Thomas Theorem

One of the most well-known and utilized theories in sociology, the Thomas theorem argues that individuals make decisions in situations based on their interpretation of the situation, whether that interpretation is correct or not. A brief look at W. I. Thomas's academic career, an overview of symbolic interaction, the sociological perspective within which Thomas' theorem lies, further discussion of the theorem itself and how it emerged out of decades of work is presented. Applications consist of collective and individual perceptions of Canadian bureaucracy, how police define victims of sexual assault based on social assumptions, and how people react to the rhetoric of fear. The main argument against the Thomas theorem is the structural-functionalist assumption that social structures are the bases for why humans react differently to various circumstances and that reality lies in a series of social facts.

Keywords Definition of the Situation; Ethnography; Interactionist Perspective; Participant Observation; Reflexivity; Role-Taking; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; Social Fact

Day to Day Social Interaction > The Thomas Theorem

Overview

"If men define their situations as real, they are real in the consequences." This phrase is known as the Thomas theorem in sociology. It is also called “definition of the situation,” and is one of the best- known concepts in sociology. This famous quote, coined by W. I. Thomas describes how humans understand reality through a complex calculation that relies on the individual's interpretation of the situation. The interpretation may or may not be accurate, yet the individual behaves as though his interpretation is correct. Further, humans have an understanding about what the social expectations are for a situation, and these may or may not coincide with the wishes of the individual. This occurs on all levels of social life for people, according to Thomas. Definition of the situation is the means people use to determine what is expected of them in various situations. The key to the theory, though, is that this assessment is subjective. In other words, people go through life deciding the meaning of situations, and those meanings determine how they behave in the situation, regardless of whether or not the interpretation is accurate. This inventive way of understanding how humans make sense of reality was developed in the 1920s, when the Chicago School of Sociology was emerging as a definitive force in the field.

The Life of W. I. Thomas

American sociologist William Isaac Thomas (1863–1947) is best known for his development of the Thomas theorem. However, he had been engaged in many other intellectual interests before developing this theory. Interestingly, and like many early sociologists, his initial academic focus was not sociology; he studied literature and modern languages and taught classes as diverse as French and natural history. He developed an interest in sociology when he began to read the work of English structural-functionalist Herbert Spencer. The broad background of Thomas, and many other sociologists of his time, reveals the differences between contemporary academia and higher education during its early years.

After teaching literature in the mid-1880s at the University of Tennessee and sociology at Oberlin College in 1894, Thomas was asked to teach at the University of Chicago were he completed his doctorate in anthropology and sociology in 1896. The new sociology department at the University of Chicago was a dynamic place, with new ideas about sociology, social problems, urbanization, industrialization, and deviance bubbling up for decades after its origin. Colleagues of Thomas are also very famous indeed in the sociology field, including George Herbert Mead, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Edwin Sutherland, and Louis Wirth (Bulmer, 1984).

Thomas worked at the University of Chicago for twenty years. Some of his early work reveals how contained ideas were in the earliest part of the twentieth century. Thomas's first major work, Sex and Society (1907), the anthropological analysis looked at the difference between sexes in societies and attempted to explain that women should be the central entity between the father and the children. In other words, Thomas argued that there is a biological explanation why women are the key caregivers for children, while men are better suited to other familial tasks. This rather traditional assessment of female and male roles in childrearing was, of course, quite within acceptable terms for the period. In this work, Thomas also argued that men are biologically more motor-oriented, while women are more stationary.

Receiving a grant to study immigrants in American society, Thomas went to Europe to begin his work where he meet Florian Znaniecki, who worked with Thomas on an early sociological classic, published in 1920, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group. This is a benchmark study because it identified the effects of immigration on people, including the adjustment period and how norms are retained in the new country, even when they create a disadvantage for immigrants. But chiefly, Thomas formulated a scheme of wishes in the individual that seemed to him to be fundamental, at least, to social behavior. These include the wish for security, safety, and conservation of the old and tried; the wish for novelty, for escape from ennui; the wish for recognition from others, and the desire for prestige; and lastly, the wish for intimate face-to-face response, or the desire for love mates or comrades (Young, 1924). It is out of these findings that Thomas later, in his study of deviant girls in society, develops his famous notion "definition of the situation."

It should be noted that Thomas and Znanieki's work on immigrants was considered one of the first real research done in American sociology. Polish peasants were the focus because Thomas initially had gone to Europe to study various European groups and settled on Poles; further, Poles were the single largest immigrant group in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, making it an ideal focus of this work. Thomas and Znaniecki analyzed letters sent to and received from Polish immigrants and those remaining in Poland. This use of letters as data was rather uncommon at the time and this method of study is called ethnography, or ethnographic studies, meaning it uses a qualitative analysis of some element of a culture to make inferences about a group. This is a common method used in anthropology, though less so in sociology.

In 1918, W. I. Thomas left Chicago under a cloud of scandal that is poorly documented. He was well known for holding left-wing political ideas and living an unconventional lifestyle. He was also known for having many relationships with women. He was arrested under the Mann Act, a law that is designed to ensure prostitutes cannot be moved across state lines. It is unlikely Thomas had anything to do with prostitution, but the University of Chicago reacted by firing him and refusing to acknowledge his academic contributions and published work Thomas had written under the names of other researchers in the department of sociology. This was not acknowledged until 1951, when the Social Science Research Committee reissued the work under Thomas's name. Thomas emerged in New York City in the early 1920s and by the mid-1920s was able to work with the extraordinarily prominent social scholars from Europe in their establishment of a new type of university, the New School for Social Research. The New School, which at the time was not a well-known school, was progressive, and some might say, radical. But Thomas never had a permanent position again in his teaching career. In 1927, Thomas was made honorary president of the American Sociological Association.

W.I. Thomas & Symbolic Interaction

Sociological theory in the early 1900s was dominated by European-based marcosociological theories. Commonly, theorists maintained either a conflict theory approach or a structural-functionalist approach. A social scientist's position was based on his assumptions about the social world. If one assumed the social world was defined by the relationship between the oppressed and oppressor, he or she would hold a conflict theorist approach, which had been defined by both Karl Marx and Max Weber in the late 1800s and early 1900s. If one believed the social world is defined by social order and that order is maintained by shared norms and values, he or she would hold a structural-functionalist perspective, purported principally by Emile Durkheim.

While neither of these approaches worked well to help understand why humans reproduce role expectations, structural-functionalists emerged in the early 1900s as holding the most legitimate explanation for this. Structural-functionalists held that societies have certain needs and those needs will be fulfilled by the existing role expectations. Fulfilling these expectations has little to do with the individual's understanding of the social world; reality exists outside the individual and individuals reproduce the normative structure, for the most part. Naturally, there will always be deviance in societies, since seeing the effects of someone deviating from the norms is one of the ways individuals know how to behave in a society. So, structural-functionalists believed that, since all social systems are striving for social order, the members are likely to behave in ways that are in accord with the dominant social norms.

Structural-functionalism tended to be a rather conservative theoretical position in that it holds that normative structures are neither moral nor immoral; rather they are either functional or dysfunctional. In other words, they either work to support and perpetuate the current social order or they do not. For this reason, any significant deviance against the normative structure would be seen as dysfunctional. Further, when members deviate in large numbers, it reflects what Durkheim called a sense of "anomie," or disconnectedness. This sense of anomie is the result of a lack of common ideas about norms and values in society.

In the 1920s, the Chicago School of sociology had begun to develop different explanations for social behavior. Several theorists, based on the early works of Max Weber, began to suggest that humans tend to have a common understanding of meaning in the social world, or reality, but that this reality is interpreted on an individual basis. It is this early work on interpretation that eventually emerged as symbolic interaction in sociology.

Symbolic interactionism, which is known as the interactionist perspective in sociology, suggests that we have a sense of self that is social. That self is defined by symbols that are ultimately defined by the rest of society. In other words, because we can use language, which is really a series of symbols, the world is only known and can only be defined through such symbols. Meaning for humans, according to symbolic interactionists, is in the symbol that we use to define the object. So, we use the symbol t-r-e-e to describe the larger vegetation that grows outside with leaves or needles. T-r-e-e is not a tree; it a symbol used to convey the concept of a tree. Further, the meanings these symbols hold are not defined by individuals. These meanings come from the larger society and are always culturally and historically dependent. Individuals do the same thing with themselves, according to interactionists; people look out into the world and interpret what it means to be whomever they are based on the series of symbols used to define themselves. It is in this way that individuals take on identities, in the form of roles and statuses, and adopt the social expectations that accompany them. Individuals do not define what t-r-e-e means, nor do they define what m-o-m will mean. This is defined externally, and, for the most part, people reproduce these social expectations. For Thomas's colleague George Herbert Mead, the most revered symbolic interactionist, an individual's sense of self is in the interpretations of how well he or she is aligning his or her behavior to the social expectations. Put another way, an individual imagines himself the object of other's contemplation, what Mead calls taking-the-role-of-the other, and, through a course of interpretation, comes to understand what and who he is in the world through this process. This process is also called reflexivity in sociology.

George Herbert Mead is considered the father of symbolic interaction, yet he never personally published anything on this perspective. Rather, he lectured on it for years, died suddenly, and his student Herbert Blumer coined the term "symbolic interaction" and developed a clear picture of how humans determine reality and a sense of self through a constant process. Blumer set out three basic premises of the perspective: First, "human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things"; second, "the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society"; and finally, "these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters" (1969).

While Blumer was able to develop a cohesive theory in the 1960s out Mead's early lectures, W. I. Thomas's work in the 1920s utilized Mead's early work to develop this powerful theorem that is understood and used by interactionist today. In fact, these well-developed theories altered how sociologists viewed role expectations; through the lens of symbolic interaction, theories of how people are socialized (learn to behave in particular situations in socially acceptable ways) through a process called "role-taking" in which individuals put themselves in the position of others and imagine what others must think of them and their behavior. This is a very basic idea in symbolic interaction.

Interactionist theory was quite radical in the early 1900s. Thomas's work contributed to the battle between the powerful structural-functionalists of the era and the new ideas about the roles and statuses that were being developed in symbolic interaction. His work on The Unadjusted Girl in 1923, as well as his work coauthored by his future wife, Dorothy Swaine, in 1928, The Child in America, are the works in which the Thomas theorem first emerges.

The Thomas Theorem as Definition of the Situation

American sociologist Robert Merton pointed out that this entire phrase, and earlier part of this phrase, is seen only twice in Thomas's work (1992, p. 183). He also points out that this concept is quite old and can found in many of the ideas of great philosophers. The power of Thomas's phrase is in its simplicity. It reflects a certain universalism in that it can be applied to both an individual's sense of self in general, in a given situation, and as part of a collective reaction.

In The Unadjusted Girl, Thomas continues his work that he began on immigrants. That is, as stated earlier, he took the ideas he had developed in his work on Polish peasants and applied them to poorly adjusted girls. He contended that, like immigrants, the unadjusted girl has to battle with the rapidly changing social situation as the society moves to industrialization. This social change creates a sense of confusion for members, and many of the old forms of social control disappear. It creates an effect that the individual must react in a individualistic way, rather than what he said is a simpler fashion of a pre-industrialized period. In other words, with rapid social changes, wishes of individuals are ignored and, in their reaction to these unfulfilled needs, the girls in his study behaved in individualistic, and therefore, socially unacceptable ways. But, the key to this work is that these socially acceptable ways are defined by the larger social world. Consequently, those girls who behaved unacceptably were aware of this and, therefore, defined themselves as socially unadjusted. For Thomas, it is the families' expectations of the girls, which originate from the larger society, that create the definition of what a well-adjusted girl is. It is in this proposition that definitions are found outside individuals, but that their own interpretations of expectations are the sources of behavior, that Thomas's notions of this phenomenon begin.

To emphasize the importance of this work for the understanding of deviance and for the power of dominant norms and values is worthwhile. In other words, it is at this time in sociological history that functionalists had dominated the sociological landscape, particularly in terms of explaining deviance. They contended that in order to maintain low levels of deviance (for all healthy societies always have some deviance), there must be a strong common sense of morality. But, according to Thomas, this morality is not only socially constructed, like all things social, but it is also known to members through lines of interpretation. So that it is impossible for members to know entirely what morality is; it is only possible for members to interpret morality, and these interpretations are bonded by the social definitions of these expectations in society and how certain these definitions are.

Thomas's work on this idea continued and was firmly developed in his 1928 work The Child in America, which he coauthored with his future wife, Dorothy Swaine Thomas. Here, the idea that children are born into a social world that is already defined, and because of this, individuals all come into situations with the combination of known pre-existing social expectations and personal interpretations of these situations. Thomas puts it this way in his earlier work The Unadjusted Girl:

Essentially, what Thomas means is that as individuals come to any situation, they have assumptions about the situation that are not their own, rather these assumptions are part of the existing social structure. The desires, or wishes, of individuals are subordinate to the needs of society. Individuals want to satisfy wishes, even if they are contrary to the expectations of the social structure. Thomas identifies people as measuring reactions based on the relationship between these two things. People are aware, according to Thomas, of the various choices to be made in situations, but those choices lie in interpretations of the situations and may not be part of reality.

Finally, it is crucial to see that defining situations is a process. That is, our sense of what is real and what is part of the landscape of possibility is dynamic and always changing. It is part of a constant interpretation in which the elements come and go and situations change. Still, as Thomas emphasizes in The Child in America, a consistency is the social structure within which the individual must constantly work.

Applications

Definition of the situation is highly applicable in so many aspects of the social world. Still, one of the most useful ways the Thomas theorem has been used is to understand organizations. This is highly powerful because organizations take on a life of their own, seemingly separate from the members. When members perceive others in an organization as having conflicting goals, whether true or not, they will act and react as though this is reality. This has been the demise of many organizations. In Paul Kariya's assessment of the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, it is observed that it did not matter whether the organization was helpful to First Nations tribes or not. In fact, the bureaucracy designed to benefit First Nations individuals was not effective, with unemployment and graduation rates outside of the reserve far higher than on the reserve (Duncan & Ley, 1993, p. 190). The inconsistencies between the goals of the organization and the outcomes were irrelevant, however, if it was perceived that they were fulfilling the expectations. It is in this way that organizations that are ineffective continue, if able to maintain the illusion of being effective.

Sometimes, Thomas's theorem is referred to as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1992, p. 183–7). In other words, this theorem helps clarify how, if a person thinks others think of her in a particular way, this interpretation is the reality and the individual reproduces this, whether it is the truth or not. It also explains how societal norms contribute to labeling individuals as "good" or "bad" based on expectations. Several studies that looked at how police perceive victims of sexual abuse reveal this. For example, if a woman who had been sexually abused had been intoxicated during her abuse, the police were more likely to look at her more negatively and be less inclined to be sympathetic to her situation (Schuller & Stewart, 2000). In a 1997 report, interviews with ninety-one police officers showed that over half defined rape at least partially with language that blamed the victim (Campbell & Johnson, 1997).

Finally, in sociologist Kenneth Ferraro's 1995 look at fear, he marks how perception of crime and other social problems are anchored in perceptions of these issues. In this work, symbolic interaction in general and definition of the situation in particular are used to help explain the gap between people's fear of crime and the true possibility of being a victim of crime. Ferraro uses AIDS as a parallel, saying while one never knows the possibility of contracting the virus, just as one never knows if he will be a victim of a crime, sexual activity is often based on a person’s perception of whether he or she will be exposed. These perceptions, regardless of whether they are accurate or not, are the gauge for behavior. In other words, fear of crime is not the basis for whether someone will be the victim of crime; fear is, rather, the interpretation of whether the person is likely to be the victim of crime.

Critique

There are several perspectives that hold that the definition of the situation is not how humans determine reality. The most forceful one is the perspective that was, in fact, the dominant argument when Thomas developed his theory, structural-functionalism. This perspective argues that humans know the social world through social facts, which are all the elements of society that people behave toward as though they are real. This term, developed by the classical sociological theorist Emile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century, argued that sociological phenomena are measurable, even if they are impossible to see or hear. He believed that even if these phenomena were not empirically measurable in themselves, the effects of them are. Durkheim believed these social facts existed apart from an individual's perception of them, but they are the basis for individual's reality. Conversely, the Thomas theorem argues that facts are based on the individual's interpretation of them and facts do not exist outside a person's observance of a situation; "real" facts are what each person defines as real. Structural-functionalism remains an explanation for reality for many contemporary sociologists.

Terms & Concepts

Definition of the Situation: Also known as the Thomas theorem, it describes how humans create reality through their interpretations.

Ethnography: A method in social sciences that takes aspects of a culture as data and makes inferences about the culture based on smaller, anecdotal pieces.

Reflexivity: In symbolic interaction, reflexivity describes the way people come to develop their sense of self by stepping outside of themselves and trying to imagine what others think of them. In this way, a person is simultaneously the judge and the judged.

Role-Taking: A concept developed by symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead, it is the process of individuals imagining themselves in the roles of others in order to determine who they are. In this process, people take the role of others, trying to determine a sense of self.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The idea that when a person thinks, through interpretation, that others expect them to behave in certain ways, even when others do not, the person fulfills this expectation.

Social Fact: A term coined by structural-functionalist Emile Durkheim in an effort to show that sociological phenomena are measurable by measuring their effects on people, even when the actual phenomena are not empirically measurable.

Interactionist Perspective: Also known as symbolic interaction, this sociological perspective explains the existence of the self; self concept occurs through a process of reflexivity, in which individuals use their interpretations of what they think others think of them to determine who they are.

Bibliography

Athens, L. (2010). Human subordination from a radical interactionist’s perspective. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 40, 339–368. Retrieved October 24, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=53074087

Athens, L. (2012). Mead’s analysis of social conflict: A radical interactionist’s critique. American Sociologist 43, 428–447. Retrieved October 24, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=84368863

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Campbell, L. & Marshall, T. (2011). Anxious attachment and relationship processes: An interactionist perspective. Journal of Personality 79, 917–947. Retrieved October 24, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=67226236

Campbell, R. & Johnson, C. (1997). Police officers perceptions of rape: Is there consistency between state law and individual beliefs? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 12, 527-572.

Duncan, J. & Ley, D. (1993). Place/culture/representation. New York: Routledge.

Ferraro, K. (1995). Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Meltzer, B., Petras, J., & Reynolds, L. (1975). Symbolic interaction: Genesis, varieties, and criticism. New York: Routledge.

Merton, R. & Sztompka, P. (1996). On social structure and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Park, D., & Moro, Y. (2006). Dynamics of situation definition. Mind, Culture & Activity, 13, p. 101-129. Retrieved October 4, 2008 from EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=22345538&site=ehost-live

Payne, B., & Thompson, R. (2008). Sexual assault crisis centre workers' perceptions of law enforcement: defining the situation from a systems perspective. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 10, 23-35. Retrieved October 4, 2008 from EBSCO online database Academic Search Premier: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=30063732&site=ehost-live

Schuller, R. & Stewart, A. (2000). Police response to sexual assault complaints: The role of perpetrator/complainant intoxication. Law and Human Behavior, , 535-551.

Thomas, W. I. (1923). The unadjusted girl. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

Thomas, W. I. & Thomas, D. (1928). The child in America: Behavior problems and programs. New York: Knopf.

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Suggested Readings

McAlister, D. (2011). The law governing racial profiling: Implications of alternative definitions of the situation. Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, 53, 95–103. Retrieved October 24, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=57439668

Merton, R. (1995). The Thomas theorem and the Matthew effect. Social Forces, 74, 379-424.

Retrieved October 4, 2008 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9602020674&site=ehost-live

Tacq, J. (2007, May). Znaniecki's analytic induction as a method of sociological research. Polish

Sociological Review, 158. Retrieved October 4, 2008 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=25741135&site=ehost-live

Wiley, N. (2007, May). Znaniecki's key insight: The merger of pragmatism and neo-Kantianism. Polish

Sociological Review, 158, p. 133-143. Retrieved October 4, 2008 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=25741131&site=ehost-live