Introduction of G.H. Mead, The Act

 George Herbert                     Mead

INTRODUCTION

George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the university of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism and of what has come to be referred to as the Chicago sociological tradition.

George Herbert Mead was born on 27 February, 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He was raised in a Protestant, middle class family. Mead was trained mainly in philosophy and its application to social psychology. He received a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1883, and after a few year as a secondary- school teacher, surveyor for railroad Companies, and private tutor, Mead began graduate study at Harvard in 1887. Mead was offered an instructorship at the university of Michigan in 1891. It is interesting to note that Mead never received any graduate degrees. In 1961 - 1917 it was transformed into an advance course ( Mind, self and Society) that followed a course in elementary social psychology that was taught after 1919 by Ellsworth Faris that Mead had such a powerful influence on students in sociology. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Mead became involved in social reform. He believed that science could be used to deal with social problems. He played a key role in social research conducted by the settlement house. Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931.

The Act

Mead considers the act to be the most "primitive unit" in his theory (1982). In analyzing the act, Mead comes closest to the behaviornist's approach and focuses on stimulus and response. However, even here the stimulus does not elicit an automatic, unthinking response from the human actor. As Mead says, "We conceive of the stimulus as an occasion or opportunity for the act, not as a compulsion or a mandate" 

Mead (1938/1972) identified four basic and interrelated stages in the act. The four stages represent an organic whole (in other words, they are dialectically interrelated). Both lower animals and humans act, and Mead is interested in the similarities, ad especially the differences, between the two.

Act divided into four stages

1. Impulse:- The first stage is that of the impulse, which involves an "immediate sensuous stimulation" and the actor's reaction to the stimulation, the need to do something about it. Hunger is a good example of an impulse. The actor (both non-human and human) may respond immediately and unthinkingly to the impulse, but more likely the human actor will think about the appropriate response (for example, eat now or later). In thinking about a response, the person will consider not only the immediate situation but also past experiences and anticipated future results of the act.                                                                                                                   Hungry may come from an inner state of the actor or may be elicited by the presence of food in the environment, or, most likely, it may arise from some combination of the two. Furthermore, the hungry person must find a way of satisfying the impulse in an environment in which food may not be immediately available or plentiful. This impulse, like all others, may be related to a problem in the environment (that is, the lack of immediately available food), a problem that must be overcome by the actor. Indeed, while an impulse such as hunger may come largely from the individual (although even here hunger can be induced by an external stimulus, and there are also social definitions of when it is appropriate to be hungry), it usually is related to the existence of a problem in the environment (for example, the lack of food). Overall, the impulse, like all other elements of Mead's theory, involves both the actor and the environment.                                                  
2. Perception:- The second stage of the act is perception, in which the actor searches for, and reacts to, stimuli that relate to the impulse, in this case hunger as well as the various means available to satisfy it. People work have the capacity to sense of perceive stimuli through hearing, smell, taste, and so on. Perception involves incoming stimuli, as well as the mental images they create. People do not simply respond immediately to external stimuli but rather think about, and assess, them through mental imagery. People are not simply subject to external stimulation; they also actively select characteristics of a stimulus and choose among sets of stimuli. That is a stimulus may have several dimensions, and the actor is able to select among them. Furthermore, people usually are confronted with many different stimuli, and they have the capacity to choose which to attend to and which to ignore. Mead refuse to separate people from the objects that they perceive. It is the act of perceiving an object that makes it an object to a person; perception and object cannot be separated from (are dialectically related to) one another.          
3. Manipulation:- The third stage is manipulation. Once the impulse has manifested itself and the object has been perceived, the next step is manipulating the object or, more generally, taking action with regard to it. In addition to their mental advantages, people have another advantage over lower animals. People have hands (with opposable thumbs) that allow them to manipulate objects far more subtly than can lower animals. The manipulation phase constitutes, for Mead, an important temporary pause in the process so that a response is not manifested immediately. A hungry human being sees a mushroom, but before eating it, he or she is likely to pick it up first, examine it, and perhaps check in a guidebook to see whether that particular variety is edible. The lower animal, in contrast, is likely to eat the mushroom without handling and examining it (and certainly without reading about it). The pause afforded by handling the object allows humans to contemplate various responses. In thinking about whether to eat the mushroom, both the past and the future are involved. People may think about past experiences in which they are certain mushrooms that made them ill, and they may think about the future sickness, or even death, that might accompany eating a poisonous mushroom. The manipulation of the mushroom becomes a kind of experimental method in which the actor mentally tries out various hypotheses about what would happen if the mushroom were consumed.               
4. Consummation:- On the basis of these deliberations, the actor may decide to eat the mushroom (or not), an this constitutes the last phase of the act, consummation, or more generally the taking of action that satisfies the original impulse. Both humans and lower animals may consume the mushroom, but the human is less likely to eat a bad mushroom because of his or her ability to manipulate the mushroom and to think (and read) about the implications of eating it. The lower animal must rely on a trial-and-error method, and this is a less efficient technique than the capacity of humans to think through their actions. Trial-and-error in this situation is quite dangerous; as a result, it seems likely that lower animals are more prone to die from consuming poisonous mushrooms than are humans.                                                                                          For ease of discussion, the four stages of the act have been separate from one another in sequential order, but Mead sees a dialectical relationship among the four stages. John C. Baldwin expresses this idea in the following way: "Although the four parts of the act sometimes appear to be linked in linear order, they actually interpenetrate to form one organic process: Facets of each part are present at all times from the beginning of the act to the end, such that each part are present at all times from the beginning of the act to the end, such that each part affects the other". Thus, the later stages of the act may lead to the emergence of earlier stages. For example, manipulating food may lead the individual to the impulse of hunger and the perception that the individual is hungry and that food is available to satisfy the need.