Charles Horton Cooley
Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) was born in Michigan and was associated with the University of Michigan for all of his professional life. Like Mead, his ideas also contributed to the development of symbolic interaction theory. His perspective on the relation between a person’s self-concept and face-to-face interaction within primary groups is expressed in his frequently cited concept of the “looking glass self” (Cooley, 1922). This metaphor refers to the way one’s identity is formed from the reflections one sees of oneself in the reactions of others. This concept is clearly parallel to Mead’s insights regarding the social origins of one’s self-concept. More than Mead, however, Cooley stressed the importance of our emotional reactions to these responses. When we perceive the reactions of others as indicating either approval or disapproval, we feel pride or shame as a result.
In his book, Human Nature and Social Order, he examines the ‘‘distributive aspect’’ (Cooley, 1922. p. 42) of intersubjective relationships from a social psychological perspective; namely, the development of the self through symbolically mediated interaction. Cooley reconstructed three progressive phases of the evolving self:
1. The ‘‘sense of appropriation’’ (Cooley, 1922, p. 169), which is the expression of a biologically manifested spontaneity and activity.
2. The ‘‘social self’’ (Cooley, 1922, p. 179), which is developed by taking in the attitude of others.
3. The famous ‘‘looking glass self’’ (Cooley, 1922, p. 168-210).
Which describes neither an ‘‘over socialized self ’’ characterized by passive internalization of given habits and values, nor an ‘‘unencumbered self’’ freed from all social constraints. The metaphor ‘‘looking glass self,’’ as Cooley explicitly declared, means not a ‘‘mere mechanical reflection of ourselves,’’ but it represents an open and distinctive self image, created through the imagination and interpretation of the world we inhabit. A looking glass self, according to Cooley, has three ‘‘principal elements’’:
1. The imagination of our appearance to the other person.
2. The imagination of his judgment of that appearance.
3. Some sort of self feeling, such as ‘‘pride or mortification’’ (Cooley 1922, p. 184).
Cooley used the image of a mirror as a metaphor for the way in which people’s self concepts are influenced by their imputations of how they are perceived by 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.’’ Much of the time, Cooley thought, our experience of self is an emotional response to the supposed evaluations of others, especially significant others. Children learn the meaning of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘me’’ and ‘‘mine’’ through the appropriation of objects they desire and claim as their own, in contrast to the things they cannot control.
Importantly, among the objects they seek to control and appropriate as their own are their parents and others in the primary group. As infants and toddlers discover they can influence others by their actions, they simultaneously discover and realize reflections of themselves in these others. Cooley based his self theory on observations of his own children, confirming his initial hypotheses with a systematic study of his third child from shortly after birth to the thirty third month, in order to determine how the word ‘‘I’’ is learned and its meaning. Children begin appropriative processes with attempts to control the things closest to them, including their own bodies, and then move outward to the people in their vicinity, even as infants ‘‘exerting [their] social power’’ to attract attention. They lay claim to their parents in much the same way they assert as their own their noses and their rattles.
To learn 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 understanding 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 (for Cooley, usually the child’s mother), 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. Indeed, Cooley argued that even young children can manipulate their audiences, care more about the opinions of some people than others, and selectively ‘‘own’’ those with whom they are the closest and over whom they have the most influence (e.g., ‘‘my mama’’). Adults are not that different; their imaginations are more complex and specific and their manipulations of others more subtle. The self emerges in interaction, becomes meaningful only in contrast to that which is not of self (society) and is, therefore, inextricable from society. Cooley described the looking-glass self in his first major work, Human Nature and the Social Order, published in 1902.
His analysis of self was influenced by his early reading of idealist and transcendentalist literature, including Thoreau, Goethe, and Emerson, as well as the pragmatism of Dewey, also at Ann Arbor at the time. The social self draws upon the work of the psychologist and philosopher William James and the social psychologist James Mark Baldwin and was articulated within the populist, progressive intellectual milieu of the Midwestern scholarship of Cooley’s era and the sheltered academic environs of the University of Michigan, which granted him the leeway to develop his reflective notion of self based on his observations of his own children and introspection. As Cooley was also a painfully shy and reclusive man who wrote in his journals of his obsession with gaining the approbation of others, his theorization of a self that depends on a reflexive, emotion laden response to imagined evaluations is distinctly autobiographical.
Cooley’s methodological approach follows directly from his conception of the self: human action must be understood in terms of the subjective meanings actors impute to situations. In his conjoining of the social self with society as the communicative imaginations of multiple selves, his looking glass self is a culturally and historically specific product of his social location and his conceptual and political idealism. 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 with those of Mead and Goffman, Cooley’s ideas about the self have become a constitutive and foundational core of theories of self in sociological social psychology and symbolic interactionism, and because of his emphasis on the emotional aspects of identity, have influenced the sociology of emotions.
Critique
Mead thought his work was too ‘‘mentalistic’’ and others have suggested that the looking glass self, if accurate, suggests an over socialized human, passive and overly dependent on the opinions of others. Cooley himself answered both of these concerns, claiming in the introduction to Social Organization in 1907 that imagination was not all of society but only his particular focus. His discussion of the looking glass self, moreover, is only one dimension of the social self conceptualization, in which he points not only to the importance of reflection but also to how humans selectively and actively interpret and appropriate these reflections.
The Principle of Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionists (Blumer, 1969a; Manis and Meltzer, 1978; A. Rose, 1962; Snow, 2001) have tried to enumerate the basic principles of the theory. These principles include the following:
1. Human beings, unlike lower animals, are endowed with the capacity for thought.
2. The capacity for thought is shaped by social interaction.
3. In social interaction, people learn the meanings and the symbols that allow them to exercise their distinctively human capacity for thought.
4. Meanings and symbols allow people to carry on distinctively human action and interactions.
5. People are able to modify or alter the meanings and symbols that they use in action and interaction on the basis of their interpretation of the situation.
6. People are able to make these modifications and alterations because, in part, of their ability to interact with themselves, which allows them to examine possible courses of action, assess their relative advantages and disadvantages, and then choose one.
7. The intertwined patterns of action and interaction make up groups and societies.
“Social life is an empirical self”
What is being discussed here is what psychologists refer to as the empirical self, the self that can be observed or confirmed through ordinary observation. It is qualified by the term social, not to suggest the existence of a self that is non-social — as the “I” in common language typically implies some reference to other individuals — but to underscore and dwell upon its social aspect (Cooley, 1922, pp. 168-169).
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