A symbolic interactionist model of human communication

Conclusion

In the preceding pages, I have presented an elementary description of the manner in which symbolic interactionist principles could be applied to the analysis and description of some theoretical and empirical issues in the field of human communication. The general method of exposition has been essentially a naturalistic and phenomenological one based upon the view that the most enlightening social psychological approach to an understanding of communication begins with a consideration of what the human individual is actually doing when he encodes and transmits messages, and when he receives and decodes messages, in the real social situation in which this kind of behavior occurs.

I have also tried to give due attention to the fact that any explanatory system designed to operate on this macroscopic, molar level must provide ways whereby it can be logically connected up with structures and processes existing on the underlying molecular levels of neurophysiology and general psychology. As I have pointed out, the symbolic interactionist does not hesitate to speculate about some of the general processes that may be operating inside the individual, in the black box, and I have suggested that the term “covert rehearsal” might be used as the name for these internal processes as the symbolic interactionist conceptualizes them. Mead himself speculated freely about these inner processes. In fact, as has been indicated, the full recognition of the necessity of exploring these processes (the “inner experience of the individual”) was to him the principal distinction between the radical behaviorism of his time and the social behaviorism that he was building.

Many of the basic insights and theoretical principles that are historically associated with symbolic interactionism have already become the common property of all social psychologists and many communications theorists. Some of these have been borrowed directly or indirectly from the symbolic interactionist literature; others have grown up independently as logical developments of empirical and theoretical work initially grounded in other perspectives. What I have tried to do here is not to claim priority or proprietorship of everything on behalf of symbolic interactionism, but to show how all—or at least a major portion—of this work can be assimilated into a relatively simple frame of reference derived from that doctrine—a perspective that will, if nothing else, have considerable descriptive and explanatory power. Hopefully, this perspective and the model built upon it will also have additional uses : they will have significant heuristic value in suggesting leads for further refinement of the model and the underlying theory, and for testing the theory by future empirical research.