Points of View

Points of View: Symbolic Interactionism

Begin with the obvious: the name of the perspective itself tells you much. Sociologists who use this perspective focus on human interaction. Now, as I have indicated earlier, sociology itself—the entire discipline—focuses on human interaction. But, there is more than one way to do this. Symbolic interactions tend to look at the smallest units of this interaction. As your textbook explains, they study face-to-face interaction, face-to- face relationships. When they study larger groups of people, they explain the behavior of these larger groups in terms of the meaning which individuals in that group create as they interact with each other.

The other word in the name of this perspective is “symbolic.” Symbolic interactionists put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the symbols that we use when we interaction with each other. And language is, perhaps, the most important set of the symbols that influence our behavior and our interaction.

Three brief examples: One: The English language uses verbs that enable us to talk about the past, the present, and the future, i.e. verbs have a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense. This allows us to see time as linear. There is a past that comes before the present which comes before the future. And we interact with each other in these terms.

There are some groups of people whose language does not have past, present, and future tenses. Time for them is not linear; instead, time is cyclical. Time moves, not in a straight line but in a great circle. The past is always in the future which is always in the past. Those of us who speak only English can not even think in these terms. We are trapped into understanding time in only one way. How would we interact differently if we could think of time as something that operated in a cyclical fashion?

Two: As good “liberals,” we place a high value on the individual ownership of property, the individual possession of things. Is this something that is natural, or is this a value that our language leads us toward. Think how quickly we introduce children to the concept of possession through the use of pronouns like “mine,” “his,” “hers.” Ownership and possession are built into everything we talk about on a day-to-day, face-to-face basis.

Three: A husband and wife are traveling in an automobile along the Interstate. The husband is driving. The wife asks the husband, “are you thirsty?” He responds, “no,” and keeps on driving. She gets mad; he doesn’t know why. Later, he asks why she is mad. She responds that she was thirsty and he would not stop to get her something to drink. He argues that she never said she was thirsty. She argues . . . he argues . . . etc., etc., etc. Has this, or something like this, ever happened to you? Or have you seen it happen to others? Well, sociologists who study language would say that this event happened because men and women seem to use language differently. The symbols are shared, but the meaning often is different.

Symbolic interactionism is sociology at the micro level. What does that mean? See your text.