Who theorized the social self?
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George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) developed a theory of social behaviorism to explain how social experience develops an individual's self-concept. Mead's central concept is the self: It is composed of self-awareness and self-image. Mead claimed that the self is not there at birth, rather, it is developed with social experience. Since social experience is the exchange of symbols, people tend to find meaning in every action. Seeking meaning leads us to imagine the intention of others. Understanding intention requires imagining the situation from the others' point of view. In effect, others are a mirror in which we can see ourselves. Charles Horton Cooley (1902-1983) coined the term looking glass self, which means self-image based on how we think others see us. According to Mead the key to developing the self is learning to take the role of the other. With limited social experience, infants can only develop a sense of identity through imitation. Gradually children learn to take the roles of several others. The final stage is the generalized other, which refers to widespread cultural norms and values we use as a reference for evaluating others.
Socialization
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The proposition of social learning was expanded upon and theorized by Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura. Bandura, along with his students and colleagues conducted a series of studies, known as the Bobo doll experiment, in 1961 and 1963 to find out why and when children display aggressive behaviors. These studies demonstrated the value of modeling for acquiring novel behaviors. These studies helped Bandura publish his seminal article and book in 1977 that expanded on the idea of how behavior is acquired, and thus built from Miller and Dollard's research. In Bandura's 1977 article, he claimed that Social Learning Theory shows a direct correlation between a person's perceived self-efficacy and behavioral change. Self-efficacy comes from four sources: "performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states".
Social cognitive theory
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Graves theorized that in response to the interaction of external conditions with internal neuronal systems, humans develop new bio-psycho-social coping systems to solve existential problems and cope with their worlds. These coping systems are dependent on evolving human culture and individual development, and they are manifested at the individual, societal, and species levels. He believed that tangible, emergent, self-assembling dynamic neuronal systems evolved in the human brain in response to evolving existential and social problems. He theorized "man's nature is not a set thing, that it is ever emergent, that it is an open system, not a closed system." This open-endedness set his approach apart from many of his contemporaries who sought a final state, a nirvana, or perfectibility in human nature. His inclusion of the bio-, psycho-, social, and systems theory as vital co-elements also described an inclusive point of view that continues developing today.
Clare W. Graves
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Mead theorized that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game". "Play" comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. For instance, he first plays the role of policeman and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers," and plays the role of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor." As a result of such play, the child learns to become both subject and object and begins to become able to build a self. However, it is a limited self because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others, they still lack a more general and organized sense of themselves.
George Herbert Mead
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Quentin Skinner has argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England. Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), from the School of Salamanca, might be considered an early theorist of the social contract, theorizing natural law in an attempt to limit the divine right of absolute monarchy. All of these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty by means of a social covenant or contract, and all of these arguments began with proto-"state of nature" arguments, to the effect that the basis of politics is that everyone is by nature free of subjection to any government.
Social contract
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Social representations should neither be equated with relatively stable collective representations, nor should they be confused with individual, cognitive representations. This has been elaborated by several authors who contributed to the theory: Gerard Duveen and Barbara Lloyd emphasized the articulation of the individual and the collective in micro-genetic processes of socialization, Wolfgang Wagner theorized about the role of action and social interaction in the construction of social representations, and Sandra Jovchelovitch proposed to regard social representations as a space in-between, at the cross-roads between the individual and society that is the public sphere, that links objects, subjects and activities. Most authors agree that social representations are dynamic elements of knowledge that depend on social conflict and dispute to originate and that have a history of elaboration and change over time. Bauer & Gaskell integrate this view in their formal model relating three elements: subjects, or carriers of the representation; an object, activity, or idea that is represented; and a project of a social group within which the representation makes sense. This conceptualisation is known as the toblerone model of social representations.
Social representation
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Niklas Luhmann was a prominent sociologist and social systems theorist who laid the foundations of modern social system thought. He based his definition of a "social system" on the mass network of communication between people and defined society itself as an "autopoietic" system, meaning a self-referential and self-reliant system that is distinct from its environment. Luhmann considered social systems as belonging to three categories: societal systems, organizations, and interaction systems. Luhmann considered societal systems, such as religion, law, art, education, science, etc., to be closed systems consisting of different fields of interaction. Organizations were defined as a network of decisions which reproduce themselves; his definition is difficult to apply in terms of finding a real-world example. Finally, interaction systems are systems that reproduce themselves on the basis of communication rather than decision making.
Social system
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In 2012, Hood published his second popular science book "The Self Illusion: Why there is no 'you' inside your head" (published under the alternative title "The Self Illusion: How the social brain creates identity" in America). In this book, he argues that the human sense of self is a construct of the brain which facilitates experiencing and interacting with the world. "Who we are," Hood writes, "is a story of our self − a constructed narrative that our brain creates". Bruce uses a "a distinction that William James drew between the self as "I" and "me." Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the "I" and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual – a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the "me" which again is a coherent account of who we think we are based on past experiences, current events and aspirations for the future."
Bruce Hood (psychologist)
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A final piece of Mead's social theory is the mind as the individual importation of the social process. Mead states, "The self is a social process," meaning that there are series of actions that go on in the mind to help formulate one's complete self. As previously discussed, Mead presented the self and the mind in terms of a social process. As gestures are taken in by the individual organism, the individual organism also takes in the collective attitudes of others, in the form of gestures, and reacts accordingly with other organized attitudes. This process is characterized by Mead as the "I" and the "Me". The "Me" is the social self and the "I" is the response to the "Me." In other words, the "I" is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others, while the "me" is the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes.
George Herbert Mead
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In 2012, Eliot Bates of Cornell University approached the topic of the ethnomusicological study of musical instruments by focusing specifically on what he terms “the social life of musical instruments”.Bates argues that “‘the social’ has not been adequately studied and theorized because of a paucity of attention given to how social relations are mobilized around material objects and the thing-power that they possess.” Essentially, Bates states that material objects often hold significant social value. It is important to study the object not necessarily for the sake of categorization or understanding the way that it is played or how it works but the meaning that it holds for the musician and the audience.
Organology
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Social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and the 1980s, social identity theory introduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to explain intergroup behaviour.
Social identity theory
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Social identity theory is described as a theory that predicts certain intergroup behaviours on the basis of perceived group status differences, the perceived legitimacy and stability of those status differences, and the perceived ability to move from one group to another. This contrasts with occasions where the term "social identity theory" is used to refer to general theorizing about human social selves. Moreover, and although some researchers have treated it as such, social identity theory was never intended to be a general theory of social categorization. It was awareness of the limited scope of social identity theory that led John Turner and colleagues to develop a cousin theory in the form of self-categorization theory, which built on the insights of social identity theory to produce a more general account of self and group processes. The term social identity "approach", or social identity "perspective", is suggested for describing the joint contributions of both social identity theory and self-categorization theory. Social identity theory suggests that an organization can change individual behaviors if it can modify their self-identity or part of their self-concept that derives from the knowledge of, and emotional attachment to the group.
Social identity theory
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Some social identity theorists, including John Turner, consider the self-esteem hypothesis as not canonical to social identity theory. In fact, the self-esteem hypothesis is argued to be conflictual with the tenets of the theory. It is argued that the self-esteem hypothesis misunderstands the distinction between a social identity and a personal identity. Along those lines, John Turner and Penny Oakes argue against an interpretation of positive distinctiveness as a straightforward need for self-esteem or "quasi-biological drive toward prejudice". They instead favour a somewhat more complex conception of positive self-concept as a reflection of the ideologies and social values of the perceiver. Additionally, it is argued that the self-esteem hypothesis neglects the alternative strategies to maintaining a positive self-concept that are articulated in social identity theory (i.e., individual mobility and social creativity).
Social identity theory