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The looking-glass self is Charles Horton Cooley’s conceptualization of the “social self”. Cooley used the image of a mirror as a metaphor for the way in which our experience of self is an emotional response to the supposed evaluations of others, especially significant others.
Cooley distinguished three ”principal elements of the looking-glass self: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his [sic] judgment of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification” (Cooley 1922: 184). When learning the meaning of personal pronouns, which refer to different objects when used by different people, children must imagine themselves from the perspective of others. After coming to understand what others mean when they refer to themselves, that is, that ”I refers to self-feeling, children ”sympathize with these others and this empathetic process gives meaning to their own incipient self-feelings. ”I is social because when it is used it is always addressed to an audience, and its use thus indicates children s newly acquired ability to take the role of their audience. Once they begin to do this, they can also perform different selves for different audiences.
The self emerges in interaction, becomes meaningful only in contrast to that which is not of self (society), and is thus inextricable from society. Cooley’s looking-glass self was elaborated by George Herbert Mead in the latter s development of the notion of taking the role of the other, especially the generalized other, as the mechanism through which a unified self emerges in interaction. Cooley also influenced Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of the self as a situated performance. There is a significant body of research on what is now commonly referred to as ”reflected self appraisal and its role in the development of self-concepts, and Cooley s ideas have influenced the sociology of emotions.
Bibliography:
- Cooley, C. H. (1922) Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribner’s, New York.
- Cooley, C. H. (1930) Sociological Theory and Social Research. Henry Holt, New York.
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