Mead and Cooley: Making the Society Easier to Understand
During the first part of this unit I have learned a lot about Mead’s theory of mind and “the self”. Mead believes that certain people can affect how we view ourselves; people that we interact with throughout our day by day activity change who we are possibly in a good or bad way. Mead gives the example of childhood. Children tend to act and be as they please, not really caring what others think. But Mead believes that as we develop and grow older we start to care about other people's opinions and do less of what makes us unique. Mead explains that there are three MAIN stages: the preparatory stage, the play stage, and the game stage.
The first stage, the preparatory stage, is where kids tend to mimic others and that is pretty much their main source of learning. During my first semester of college I took Introduction to Psychology. Something cool I learned that Mead’s first stage made me think about was the Bobo Doll Experiment. Around the 1960s, a scientist, Albert Bandura ran a bunch experiments that had to do with learning by observing others. One of his most popular and successful experiments was called the Bobo Doll Experiment.
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/psychology/browse/experiment-material?ff%5B0%5D=experiment_discussed_facet%3ABobo%20Doll%20Experiment
They had a clown doll and would have some of the children watch a adult punch the doll (showing multiple signs of aggression towards the doll) and some of the children would be left alone with the doll (without any adults). Then they would see how the child would react when alone with the doll. Most of the children that observed a adult abusing the doll would find similar ways to “harm” the doll. The other kids that did not observe a adult hurting the doll would do no harm to the doll. Here is a cool link that goes into greater detail about observation experiments that help prove Meads first stage (the preparatory stage); https://www.simplypsychology.org/bobo-doll.html.
The second stage, the play stage, is the where kids are beginning to develop from communication with other kids and/or adults. They start using words and certain hand movements to get their “point” across to their peers. The children also start to understand that creating relationships with people are important; certain roles are important. He discovered this by observing kids when “playing pretend”. Most kids when playing pretend tend to act as other people; especially people with big roles in their life- like parents, doctors, etc…. Which in this case is different then imitation because in this stage they are able to put themselves in someone else's shoes and answer in a different perspective. They continue to create their own scenarios and scenes.
The third stage, the game stage, kids are able to reflect on people attitudes and certain behaviors. The children start to understand that most citizens act in ways that make not only themselves happy but act how other people will accept you. Mead believes that this stage lead to the creation of the “me” and “I”. “Me” being how others see us; showing what we learn through socialization. “I” being how we think about those interactions. Here is a link to a youtube video that helps understand the “me and i” aspect; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDhe48mLFmQ.
Another topic related to self-identity that we already started to discuss in this unit is Charles Cooley’s- “Looking glass self”. Cooley tried explaining that we as people, are NOT actually being impacted by our peers or surroundings. He believes that what is actually affecting us is the opinions we create in our mind that we think other people have about me and you. In the opinion of Cooley’s theory we most likely are changing who we are based off of possibly true and possibly false assumptions. Here is a example that really helped me understand this theory that we discussed in class last week; let’s say that you wear these new pants to school. You are walking through the ASC in your new pants and this girl you spot kind of gives you a semi-mean/judgemental look. You automatically are thinking, “Why the hell did I wear these pants?! Who even wears pants anymore?!!! Pants are so dumb OMG!!!” By this one observation you received you automatically begin to make assumptions about the look. We are influenced by simple daily interactions way more than we think. This simple thing about pants could possibly lead to creating a whole different self perspective.
https://blog.bufferapp.com/6-proven-strategies-for-promoting-content-across-social-media
During this blog post, I discussed how a couple that usually has little to none media attention were able to create a totally real account based off of a totally unreal person. I believe that that proves that when seeing someone’s social media account it is very possible that that account could be nothing like the actual account holder/user. We also discussed how Cooley believed that "the self" is simply just a product created by our social interactions with other people that involves three steps: 1) The imagination of our appearance to other people and associated feelings; 2) Imagining that others are evaluating our behavior; 3) We develop feelings and react to the imaginary evaluations of ourselves as objects. We also talked about Mead; Mead dealt with imitation. With imitation, you’re always trying to see the world from another's point of view; a self image is developed in recognizing how others are perceiving you or how others view you. As a human, people are constantly trying to put themselves in the shoes of another, thinking about how they are seeing this particular event, situation or action.
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