In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves.
Category Archive: George Herbert Mead
Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law.
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.
What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.
The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.
To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.