User:Howling Commando/Symbolic interactionism

Assumptions[edit]
According to Erving Goffman, what motivities humans to position their body parts in certain manners and the desires to capture and examine those moments are two of the elements that constitute the composition of the social reality which is made of various individuals' perceptions, it's crucial to examine how these two elements' occurrence. It appeals symbolic interactionists to shift more emphases on the realistic aspect of their empirical observation and theorizing.

Premises[edit]
4) "It's the inherent human desire to acquire potential psychological rewards from interacting with others that motivates us to establish realities filtered through social interactions"

Some symbolic interactionists point out the ineradicable nexus of the desire for potential psychological reward between individuals and their respective socially constructed realities that is commonly known as the "society", these experts have confirmed that one crucial premise for analyzing and dissecting symbolic interactionism is the psychological reward that drives individuals to connect with others and create meanings via social interactions. We as humans instinctively discern individuals whom we want to be associated with, before we initiate an interaction with them, we would experience an internal emotional rush biologically that encourages us to initiate the interaction, thus beginning to form various socially constructed realities that enables symbolic interactionism to examine, namely it's our desires for emotional rewards that makes the theory of symbolic interactionism possible and viable.

Applications[edit]
Applications on social roles

Symbolic interactionism can be used to dissect the concept of social role and further study relations between friends. A social role begins to exist when an individual initiates interaction with other people who would comprise a social circle in which the initiator is the central terminal, the accumulated proceedings of duties and rights performed by the central person and all the other participants in this social circle reinforces this dynamic circle. Apart from the central role, such social groups are constituted of participants who benefit from the central figure and those who are eligible and capable of helping the central role to achieve its envisioned objectives. The roles in the social role dynamic aren't preordained although the prevalent culture of a specific society usually possesses a default structure to most social roles. Despite the fact that the predominant culture of a certain society typically exerts large amount of influence on the instinctive formation of the structures in social groups, the roles in social groups are eventually formed based on the interactions occurred between the central figure and other potential participants in this role. For illustration, if a central person of the social role is a police officer, then this social role can contain victims, teammates, operators, the dispatch, potential suspects, lieutenant. Social roles could be formulated by happenstances, but it can't escape the inexorable reconfiguration of multilateral exchanges of each role's obligations in a social role. (Lopata 1964). Through this lens, the examination of various social roles becomes more receptive and accessible, which also possesses the same effects on examining friendship and other vocations.

Limitations and Critiques
Some symbolic interactionists like Goffman had pointed out the obvious defects of the pioneering Mead concept upon which the contemporary symbolic interactionism is built, it has influenced the modern symbolic interactionism to be more conducive to conceiving "social-psychological concerns rather than sociological concerns". For instance, during analyzing symbolic interactionism, the participants' emotional fluctuations that are inexorably entailed are often ignored because they are too sophisticated and volatile to measure. When the participants are being selected to participate in certain activities that are not part of their normal daily routine, it will inevitably disrupt the participants psychologically, causing spontaneous thoughts to flow that are very likely to make the participants veer away from their normal behaviors. These psychological changes could result in the participants' emotional fluctuations that manifest themselves in the participants' reactions; therefore, manufacturing biases that will the previously mentioned biases. This critique unveiled the lack of scrutiny on participants' internal subjective processing of their environment which initiates the reasoning and negotiating faculties, which the contemporary symbolic interactionism also reflects. Henceforth, prejudice is not a purely psychological phenomenon, instead it can be interpreted from a symbolic interactionism standpoint, taking individuals' construction of the social reality into account.

References:
Lehn, Dirk vom, and Will Gibson. “Interaction and Symbolic Interactionism.” Symbolic Interaction, vol. 34, no. 3, 2011, pp. 315–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2011.34.3.315. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

“Back Matter.” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 34, no. 1, 1991. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1389146. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Lopata, Helena Znaniecka. “Symbolic Interactionism and I.” Symbolic Interaction, vol. 26, no. 1, 2003, pp. 151–72. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.1.151. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.