Bio: (1863-1947) American sociologist. William Thomas received his doctorate from the University of Tennessee, after which he taught sociology at the University of Chicago from 1896 to 1918. He was a member and associate of the most important representatives of the first generation of the Chicago School of Sociology. After being forced to leave the University of Chicago in 1918, Thomas subsequently taught or was a researcher at several universities and institutes in America and Sweden. While working at the University of Chicago, he formulated his theoretical approach - symbolic interactionism, which was inspired by the theory of evolution and the philosophy of pragmatism.

                                            Polish Peasant

During his career, Thomas studied very different areas of social life, such as professions, social psychology of sex, education, cultural diffusion, and childhood. However, Thomas is best known for his extensive empirical and theoretical research on peasants in Poland, as well as their lives as immigrants in the United States. This great research came from Thomas' interest in the European peasantry and their emigration to the United States. His research, conducted in collaboration with Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki, lasted four years, and the results of that research were published in the five-volume book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920). Thomas is the main author of parts of the book concerning the theoretical framework, hypotheses, and conclusions of the research. His theoretical approach is a combination of sociology and social psychology. He believed that social psychology represents the application of individual psychology to collective phenomena.

The primary field of this science is the study of "attitudes" and "values". Attitudes refer to the special organization of a person's response in relation to a social situation, while the answer itself can be explicit or implicit. To understand attitudes, it is necessary to understand the values ​​that people have. Value is any form of activity of an individual, for which (activity) the meaning is socially determined. An individual's activity is a link between values ​​and attitudes. In that sense, social psychology studies all those attitudes that are important for the social organization of life and which are manifested in social activities. This science studies cultural attitudes, that is, rules of conduct that regulate active relationships between individuals themselves, but also between individuals and the group as a whole. Rules of conduct can take the form of customs, laws, ideals, etc., while institutions, such as family, community, tribe, and state, systematize these rules and they form the center of social organization.

Social groups at lower levels of cultural evolution tend to control all individual activities. At higher levels of cultural evolution, areas of culture appear that stand outside social regulation and no longer have a direct impact on the survival or coherence of society. Sociology as a science should study only those cultural areas that are important for social organization. Sociology, in Thomas' conception of it, is a narrower science than social psychology and is encompassed by it. Thomas believes that the role of social psychology is to be a methodological center of sociological interest, but also an auxiliary science to other special social sciences. The basic methodological principle is that individual and social phenomena are caused by a combination of these phenomena, that is, that one value and one attitude are never independent, but exist in combination with each other. In society, there is a constant interaction between objective social consciousness and individual consciousness. In that sense, every social phenomenon represents a dual relationship of interaction between already existing social values ​​and individual attitudes that influenced those values. Thomas' approach is to focus on the complicated relationship of "social organization" with individuals.

                         Wishes - Psychological Impulses

Thomas believed that there are four basic "whishes" (desires), that is, four basic psychological impulses in all individuals: the need for new experiences; the need to gain recognition; the will to have power (in later works Thomas instead of the wish for power puts the wish for compassion as one of the four basic whishes); and the need for security. The character of a person is determined by the way of organizing wishes, and that organization is a consequence of the innate character of a person and the experience of that person, primarily concerning the kind of social recognition received by the expression of a wish (desire). Apart from the character of the person, how these wishes are expressed, in a specific case, also depends on the specific "definition of the situation" of that person. Definitions of the situation are organized ways of reacting that modify and control the expression of desires.

Every person, before doing something, approaches the definition of the (social) situation in which he finds himself. This definition of the situation can be spontaneous, but it can also be socially given in advance. Definitions of the situation that have already been socially defined have their own rules of action and serve as the direction of interest towards certain values, while at the same time serving to ignore other values. Once definitions of a situation have been created, they function as a moral code, that is, a set of rules and norms of behavior that regulate the expression of desires. The definition of a situation does not have to be directly related to real circumstances, because " If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences" (Thomas, 1928). Social conflicts arise when definitions of situations change too quickly, or when existing definitions of situations do not provide individuals with the opportunity to adequately satisfy their basic desires.

                                     Personality Types

Thomas gives three ideal personality types, based on the way they react to social definitions of situations. The first type of personality is "the Philistine". This type of personality acts conservatively and accepts only small and gradual changes in social definitions of the situation. The second type of person is "the Bohemian". This type of personality has great potential for the evolution of one's own character because that character is not firmly formed, that is, his attitudes do not act as a stable and systematized structure. The third type of personality is the "Creative man" personality. This type of person has an orderly and organized character, but he also needs to change his own attitudes through rational thinking, to make his activities more productive.

Main works

The Relation of the Medicine-man to the Origin of the Professional Occupations (1903);

Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex (1907);

Source-Book for Social Origins (1909);

Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education (1917);

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vol. (1918-1919);

Old World Traits Transplanted (1921);

The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis (1923);

The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (1928);

Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (1936);

Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences (1939).