society (b and c) and on the broader environmental system (d). As all the components of the system are interconnected in an organic whole, changes in any part of the system can influence other parts, creating dynamic changes in the whole system.  This order of development follows from Mead’s own intellectual development, beginning with his graduate work on physiological psychology in Germany, next turning to his interest in signals, communication, language, mind, and self, then focusing increasing attention on macro society.