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babies: symbolic interactionists or goffmanian chain ritualists?

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1. Bandura would point to some kind of modeling/mimicking (similar to your point one), Skinner to environmental rewards. Chomsky would just say that the baby smiles because it can, smiling is in its nature (note, for example, that your pet ferret does not smile back).

   tf

   May 11, 2008 at 6:17 am
2. what no mechanistic description? the baby smiles because of mirror neurons begin to cascade toward the state felt by others?

   i do find it interesting that the model in almost all the above theories is cognitive, about an externally perceived relation between stimulus and response.

   how can you know the ferret is not smiling? “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him”… no? i’ve seen people describe ferrets as happy, when they just appeared to be playing, similarly they were said to be sad when they appeared to be trying to hide.

   jeremy hunsinger

   May 11, 2008 at 1:55 pm
3. Fabio, (1) sounds like classical conditioning and (2) sounds like operant conditioning (of course both could also be thought of as operant conditioning, but phrased in slightly different ways), so the distinction escapes me. In (1) it is not the “symbolic connotations” that appear to account for the learning, but simply the classical pairing of an involuntary response with a rewarding stimulus. In (2) smiling simply precedes “positive environmental feedback” which is the standard Skinnerian setup. As Parsons was well aware, if you can explain action with reductionistic behaviorist theory, then the entire enterprise of imputing purposes and motives is threatened, so in neither case can the behavior be considered to be following a “means-ends” scheme.

   Well, how old is the baby??? It is clear that babies are born with the capacity to imitate facial gestures (the classic paper is Meltzoff and Moore 1977; for a wild contemporary ride that stretches those insights with a bit of contemporary neuroscience see Gallese 2002), so at least initially a baby smiling at the sight of another person smiling cannot possibly be conceived as purposive behavior but neither is it explainable by traditional learning theory, so it falls under the type of action (imitation, or “embodied simulation”) that you tucked under your asterisk.

   Omar

   May 11, 2008 at 2:02 pm
4. Teppo and Jeremy H: Ferrets smile. Just ask Jessica.

   Omar: We’re at 4 1/2 months. I think the baseline observation is that there’s much imitative smiles, especially early on. But when does the learning-smile sequence start? And when do babies learn to judge social situations, which triggers more smiles?

   fabiorojas

   May 11, 2008 at 3:53 pm
5. Good question! I can tell you what Mead said on the subject (since I’m reading Mead in preparation for the Theory Class I’ll be teaching in the fall):

   To return to the formula given above for the formation of an object in consciousness, we may define the social object in terms of social conduct as we defined the physical object in terms of our reactions [to them]…The object was found to consist of the sensous [sic] experience of the stimulation to an act plus the imagery from past experience of the final result of the act. The social object will then be the gestures, i. e., the early indicators of an ongoing social act in another plus the imagery of our own response to that stimulation. To the young child the frowns and smiles of those about him, the attitude of body, the outstretched arms, are at first simply stimulations that call out instinctive responses of his own appropriate to those gestures [consistent with the Meltzoff and Moore results]. He [sic] cries or laugs, he [sic] moves toward his mother, or stretches out his arms. When these gestures in others bring back the images of his own responses and their results, the child has the material out of which he [sic] builds up the social objects that form the most important part of his environment. We are familiar with this phase of a baby’s development, being confident that he [sic] recognizes the different members of the group about him. He [sic] acts then with confidence toward them since their gestures have come to have meaning for him. His own response to their stimulations and its consequences are there to interpret the facial expressions and attitudes of body and tones of voice. The awakening of social intelligence of the child is evidenced not so much through his ready responses to the gestures of others, for these have been in evidence much earlier. It is the inner assurance of his ow readiness to adjust himself to the attitudes of others that looks out of his eyes and appears in his own bodily attitudes

   ….The form of the social object must be found first of all in the experience of other selves. The earliest achievement of social consciousness will be the merging of the imagery of the baby’s first responses and their results with the stimulations of the gestures of others. The child will not succeed in forming an object of himself–of putting the so-called subjective material of consciousness within such a self–until he has recognized about him social objects who have arisen in his experience though this process of filling out stimulations with past experience of response…The child early social percepts are of others. After these arise incomplete and partial selves–or “me’s”–…which precede his [sic] perception of himself as a whole (Mead 1912: 404-405).

   So I think that Mead’s answer is: not yet! In order for the child to be able to judge social situations, she must have a “self concept.” But at that early stage, what the child have are concepts of the “social objects” around him or her (in your case pretty much your face and the gestures that accompany it), as well as concepts of the physical objects that she interacts with. What is interest about Mead’s proposal is that because he defines an “object” as percept+some sort of motor “imagery” (really a schema in modern language) that accompanies perception, he believes that we first form concepts of “social objects” external to us (i.e perception of faces + memories of the motor schemes triggered by those faces), then form concepts of physical objects and lastly form a concept of our own selves molded after those initial social objects that we come equipped to the world ready to recognize and imitate. So that the child won’t be able to conceptualize a situation in which she is a separate self interacting with other selves, until at least when primitive locomotion starts to happen.

   Omar

   May 11, 2008 at 5:13 pm