George Herbert Mead’s Social Psychology

George Herbert Mead’s social psychology went off in two different directions; one explained the social world in terms of language, the other in terms of (individual) biology. This paper addresses the latter approach, in Mead’s early social psychology in terms of instincts and in his later social psychology in terms of fundamental impulses. The approach derives from William McDougall’s An Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908 and changed in response to criticism of instincts following World War I by John Dewey, Ellsworth Faris, Floyd Allport, and Luther Bernard, among others. The paper argues that such an approach was a dead end and had to be rejected to allow for a scientific social psychology. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.