Significant symbols are, in George Herbert Mead's account, gestures that call out in the person who makes them the same response they call out in the person who receives them. When a shout of fire means the same danger to the shouter as to the hearer, the gesture has become a shared symbol rather than a mere stimulus. Language is the paradigm case, since spoken words are heard by the speaker exactly as by the audience.
Where it comes from
Mead reached the idea by contrasting two levels of interaction, set out in the lectures published as Mind, Self and Society. In the conversation of gestures, one organism responds directly to another's movement without either grasping a meaning: dogs circling in a fight adjust to each other, but neither anticipates its own gesture from the other's standpoint. In symbolic interaction, the gesture is significant — the actor knows in advance what it will mean to the other and can therefore use it deliberately. This shift from non-significant to significant gesture is, for Mead, the emergence of mind.
How it works
Because a significant symbol produces the same response in its user, the actor can take the attitude of the other towards their own conduct. Three consequences follow. Role-taking becomes possible, since the shared symbol supplies the other's standpoint. The self becomes possible, since a person can address and respond to themselves in the same terms others use. Thinking becomes possible, being an inner conversation carried on in significant symbols and therefore socially derived rather than private in origin.
Why it matters
The concept supplies the foundation of symbolic interactionism. Herbert Blumer's first premise — that people act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them — presupposes symbols whose meanings are shared and negotiated in interaction. It also explains why interactionists insist meanings are neither fixed by culture nor invented privately, but worked out and revised in encounters.
For the UPSC answer
Contrast the conversation of gestures with symbolic interaction to define the term, then draw the chain outwards: significant symbols make role-taking possible, role-taking makes the self possible, and the self makes reflective thought possible. Naming language as the type case earns marks quickly.
References & further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.