Contribution
A founding text of American social psychology. It argues that “society” and “individuals” are “collective and distributive aspects of the same thing” (ch. I), that the immediate social reality is the idea one person has of another (ch. III), and that the self of ordinary speech is a feeling of appropriation whose objects are formed in communication (ch. V). Within that it names “the reflected or looking-glass self” (ch. V), the source of the phrase the record cites, and then works through pride, vanity, honour, humility, resentment, withdrawal and conformity as phases of a self that lives in imagined other minds (chs. VI, VIII).
Key insight
The other in whose eyes one sees oneself is always an imagined other. “So far as the study of immediate social relations is concerned the personal idea is the real person” (ch. III). The same holds of the self-idea’s audience: “in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it” (ch. V). What moves us “is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind”. So the audience that shapes a self is the person’s construction, and can diverge from any real audience.
Assumptions
- Introspection, observation of the author’s own two children, and literature are taken as evidence. No method is stated by which a claim could be shown false.
- Self-feeling is an instinct, “doubtless evolved in connection with its important function in stimulating and unifying the special activities of individuals” (ch. V), refined by communication into sentiments.
- Persons are known only as ideas. “I do not see how anyone can hold that we know persons directly except as imaginative ideas in the mind” (ch. III). Cooley says he does not deny “the independent reality of persons”, only that the personal idea is “the immediate social reality”.
- The book carries its time’s assumptions about sex and race (for example ch. V on women’s dependence on “personal support and corroboration”, ch. VIII on “the intrinsic cantankerousness of the race”). They are part of the text and not of its argument about the self.
Key results
There are no results in the empirical sense. The theses, by chapter:
- Ch. I. “A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.” The antithesis of society and individual is “false and hollow”. Innovation “is just as social as conformity”.
- Ch. III. Thought is “imaginary conversation”; “the interlocutor, who is half of all thought and life, is drawn from the accessible environment”. “There is no separation between real and imaginary persons.” A group is realized in the mind through personal images: “group sentiment, in so far as it is awakened by definite images, is only a variety of personal sentiment”; public opinion “is sometimes thought of as a vast impersonal force, like a great wind, though ordinarily it is conceived simply as the opinion of particular persons”. A person aware of a nation or an epoch embraces “ideas or sentiments which he attributes to his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect”. Hence “the imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society”. “Self and other do not exist as mutually exclusive social facts”.
- Ch. V, the self. “The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.” It is not ordinarily the body. “There is no sense of ‘I,’ as in pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they.”
- Ch. V, the looking-glass self. “In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one’s self … appears in a particular mind”. Three elements: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.” The other’s weight matters: “We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.”
- Ch. V, becoming what one is taken for. “a sensitive man, in the presence of an impressive personality, tends to become, for the time, his interpretation of what the other thinks he is.” Cooley calls it “usually a temporary and somewhat superficial phenomenon” but “typical of all ascendency”. And: “Directly or indirectly the imagination of how we appear to others is a controlling force in all normal minds.”
- Ch. VI, stability. Pride is a reflected self worked over “until it is a steadfast portion of his thought”. Vanity, by contrast, is “becoming, so far as he can, what any flatterer says he is”. The self-respecting man “discriminates and selects”, and independence of opinion means only that one “can supply their places by imagination, can hold on to some influences and reject others, choose his leaders, individualize his conformity”. “No one can permanently maintain a standard of honor in his own mind if he does not conceive of some other mind or minds as sharing and corroborating this standard.” The audience may be dead or ideal: “anyone that is at all real, that is imaginable, to us, becomes a possible occasion of social self-feeling”. Resentment is the aggressive self’s response “to imagined depreciation”; humility is yielding to it.
- Ch. VI, the pathology of the imagined audience. The man of peculiar aims maintains his self-image by “cultivating in imagination the approval of some higher tribunal”; if he becomes indifferent to his neighbours “The image lacks verification and correction”. Delusions of persecution are “a like extravagant development of that jealousy regarding what others are thinking of us”. And “‘queerness’ is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection from other minds.”
- Ch. VIII, conformity. Its ordinary motive is “a vague sense of the depreciatory curiosity which one imagines that he will excite”; “His social self-feeling is hurt by an unfavorable view of himself that he attributes to others.” Group standards “are enforced by the mere inertia of the minds constituting the group”, without “any deliberate purpose”.
- Ch. VIII, non-conformity. Its essence is “contrary suggestion or the spirit of opposition”: “if others are against him one feels sure they are his own.” And “non-conformity may be regarded as a remoter conformity”, to an imagined group: “Our real environment consists of those images which are most present to our thoughts”. “opposition, by itself, being sterile”.
Claims
Not filled: the note is Skimmed. The theses are listed by chapter above. None is supported by more than illustration.
Concepts
- Self-feeling, the “my-feeling” or “sense of appropriation”: the feeling by which any idea is named “I” or “mine”; for Cooley the defining mark of the self (ch. V).
- Social self: “any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own” (ch. V).
- Reflected or looking-glass self: the class of social self whose feeling is set by an imagined appearance in another mind and an imagined judgement of it (ch. V).
- Personal idea: the system of sentiments a person’s symbol calls up; “the immediate social reality” (ch. III).
- Conformity: “the endeavor to maintain a standard set by a group”, voluntary rather than mechanical imitation (ch. VIII).
- Contrary suggestion: opposition to what is suggested, felt as self-assertion (ch. VIII, after Baldwin).
Connections
Cooley draws on William James’s “empirical self” and Baldwin’s social psychology (contrary suggestion, imitation and invention), and illustrates from Goethe, Thoreau, Emerson, George Eliot and the autobiography of J. A. Symonds. The looking-glass self is the ancestor of reflected appraisal in symbolic interactionism (Mead, who is later) and of the record’s other social-self material; the chapters read do not anticipate pluralistic ignorance as a named error, though chapter VIII’s conformity is driven by an attributed judgement, which is its mechanism.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-415, step 1 (the audience in a self-model can be a false unity). The claim says Cooley “makes the self-conception run through imagined judgements of others” and that it adds “the others imagined can be a unity no one composes”. The first half is right, with a correction: for Cooley the looking-glass self is “a very large and interesting class of cases” of the social self, not the whole of it, and the self is defined by self-feeling, not by the reflection. The second half is less new than the claim says. Cooley already holds that the audience is imagined and may be unreal (“There is no separation between real and imaginary persons”; the “higher tribunal”; the dead and fictional as “occasion of social self-feeling”), that a group is realized as imagined persons, and that a person attributes sentiments to “his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect”. What he does not do is say that the attributed collective can be a unity no one composes while its members hold otherwise. That is the claim’s addition, and the reading leaves it the claim’s.
- CLAIM-415, step 2 (rejection does not free). Cooley anticipates it, and the claim should say so. Non-conformity is “contrary suggestion”, in which what others enjoin settles what one does by opposition (“if others are against him one feels sure they are his own”); resentment is a response “to imagined depreciation” and so is organized by it; and “opposition, by itself, being sterile”. Cooley’s way out is selection among imagined audiences, “a remoter conformity”, which is close to the claim’s A39 reading that restores agency.
- “I am whatever you say I am.” The nearest text is chapter V’s “tends to become, for the time, his interpretation of what the other thinks he is” and chapter VI’s vanity, “becoming, so far as he can, what any flatterer says he is”. Cooley treats this as the unstable pole, against pride and self-respect, not as the general case. The phrase is the owner’s and the lyric’s; LIT-1379’s summary should not be read as Cooley endorsing it.
- CLAIM-355 (the constructed owner). Consonant. Cooley’s “I” is a feeling attached to whatever ideas one appropriates, “not separate from the rest but gradually merging into it”, and “every cherished idea is a self” (ch. VI). He describes no further owner. He does not argue that the sense of one owner is an illusion; he takes self-feeling at face value (“there is no appeal from it”).
- CLAIM-402 and CLAIM-349. Chapter VI’s “‘queerness’ is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection from other minds” is a looping effect stated in 1902. The self-respecting man who “discriminates and selects” among judgements is CLAIM-349’s conditional authority in other words. Both are illustrations, not evidence.
- THEORY warranted? None. The chapters read state an interpretive framework without a test, and the record’s claims are its own argument, not THEORY.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- No method that could come out otherwise: introspection, two children, and literary quotation. The claims are not tested here, and the book does not say how they could be.
- The looking-glass self is stated for “a particular mind”, an individual other. Groups enter through imagined persons; the mechanism for an imagined collective is sketched in a paragraph of chapter III, not developed.
- Seven chapters were not read, including chapter IV on sympathy and chapter X on the social aspect of conscience (“Conscience Reflects a Social Group”), which may bear on the imagined audience further.
- The 1902 text; the 1922 revision was not compared.
Open questions
- Chapter X’s “Ideal Persons as Factors in Conscience” and “Conscience Reflects a Social Group” may state the imagined collective more fully than chapter III. Reading it would settle how much of CLAIM-415’s step 1 is already Cooley’s.
- Does the looking-glass self’s imagined judgement track real others’ judgements? Cooley assumes it often does not (“This image is probably distorted”); the later empirical literature on reflected appraisals is where that is tested, and the record holds none of it.