ABSTRACT
George Herbert Mead (1934) saw two aspects of the self: the "I," which was the source of the impulses to action, and the "me," which represented the person's self-image resulting from the responses of others to those actions. In symbolic interaction theory, no response is truly predictable because the "I" forever remains unknown since it cannot be brought into consciousness. The actions of the self, however, can come to be more and more controlled by the "me," through the development of commitments to certain images of the self. It is the gradual development of commitment to a self-identity of' 'regular blood donor'' and its effect on future behavior that is the focus of this chapter.
