The generalized other is a concept introduced by George Herbert Mead into the social sciences, and used especially in the field of symbolic interactionism. It is the general notion that a person has of the common expectations that others may have about actions and thoughts within a particular society, and thus serves to clarify their relation to the other as a representative member of a shared social system. [1]
Any time that an actor tries to imagine what is expected of them, they are taking on the perspective of the generalized other.
An alternative name of the mentally constructed idea of who an audience is without real or complete insight is imagined audience.
Mead's concept of the generalised other has been linked to Adam Smith's notion of the impartial spectator [2] – itself rooted in the earlier thinking of Addison and Epictectus. [3]
Adam Smith wrote: "We Conceive ourselves as acting in the presence of a person quite candid and equitable, of one who...is meerly a man in general, an impartial Spectator who considers our conduct with the same indifference with which we regard that of other people". [4]
Mead began by contrasting the experience of role-play and pretence in early childhood, in which one role simply gives way to a different one without any continuity, with that of the organised game: "in the latter", he stated, "the child must have the attitude of all the others involved in that game". [5] He saw the organised game as vital for the formation of a mature sense of self, which can only be achieved by learning to respond to, and take on board, the others' attitudes toward the (changing) common undertakings they are involved in: i.e. the generalized other. [6]
Mead argued that "in the game we get an organized other, a generalized other, which is found in the nature of the child itself....in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters – as an organized process or social activity – into the experience of any one of the individual members of it". [7]
By seeing things from an anonymous perspective, that of the other, the child may eventually be able to visualize the intentions and expectations of others, and see him/herself from the point of view of groups of others – the viewpoint of the generalized other.
The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the larger community. According to Mead, the generalized other is the vehicle by which we are linked to society.
Arguably, a modern differentiated society contains as many generalized others as there are social groupings: [8] as Mead put it, "every individual member of any given human society, of course, belongs to a large number of such different functional groups". [9] The result is that everybody will articulate aspects of the range of socio-cultural values in their own way, taking on the perspectives of a set of generalized others in a unique synthesis. [10]
With rising levels of socialisation and individuation, more and more people, and more and more aspects of the self come into play in the dialectic of self and generalized other. [11]
As a concept, the generalised other is roughly equivalent to the idea of the Freudian superego. It has also been compared to Lacan's use of the Name of the Father, [12] as the third party created by the presence of social convention, law, and language in all human interaction. [13] It is also similar to Bakhtin's (Superaddressee) "superaddressee" presumed to receive and understand human communication.
Specifically referencing modern social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Eden Litt and Eszter Hargittai explain that the imagined audience refers to a mental construct people form of their audience without real insight into who is actually consuming their online content. [14]
This disconnect between a user's imagined audience and actual audience is affected by social norms and context, and could play a large role on impression management — if a user believes their audience is composed of certain people, they may curate their social media feed and image to reflect this belief. Notably, academic scholar Jacqueline Vickery found in a study that her informants attempted to dissociate themselves from peers they considered "ghetto." Since her informants were aware that Facebook friend connections are visible to everyone, those who were worried about associating with certain people then needed to maintain online distance by declining those friend requests. [15]
Scholar danah boyd argues that the "imagined audience ... resembles the concept of the White audience inherent to respectability politics; namely, that one must be able to successfully perform a White-defined bourgeois self to achieve upward mobility." [16] The relationship between the dominant, acceptable social norms and intersections of class, gender, racial, or ethnic norms creates tension when managing impressions for both the imagined audience and the invisible audience.
As sharing on social media continues to become more commonplace, the imagined audience will continue to play a role in how people choose to represent themselves on different platforms. For instance, a study on impression management in online dating found that participants had to navigate mediating conflict between the pressures of impression management and their desire to present an authentic sense of self. [17] Other similar studies have also found that there are significant instances of misrepresentation in online dating: 86% of participants in one study felt that other members of their dating sites misrepresented their physical appearance. [18] Misrepresentation, particularly on sites where participants are looking for companionship and love, could be explained by the idea of the imagined audience — as participants form the idea of who is actually viewing their profiles, they may cater their own online representation to be more appealing.
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological theory that develops from practical considerations and alludes to humans' particular use of shared language to create common symbols and meanings, for use in both intra- and interpersonal communication. According to Macionis, symbolic interactionism is "a framework for building theory that sees society as the product of everyday interactions of individuals". In other words, it is a frame of reference to better understand how individuals interact with one another to create symbolic worlds, and in return, how these worlds shape individual behaviors. It is a framework that helps understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. The interpretation process that occurs between interactions helps create and recreate meaning. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that affect the interaction between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context. Thus, interaction and behavior is framed through the shared meaning that objects and concepts have attached to them. From this view, people live in both natural and symbolic environments.
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
In micro-sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that sees social behavior as an interactive product of the individual and the situation. In other words, it derives social processes from social interaction, whereby subjectively held meanings are integral to explaining or understanding social behavior.
Impression management is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction. It was first conceptualized by Erving Goffman in 1959 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and then was expanded upon in 1967.
Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist. He was the son of Michigan Supreme Court Judge Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan.
Role theory is a concept in sociology and in social psychology that considers most of everyday activity to be the acting-out of socially defined categories. Each role is a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms, and behaviors that a person has to face and fulfill. The model is based on the observation that people behave in a predictable way, and that an individual's behavior is context specific, based on social position and other factors. Research conducted on role theory mainly centers around the concepts of consensus, role conflict, role taking, and conformity. The theatre is a metaphor often used to describe role theory.
Other is a term used to define another person or people as separate from oneself. In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other distinguish other people from the Self, as a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.
Herbert George Blumer was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research. Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Mead's social psychology, which he labeled symbolic interactionism. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism. An ongoing theme throughout his work, he argued that the creation of social reality is a continuous process. Blumer was also a vociferous critic of positivistic methodological ideas in sociology.
Dramaturgy is a sociological perspective that analyzes micro-sociological accounts of everyday social interactions through the analogy of performativity and theatrical dramaturgy, dividing such interactions between "actors", "audience" members, and various "front" and "back" stages.
Internet identity (IID), also online identity, online personality, online persona or internet persona, is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. It may also be an actively constructed presentation of oneself. Although some people choose to use their real names online, some Internet users prefer to be anonymous, identifying themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information. An online identity may even be determined by a user's relationship to a certain social group they are a part of online. Some can be deceptive about their identity.
The 'I' and the 'me' are terms central to the social philosophy of George Herbert Mead, one of the key influences on the development of the branch of sociology called symbolic interactionism. The terms refer to the psychology of the individual, where in Mead's understanding, the "me" is the socialized aspect of the person, and the "I" is the active aspect of the person.
Eszter Hargittai is a communication studies scholar and Professor at the University of Zurich.
The term looking-glass self was created by American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in 1902, and introduced into his work Human Nature and the Social Order. It is described as our reflection of how we think we appear to others. Cooley takes into account three steps when using "the looking glass self". Step one is how one imagines one looks to other people. Step two is how one imagines the judgment of others based on how one thinks they view them. Step three is how one thinks of how the person views them based on their previous judgments.
The social penetration theory (SPT) proposes that as relationships develop, interpersonal communication moves from relatively shallow, non-intimate levels to deeper, more intimate ones. The theory was formulated by psychologists Irwin Altman of the University of Utah and Dalmas Taylor of the University of Delaware in 1973 to understand relationship development between individuals. Altman and Taylor noted that relationships "involve different levels of intimacy of exchange or degree of social penetration". SPT is known as an objective theory as opposed to an interpretive theory, meaning it is based on data drawn from actual experiments and not simply from conclusions based on individuals' specific experiences.
Social conditioning is the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society. The concept is stronger than that of socialization, which is the process of inheriting norms, customs and ideologies. Manifestations of social conditioning are vast, but they are generally categorized as social patterns and social structures including nationalism, education, employment, entertainment, popular culture, religion, spirituality and family life. The social structure in which an individual finds him or herself influences and can determine their social actions and responses.
Social information processing theory, also known as SIP, is a psychological and sociological theory originally developed by Salancik and Pfeffer in 1978. This theory explores how individuals make decisions and form attitudes in a social context, often focusing on the workplace. It suggests that people rely heavily on the social information available to them in their environments, including input from colleagues and peers, to shape their attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions.
In sociology and other social sciences, internalization means an individual's acceptance of a set of norms and values through socialisation.
Mind, Self, and Society is a book based on the teaching of American sociologist George Herbert Mead's, published posthumously in 1934 by his students. It is credited as the basis for the theory of symbolic interactionism. Charles W. Morris edition of Mind, Self, and Society initiated controversies about authorship because the book was based on oral discourse and Mead's students notes. Nevertheless, the compilation of his students represents Mead’s most important work in the social sciences. Among them, Mead published a conceptual view of human behaviour, interaction and organization, including various schools of thought such as role theory, folklore methodology, symbolic interactionism, cognitive sociology, action theory, and phenomenology.
Context collapse or "the flattening of multiple audiences into a single context" is a term arising out of the study of human interaction on the internet, especially within social media. Context collapse "generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another" with that new audience's reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.