Last Updated on August 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Symbolic interactionism is a social action theory which argues that society is built out of the meanings people give to things, and that those meanings come out of interaction rather than existing beforehand. Four things you need to be able to do with it:
- State Blumer’s three premises — people act on meanings, meanings emerge from interaction, meanings are handled through interpretation
- Explain Mead’s theory of the self — the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, role-taking, and the generalised other
- Explain Cooley’s looking-glass self
- Apply it — labelling in education, labelling in crime and deviance, and the case for qualitative methods
Symbolic interactionism is taught within social action theory, part of the Theory and Methods module. Theory and Methods is examined on Paper 3 (Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods) and Paper 1 (Education with Theory and Methods). Most students meet it on Paper 3, so that is the paper to prepare for first.
What symbolic interactionism is
Structural theories such as Functionalism and Marxism start with society and work downwards: society has a structure, that structure shapes institutions, and institutions shape individuals. Symbolic interactionism works the other way round. It starts with two people in a room and asks how anything larger than that gets built.
The answer is symbols. A symbol is anything that carries a shared meaning — a word, a gesture, a uniform, a raised eyebrow. Human beings do not respond directly to the world; they respond to what the world means to them, and those meanings are worked out with other people. Nothing is inherently anything. A knife means one thing in a kitchen and another in a stairwell, and the difference is not in the knife.
Because meanings are made in interaction, they can also be remade there. This is why interactionists see society as fluid rather than solid. The structures that Functionalists and Marxists treat as fixed — the family, the school, the law — exist for interactionists only as long as enough people keep interpreting them the same way.
Two consequences matter for the exam. First, interactionism gives individuals agency: people are not passive products of socialisation, they actively interpret and sometimes reject what they are given. Second, it demands a particular kind of research. If social reality is made of meanings, you cannot capture it with a questionnaire, and interactionists therefore favour qualitative methods such as unstructured interviews and participant observation.
Blumer’s three premises
Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) was a student of Mead’s at the University of Chicago and took over his classes after his death. He coined the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ in a 1937 essay and set out the perspective properly in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969). If you learn one thing about interactionism as a theory, learn these three premises — they are the clearest short statement of it there is.
- Human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them. People are not simply reacting to external stimuli in the way that a structural theory or a behaviourist psychology would suggest. There is an interpretive step in between.
- Those meanings arise out of social interaction. Meaning is not built into the object and it is not simply handed down as a fixed norm. It is a social product, negotiated between people.
- Meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process. Individuals do not just apply meanings mechanically; they check them, weigh them up and adjust them as a situation unfolds. This is why meanings — and therefore social norms and institutions — can change.
Blumer’s contribution was to take Mead’s social psychology of the self and push it in a more sociological direction: he theorised how society emerges from interaction, not just how the individual does. For him, society at any given moment is the sum of the ‘joint actions’ being carried out by people who have coordinated their interpretations well enough to act together. It looks stable, and most of the time it feels taken for granted, but the interpretive work never stops — which means the whole thing is in principle always open to breaking down or being redefined.
There is a fuller treatment, with examples, in my post on Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism.
Mead: the social self
George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is the founder of the tradition, though he never used the phrase ‘symbolic interactionism’ and never published a book on it. His ideas reached sociology through Mind, Self and Society, compiled from students’ lecture notes by Charles W. Morris and published posthumously in 1934.
Mead’s central claim is that the self is social. He did not see the self as something innate or fixed that we then bring into social situations. He saw it as something that emerges through interaction, and he went as far as to say the self cannot be discovered by introspection, because outside of interaction it does not exist. The self is a process rather than a thing.
Language is what makes this possible. Animals can gesture about what is in front of them, but their communication is trapped in the immediate context. Language lets human beings refer to people and events that are absent, past or hypothetical, and it is language that allows us to hold a conversation with ourselves — to reflect, weigh up courses of action and, in Mead’s terms, actively make ourselves.
The ‘I’ and the ‘me’
Mead’s best-known idea is the distinction between two aspects of the self.
- The ‘I’ is the self as experienced from the inside — spontaneous, unpredictable, the source of consciously directed action. It is the creative and idiosyncratic part of a person.
- The ‘me’ is the self as an object of awareness — the self as I imagine others see it. The ‘me’ is the social component, formed through the internalisation of social roles, norms and values.
The relationship between them is the point. The ‘me’ is not simply a constraint on the ‘I’. It is enabling as well as regulating, because it allows a person to review what they are about to do in the light of how others are likely to react, and adjust accordingly. Every act involves this internal conversation: the ‘I’ proposes, the ‘me’ reviews.
Role-taking
The mechanism connecting the two is role-taking: putting yourself in someone else’s position in order to anticipate how they will interpret what you do. If someone waves at you across the street, you interpret the gesture by imagining the situation from their side. Role-taking is not occasional or optional — for Mead it is the basic operation of social life, and it is what makes cooperative action possible at all.
Do social roles determine us?
Mead accepted that social institutions exist — but only for as long as people accept the roles attached to them. The family exists while people accept the roles of mother and father; the school exists while teachers and pupils accept theirs. Institutions are not structures standing above interaction, they are patterns of interaction that keep being repeated.
HOWEVER, Mead did not think roles determine what people do. Cultural expectations attached to a role are usually loose rather than precise — a teacher is expected to dress appropriately, but ‘appropriately’ covers a wide range. People have some choice over which roles they enter, and some roles positively reward doing things differently. There is no single all-embracing culture handing down one set of expectations. And where expectations cannot be met, people improvise.
This is the point to reach for in a structure and agency question. Mead is not saying roles do not matter — he is saying they set loose limits inside which people still act.
The generalised other
Role-taking with one particular person is one thing. Mead’s larger idea is the generalised other: the internalised attitudes, norms and expectations of the community as a whole. Rather than imagining how one specific person sees me, I imagine how ‘people’ would see me — an impersonal, generalised standpoint.
This is how Mead explains self-regulation without needing a structural theory of socialisation. We monitor our own conduct by taking the perspective of the generalised other, and it is only by thinking about how others see ‘me’ that the ‘I’ becomes conscious of itself at all.
How the self develops: the play stage and the game stage
Mead distinguished two stages through which children acquire a self.
In the play stage, young children play at being someone else — a doctor, an astronaut, a superhero. In doing so they become aware that there is a difference between themselves and the role they are occupying, which is the beginning of the ‘me’ becoming visible as distinct from the ‘I’. At this stage the child takes the role of one particular other at a time — what later interactionists came to call significant others, the specific people whose reactions matter most to us.
In the game stage, the child has to hold several roles in mind simultaneously. Mead’s example is an organised game. To play football you need some idea of what an attacker, a defender, a goalkeeper and the referee are each doing and expecting, and you need an overall picture of the game as a whole. That overall picture is the generalised other in miniature — and the capacity it develops carries into adult life, where the ability to see yourself through the eyes of the wider community is what makes coordinated social action possible.
Cooley: the looking-glass self
Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) developed the looking-glass self in Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), before Mead’s work reached print, and it is the most exam-friendly idea in the whole perspective.
Cooley’s argument is that we come to know ourselves indirectly, by using other people as mirrors. The process has three parts:
- We imagine how we appear to another person
- We imagine how that person judges that appearance
- We develop a feeling about ourselves — pride, confidence, shame, embarrassment — on the basis of that imagined judgement
The crucial word throughout is imagine. The looking-glass self does not depend on what others actually think, only on what we believe they think, and the two can be very different. A student who is convinced a teacher has written them off will act on that belief whether or not the teacher has.
HOWEVER, Cooley did not think this was a simple mechanical reflection. Which mirror we look into matters: the judgement of a close friend, a parent or a peer group carries far more weight than the judgement of a stranger. Cooley’s related concept of the primary group — the family, the childhood friendship group — identifies the small, intimate, face-to-face groups whose reflections shape us most.
Cooley and Mead are easy to confuse because both describe the self forming through others’ eyes. The quickest way to keep them apart: Cooley’s is the mirror, Mead’s is the conversation.
Symbolic interactionism and socialisation
Structural theories tend to treat socialisation as something done to children: Functionalists have them absorbing value consensus, Marxists have them absorbing ruling-class ideology. Interactionists see socialisation as an active process in which the child is a participant rather than a sponge.
Gerald Handel drew on Mead to develop this account, and it is the most useful version of it for A-level.
Biological and social development happen together. The common-sense view is that biology comes first — the child develops the brain and body to walk and talk, and then walks and talks. Handel argues the two develop in tandem. A newborn cannot participate in society because it is both physically undeveloped and unsocialised, and the two grow together. Even a baby’s dependence on its carers requires interaction: crying is a basic form of communication. Intellectual capacities develop through use in interaction in much the same way that muscles develop through physical use. Language is the clearest case — without interaction, the capacity to think in words and communicate does not develop, and neither does the part of the brain that handles it.
Socialisation develops three capacities at once, all of them social:
- A self-concept. Following Mead and Cooley, developing a sense of self involves considering how others see what you do. Through this the child learns to self-regulate, avoiding what others disapprove of, and comes to experience itself as distinct from others.
- Empathy. Developing a self-concept and developing empathy are the same process seen from two sides, since both involve imagining a situation from someone else’s position.
- Communication. Socialisation is communicative from the start, from early non-verbal exchanges through to the grammatical complexity and nuance of language.
Adult agents of socialisation have a lot of latitude. From an interactionist perspective, parents and teachers are largely left alone to socialise children as they see fit. There are laws and guidelines, but they set very broad limits and the state rarely intervenes in the socialisation of most children. Within those limits there is enormous variation depending on parents’ and teachers’ education, religion, politics, ethnicity or simply their personalities. It follows that we should not expect all children in a society to be socialised in the same way — a direct challenge to the Functionalist idea of a shared value consensus transmitted uniformly.
Peer groups socialise differently from adults. Children are more active in interaction with other children than with adults, and other children’s opinions matter a great deal to them. Socialisation within the peer group works on different terms:
- Children take part in making the rules rather than following rules laid down for them
- Peer groups tend towards immediate gratification, where adults press for deferred gratification
- Peer groups offer an alternative set of norms, which may conflict with adult standards
Peer group socialisation does not stop in childhood. Adults are resocialised too, by colleagues when they start a new job, for example.
Conflict over norms is normal, not a breakdown. Handel treats conflict as a routine feature of socialisation — between what a child wants (reinforced by the peer group) and what parents expect, and between children and adults who have been socialised differently. HOWEVER, he also recognises a broad ‘societal demand’: a set of very general norms that nearly everyone understands they have to work within, which is why most of these conflicts get settled peacefully.
Applying symbolic interactionism
Interactionism is worth far more marks when you can apply it than when you can only describe it. Two applications come up constantly.
Labelling in education. Teachers form judgements of pupils on the basis of appearance, speech and behaviour as much as ability, and those labels can become self-fulfilling. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s field experiment is the classic evidence. The mechanism is straight out of Cooley and Mead: the pupil sees themselves reflected in the teacher’s reaction and adjusts the ‘me’ accordingly. See teacher labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Labelling in crime and deviance. Becker’s argument that an act only becomes deviant when others define it as such is symbolic interactionism applied to crime. Deviance is not a property of the act but of the reaction to it, and the people most likely to be labelled are the least powerful. See the labelling theory of crime.
Interaction as performance. Goffman’s dramaturgical theory extends the perspective by treating social life as staged: people manage the impressions others form of them, front stage and back stage. See The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Evaluating symbolic interactionism
Positive evaluations
It corrects the determinism of structural theory. Functionalism and Marxism both give us individuals who are essentially passive — filled up with value consensus or with ideology. Interactionism gives us people who interpret, negotiate and sometimes refuse, and that is closer to what research actually finds.
It explains change. If meanings are made in interaction, they can be remade, which gives interactionism an account of how norms shift that structural theories struggle to match.
It has real explanatory success in applied areas. Labelling theory is not a fringe position in either education or crime and deviance — it is a mainstream explanation of differential achievement and of who ends up in the criminal justice system.
Its methodology has high validity. Unstructured interviews and participant observation get at meanings in a way that closed-ended surveys cannot.
Criticisms
As is usual at A-level, the strongest criticisms come from the other perspectives.
It ignores structural power. This is the criticism to lead with. Interactionism explains how a label is applied but not why the same groups keep being labelled. Marxists argue you cannot explain why working-class and black pupils are disproportionately negatively labelled without a theory of class and racism operating above the level of the interaction. Interactionism describes the mechanism and leaves the pattern unexplained.
It cannot account for patterns by class, gender and ethnicity. Related, and the point examiners reward: if everything is negotiated in the moment, the persistence of the same social class, gender and ethnic patterns year after year is hard to explain.
It is vague about where meanings come from originally. Meanings emerge from interaction — but the participants bring meanings to the interaction that they did not invent. Structural theorists would say those came from somewhere, and interactionism has no good answer.
It underplays material constraint. Material deprivation has real effects on achievement that are not reducible to labelling. A pupil without a quiet room to work in is not failing because of a meaning.
Its methods have limitations. Small-scale qualitative research is difficult to generalise from and hard to replicate, so the validity gain comes at a cost in reliability and representativeness.
How symbolic interactionism comes up in the AQA exam
Framed Paper 3 first, because that is where most students meet it.
Paper 3 — Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods (7192/3). This is the main home for the material, and it can be examined twice on the same paper. In the Theory and Methods section it comes up as social action theory, typically as a comparison with structural theories or as an evaluation of what action theory contributes to our understanding of society. In the crime section it comes up as labelling theory, where the interactionist account of the self is the underlying explanation of why labels stick.
Paper 1 — Education with Theory and Methods (7192/1). Theory and Methods is examined here too. Interactionism is also the theoretical basis of teacher labelling in the education section, so it can support answers in both halves of the paper.
How to use it well. Two habits move an answer up the bands:
- Name the theorist and be specific about which idea is theirs. ‘Interactionists argue’ is worth much less than ‘Blumer argues that meanings emerge through interaction rather than being fixed in advance’.
- Use it as evaluation, not just description. Symbolic interactionism is the standard critique of Functionalist and Marxist accounts of socialisation, education and crime, and deploying it that way earns AO3 rather than AO1.
The reverse also holds. Where a question is about interactionism, the structural criticism — that it cannot explain persistent patterns of class, gender and ethnic inequality — is the evaluation that examiners are looking for.
Sources and further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society, ed. C. W. Morris, University of Chicago Press
- Cooley, C. H. (1902) Human Nature and the Social Order
- Blumer, H. (1969) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Prentice-Hall
- Inglis, D. (2012) An Invitation to Social Theory, Polity
- Parts of this post were adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 8th edition
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on George Herbert Mead
Signposting and related posts
This post has been written for students studying Theory and Methods as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, examined on Paper 3 and Paper 1.
Symbolic interactionism is one strand of social action theory. For the wider picture, including Weber and ethnomethodology, see Social Action Theory — a summary.
For Blumer in more depth, see Herbert Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism.
Students usually study interactionism against the structural theories it criticises — see Functionalist theory and the main Social Theory hub.
The socialisation material above is also relevant to the Culture and Identity option.
For exam questions and model answers, see exams, short answer questions and essays.
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