Editing Symbolic interactionism (section)

==Central interactionist themes==
To Blumer's conceptual perspective, he put them in three core propositions: that people act toward things, including each other, on the basis of the meanings they have for them; that these meanings are derived through social interaction with others; and that these meanings are managed and transformed through an interpretive process that people use to make sense of and handle the objects that constitute their social worlds. This perspective can also be described as three core principles- Meaning, Language and Thinking- in which social constructs are formed. The principle of meaning is the center of human behavior. Language provides meaning by providing means to symbols. These symbols differentiate social relations of humans from that of animals. By humans giving meaning to symbols, they can express these things with language. In turn, symbols form the basis of communication. Symbols become imperative components for the formation of any kind of communicative act. Thinking then changes the interpretation of individuals as it pertains to symbols.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.colorado.edu/Communications/meta-discourse/Papers/App_Papers/Nelson.htm|title=Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism|last=Nelson|first=Lindsey D.|date=1998|website=University of Colorado Boulder}} {{dead link|date=October 2021}}</ref>

Some symbolic interactionists like Goffman had pointed out the obvious defects of the pioneering Mead concept upon which the contemporary symbolic interactionism is built, it has influenced the modern symbolic interactionism to be more conducive to conceiving "social-psychological concerns rather than sociological concerns".<ref name=":05">{{Cite journal |title=Interaction and Symbolic Interactionism |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.2011.34.3.315 |journal=Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction|year=2011 |doi=10.1525/si.2011.34.3.315 |jstor=10.1525/si.2011.34.3.315 |last1=Lehn |first1=Dirk vom |last2=Gibson |first2=Will |volume=34 |issue=3 |pages=315–318 |s2cid=56108733 |url-access=subscription }}</ref> For instance, during analyzing symbolic interactionism, the participants' emotional fluctuations that are inexorably entailed are often ignored because they are too sophisticated and volatile to measure.<ref name=":05" /> When the participants are being selected to participate in certain activities that are not part of their normal daily routine, it will inevitably disrupt the participants psychologically, causing spontaneous thoughts to flow that are very likely to make the participants veer away from their normal behaviors. These psychological changes could result in the participants' emotional fluctuations that manifest themselves in the participants' reactions; therefore, manufacturing biases that will the previously mentioned biases. This critique unveiled the lack of scrutiny on participants' internal subjective processing of their environment which initiates the reasoning and negotiating faculties, which the contemporary symbolic interactionism also reflects.<ref name=":05" /> Henceforth, prejudice is not a purely psychological phenomenon, instead it can be interpreted from a symbolic interactionism standpoint,<ref name=":05" /> taking individuals' construction of the social reality into account.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Azarian |first=Reza |date=September 2021 |title=Analytical Sociology and Symbolic Interactionism: Bridging the Intra-disciplinary Divide |journal=The American Sociologist |language=en |volume=52 |issue=3 |pages=530–547 |doi=10.1007/s12108-021-09484-2 |issn=0003-1232|doi-access=free }}</ref>

=== Principles ===
Keeping Blumer's earlier work in mind [[David A. Snow]], professor of sociology at the [[University of California, Irvine]], suggests four broader and even more basic orienting principles: [[human agency]], interactive determination, symbolization, and [[emergence]]. Snow uses these four principles as the thematic bases for identifying and discussing contributions to the study of social movements.

# '''Human agency''': emphasizes the active, willful, goal-seeking character of human actors. The emphasis on agency focuses attention on those actions, events, and moments in social life in which agentic action is especially palpable.
# '''Interactive determination''': specifies that understanding of focal objects of analysis, whether they are self-concepts, identities, roles, practices, or even social movements. Basically this means, neither individual, society, self, or others exist only in relation to each other and therefore can be fully understood only in terms of their interaction.
# '''Symbolization''''':'' highlights the processes through which events and conditions, artifacts, people, and other environmental features that take on particular meanings, becoming nearly only objects of orientation. Human behavior is partly contingent on what the object of orientation symbolizes or means.
# '''Emergence''': focuses on attention on the processual and non-habituated side of social life, focusing not only on organization and texture of social life, but also associated meaning and feelings. The principle of emergence points us not only to the possibility of new forms of social life and system meaning but also to transformations in existing forms of social organization.<ref name=":3" />