George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago.

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.

[3] In autumn 1887, Mead enrolled at Harvard University, where his main interests were philosophy and psychology.

At Harvard, Mead studied with Josiah Royce, a major influence upon his thought, and William James, whose children he tutored.

and moved to Leipzig, Germany to study with psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, from whom he learned the concept of "the gesture", which would become central to his later work.

There, Mead met Charles Horton Cooley and John Dewey, both of whom would influence him greatly.

Mead believed that science could be used to deal with social problems and played a key role in conducting research at the settlement house in Chicago.

[12]: 5  The two most important roots of Mead's work, and of symbolic interactionism in general, are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism.

Social behaviorism (as opposed to psychological behaviorism) refers to Mead's concern of the stimuli of gestures and social objects with rich meanings, rather than bare physical objects which psychological behaviourists considered stimuli.

[13] Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets:[14] Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism: Thus, to Mead and symbolic interactionists, consciousness is not separated from action and interaction, but is an integral part of both.

[15] Mead's theories in part, based on pragmatism and behaviorism, were transmitted to many graduate students at the University of Chicago who then went on to establish symbolic interactionism.

[17] This concept of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology.

The essence of Mead's social behaviorism is that mind is not a substance located in some transcendent realm, nor is it merely a series of events that takes place within the human physiological structure.

[18]: 191–92  Thus, mind is not reducible to the neurophysiology of the organic individual, but is emergent in "the dynamic, ongoing social process"[18]: 7  that constitutes human experience.

His theory of "mind, self, and society" is, in effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many individuals, just as his theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with an environment.

[21] In joint activity, which Mead called social acts, humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors.

In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops.

[18]: 178–79  Mead states that "the self is a social process", meaning that there are series of actions that go on in the mind to help formulate one's complete self.

Mead rooted the self's "perception and meaning" deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects", found specifically in social encounters.

Mead was a major American philosopher by virtue of being—along with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James— one of the founders of pragmatism.

For example, in taking (introjecting or imitating) the resistant role of a solid object, an individual obtains cognition of what is "inside" nonliving things.

The conception of the present as a distinct unit of experience, rather than as a process of becoming and disappearing, is a scientific fiction devised to facilitate exact measurement.

[17] Mead theorized that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game".

However, it is a limited self, because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others; they still lack a more general and organized sense of themself.

[23] Assuming that games and routine social acts have differentiated social positions, and that these positions create our cognitive perspectives, then it might be that by moving between roles in a game (e.g. between hiding and seeking or buying and selling) we come to learn about the perspective of the other.

[25] In a career spanning more than 40 years, Mead wrote almost constantly and published numerous articles and book reviews in both philosophy and psychology.

Following his death, several of his students put together and edited four volumes from records of Mead's social psychology course at the University of Chicago, his lecture notes (Mead's Carus Lectures, 1930, edited by Charles W. Morris), and his numerous unpublished papers.

[26][19] Four years later, John W. Petras published George Herbert Mead: Essays on his Social Psychology, a collection of fifteen articles that included previously unpublished manuscripts.

More recently, Mary Jo Deegan (2001) published Essays in Social Psychology, a book project originally abandoned by Mead in the early 1910s.

A Reader, a comprehensive collection including thirty of Mead's most important articles, ten of them previously unpublished.