Cooley and the Looking Glass Self

Charles Horton Cooley was part of the first generation of American sociologists and taught in the sociology department at the University of Michigan from 1892, although his degree was in economics. His approach differed from those of his contemporaries, as his was a humanistic approach that emphasized the significance of the mind in developing a sense of self. As such, he opened up discussion about the impact of subjectivity and creativity on the production of society, in contrast to the rather objective approach to the constitution of society taken by many of his contemporaries. Indeed, Cooley saw himself as less of a sociologist than as a scholar fusing history, philosophy and social psychology, and he drew on the work of philosopher William James. The concept of the looking glass self describes how an individual develops his or her identity in response to how he or she understands others' perceptions of him or her. Cooley's work influenced that of George Herbert Mead and contributed to the development of symbolic interactionism. In addition, his work has indirectly influenced feminist work on gender identity and subjectivity.

Keywords Looking Glass Self; Primary Groups; Self Concept; Self Esteem; Social Self; Expressive Ties; Instrumental Ties; Symbolic Interactionism

Socialization > Cooley & the Looking Glass Self

Overview

Charles Horton Cooley was part of the first generation American sociologists and taught in the sociology department at the University of Michigan from 1892, although his degree was in economics. His approach differed from those of his contemporaries, as his was a humanistic approach that emphasized the significance of the mind in developing a sense of self. As such, he opened up discussion about the impact of subjectivity and creativity on the production of society, in contrast to the rather objective approach to the constitution of society taken by many of his contemporaries. Indeed, Cooley saw himself as less of a sociologist than as a scholar fusing history, philosophy and social psychology, and he drew on the work of philosopher William James.

Cooley's most significant contributions to the field of sociology were the concept of "the looking glass self" and what he termed "primary groups" and "secondary groups." The looking glass self was introduced in his book Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) and primary group was introduced in Social Organization (1909). The concept of the looking glass self describes how an individual develops his or her identity in response to how he or she understands others' perceptions of him or her. The concepts of primary and secondary groups describe how interactions between the individual and social groups can influence the individual's socialization (Marshall, 1998). Cooley's work influenced that of George Herbert Mead and contributed to the development of symbolic interactionism. In addition, his work has indirectly influenced feminist work on gender identity and subjectivity.

Charles Horton Cooley

One might argue that Cooley's work was shaped by some of his early life experiences. He was the son of a very successful law professor and Michigan State Supreme Court justice. However, he did not have a highly interactive, intimate relationship with his father. As a result, he developed personality traits that are associated with passive individuals and experienced a number of illnesses that are believed to have been psychosomatic. In order to compensate for his perceived shortcomings, he created a "self" that was successful (i.e. a self that had the traits of men like his father). This imagined self allowed him to cope with living in the shadow of his father and up to his father's standards. Although his work was most widely embraced by sociologists, Cooley always had topics such as "the self" at the top of his list. He wrote extensively on the relationship between the self and society in books such as Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Social Organization (1909), and Social Process (1918).

The Self in Sociology

At the beginning of the twentieth century the discipline of sociology worked with Cartesian concepts of mind and body that viewed them as separate, disconnected entities. However, a number of theorists, such as William James, began rethinking this distinction. William James' work stretched across disciplines (physiology, psychology and philosophy) and influenced thinkers in Europe and the U.S., contributing to both pragmatism and phenomenology. His work on the self, and the idea that it contained within it the capacity to reflect on itself, was especially influential on Cooley.

James divided the self into two parts: the "phenomenal self"-or the self that is experienced as the self-and "self thought," or the self that experiences and knows the self. He further divided the phenomenal self into the "material me," the "social me," and the "spiritual me." The material me comprises the body and its physical surroundings; the social me is created by how one believes others view oneself; and the spiritual me is one's awareness of one's thoughts and emotions. Self thought, on the other hand, is what orders these different phenomenal selves into an enduring sense of identity (Wozniak, 1999).

Charles Cooley built on this framework in order to integrate mind and body as an interconnected, organic whole. Moreover, foreshadowing sociologists who came to be associated with the development of symbolic interactionism at the University of Chicago, Cooley argued that the individual and society could only be understood in relationship to each other, and that each was mutually constitutive of the other. Rather than view the individual as a solitary and discrete entity, Cooley believed that a person's self is developed by his or her social interactions and therefore people are always, through interaction, connected to other people. For Cooley, these interactions create a process through which people come to view themselves as objects and are able to take on the roles of others. He used the example of a looking glass to illustrate his theory (Coser, 1977).

Further Insights

The Looking Glass Self

In 1902, Cooley published Human Nature and the Social Order in which he proposed a theory of the development of the self as a creative agent (Waters, 1994). According to Cooley, a person's sense of self is created by the ideas he or she believes others have about him or her. This self-development depends on interaction with others who reflect back to them images of themselves. In short, we learn who we are from others and our imagination of how we appear to them. We are literally looking at others and imaging the image they have of us. As Cooley wrote:

Mirrors provide us with visual access to the external appearance of our bodies, but the appearance of our bodies is mediated through what we imagine others think of us (Howson, 2004). Thus, the metaphor of the looking glass, or mirror, provides a way to think about the importance of visual information and the appearance of the body and for the development of what Cooley calls the self-idea, which emerges in three key stages:

• First, we image how we appear to others (e.g., as intelligent, pretty, professional);
• Second, the self-idea develops in relation to how we imagine others perceive or judge us (e.g. did we attend the right schools, do we wear attractive clothing, or do we belong to the right professional groups?);
• Third, the self-idea emerges through the "self-feeling" or attitude we develop toward ourselves, based on how we believe others perceive us (e.g. pride or embarrassment about our intelligence, physical appearance, or professional status).

In essence, Cooley argues that the development of self is "an interactive process through which connections are made between the personal subjective self of the viewer and the external world of other people" (Hepworth, 2000, p. 46). It is worth quoting Hepworth in full here:

However, this process of mediation is not error-free, and it is possible for a person to develop a false interpretation of what others think and end up with an erroneous self-perception (Coser, 1977).

Primary Groups & Secondary Groups

A primary group can be described as a group of individuals who share an intimate relationship and face-to-face interaction. Examples of such groups include families, close circles of friends, and neighborhoods. Group members identify with the group, cooperate and sympathize with one another, and share responsibilities and culture. Cooley was thinking in particular of the family and peer group as a primary group in order to establish a distinction between relationships among people that are characterized by intimacy and those that are more contractual (Andersen & Taylor, 2005). Researchers have persistently demonstrated the power in Cooley's insight, in work, for instance, that explores the influence of peer groups on children's development of identity and self-esteem. Moreover, primary, or peer groups, do not stop being influential as people grow older. Professional groups and other groups to which people belong have an impact on identity and emotional experience. Cooley believed that primary groups have a strong influence on a person's self, which is why they may last a long period of time. These relationships can provide a source of support when an individual experiences the high and low points of his or her life. Still, others have pointed out that primary groups can demand that members conform to strict codes of thought and behavior, and thereby stultify individuality (Giddens, Duneier & Appelbaum, 2007).

A secondary group, in contrast, tends to have few personal relationships and be temporary and formed for a specific purpose. This "nucleated" group is larger and more disparate and its members have far less, if any, direct contact with each other. Examples of such a group would be coworkers, an organization's board members, the people in a neighborhood and political groups. Such groups do not last as long as primary groups, although they can occasionally take on the characteristics of a primary group in circumstances of social change or stress (Andersen & Taylor, 2005). For instance, when communities are affected by disasters (e.g. hurricanes, floods or crime), they can, for a time, become more connected to each other and coalesce around the event, and in doing so, become a primary group.

As Andersen and Taylor (2005) note, primary and secondary groups serve different social needs. Primary groups provide opportunities for meeting expressive needs such as emotional intimacy and companionship, while secondary groups provide opportunities for instrumental needs, such as playing games or sports (sports or athletic groups) or lobbying to create political change (political groups). Secondary groups can evolve and become primary groups (by providing an important source of identity for its members); but in general, they serve a more functional, and often short-lived objective.

George Herbert Mead's I & Me

Many scholars built on Cooley's work to create a general theory of the self. One of the most influential scholars in the sociology of the self was George Herbert Mead.

Mead taught social psychology at the University of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century. Although he published no books, his lectures were collected and published posthumously and his work has been enormously influential in the sociology of the self (Waters, 1994). Drawing on the approach developed by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, Mead took the view that humans are motivated by ideas and that society is constituted through the exchange of gestures and symbols. The self, in his view, is the product of an on-going, never-ending social process characterized by constant interaction not only between self and others but also between different aspects of self (Howson, 2004).

For Mead there is a two-part self that is aligned, first, with what he refers to as impulsive or instinctual habits (I) and second, to the set of organized beliefs learned from the mirroring process described by Cooley (me). The "me," is an objective, social self that expresses the gaze of others and from which "I" am capable of standing back from and reflecting upon. The "I" and the "me" are in continual dialogue and interaction with each other. The social self, or what he called the "me," emerges from the unsocialized "I" as it passes through three stages in childhood that are associated with play, through which, Mead theorized, we learn to develop an awareness of, anticipate and take on the roles of others.

During the first stage, the child's play imitates adult activities. Observing his or her father hammering nails, for example, the child might bang a stair step with a stick. During the second stage, the child's play will act out adult roles. He or she might play house or pretend to be a soldier. Mead called this "taking the role of the other" and believed that it helps children develop a socialized "me." During the final stage, play becomes more complex and governed by rules. The child learns to play organized games like hide-and-go seek. Mead believed that during this stage children learn about fairness as well as their cultures' values and morality (Giddens, Duneier & Appelbaum, 2007).

Like Cooley, Mead argued that the self develops over the life course; it is not fixed in time but is open to change and modification because its development occurs in interactions (Howson, 2004). The implication of this approach is that through our interactions with others over time, our awareness of how others see us may change, and in turn, how we see ourselves (Hepworth, 2000).

Viewpoints

Self & Social Perception: A Two-Way Relationship?

Cooley's concept of the looking glass self assumes that a person's self perceptions are derived and internalized via the images provided by others. However, researchers have begun to examine the direction of this relationship and explore the control that people have over how others perceive them. For instance, Yeung and Martin (2003) sought determine whether "one's self-perceptions are an internationalization of perceptions of the views of others" or whether one's self-perception is created by one's relative ability or inability to convince others to see oneself in a particular way (Yeung & Martin, 2003, p. 843). Taking communes as their case study, the researchers reasoned that because communes generally attract people who are looking for a social environment in which they can develop personally (i.e. alter their sense of self), they would be places where people are especially sensitive to how others perceive them.

The researchers collected and analyzed data from the Benjamin Zablocki Urban Commune Project in 1974. Of the 60 communes studied in this project, Yeung and Martin selected 56 communes for their own study. These selected communes had between 5 and 40 members, though most had about 10 members. In total, 422 commune members were included in Yeung's and Martin's study.

During Zablocki's initial study, members were asked to complete a relationship questionnaire in which they were asked to name other members whom they considered to have a variety of personality traits, such as charisma, strength, passivity, and narcissism. A second questionnaire asked each member which traits he or she believed he or she possessed. Yeung and Martin analyzed the results of these surveys to determine if members' assessments of one another were similar to their assessments of themselves and concluded that one's understanding of oneself is at least partly formed by the internalization of the others' beliefs about oneself. However, their results also suggested that especially persistent people could change others' perceptions about themselves over time.

Gender Identity, the Looking Glass Self & Representation

Cooley's concept of the looking glass self has been directly and indirectly influential on how feminist researchers have conceived of the female self, and in particular, the process of objectification that shapes feminine identity. Identity building depends on the recognition of others and the images they reflect back to us. Many feminists have argued that the images of femininity reflected to young girls and women are images that have the power to objectify. As art critic John Berger noted, "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being look at" (1972, p. 48). In Western art and culture more generally, women are represented as objects. A consequence of this representation is that women are seen as visual objects of sorts, and that they are encouraged by Western culture to treat their physical appearance as part of being "on show."

Women, feminists argue, spend a lot of time and energy in making sure that their appearance aligns with Western idealizations of female beauty. The experience of being watched encourages women to be conscious of themselves and invest in their bodies as an expression of self (Brumberg, 1997). This preoccupation with the body as an expression of self, and as a manifestation of the self-building process that is captured in Cooley's analogy to the looking glass, is a somewhat modern phenomenon. However, it requires a high degree of internal control and discipline (Bordo, 1989) and contributes to a constrained sense of self that creates psychic limitations for women. In this sense, the looking glass self process appears to be an endless process that locks women into identities that are potentially limiting.

Conclusion

Cooley's approach to understanding the development of the self is somewhat solipsistic, in that the self, in fact, slips from view and society is viewed as a series of "imagined imaginations." Moreover, Cooley saw himself as contributing not to sociology as such, but to a more integrated approach to history, philosophy and social psychology. Nonetheless, his work has captured the sociological imagination and continues to be among the most influential concepts for understanding the self-society relation, as a series of imagined imaginings through which self and society are created in relation to each other.

Terms & Concepts

Expressive Ties: Relationships associated with primary groups that are characterized by being an end in themselves.

Instrumental Ties: Relationships associated with secondary groups that are characterized by being goal or task-oriented.

Looking Glass Self: A theory of the self which hold that one's sense of self is created through 1) how one believes oneself to appear to others 2) how one believes other perceive oneself and 3) how one responds to one's beliefs about how others perceive oneself.

Primary Groups: A concept developed by Cooley, primary groups are characterized by close, enduring relationships among group members. These groups are marked by members' concern for one another, shared activities and culture, and endurance over a long period of time.

Secondary Groups: A concept developed by Cooley, secondary groups tend to be temporary and are formed to achieve a specific goal. Secondary group members have few if any close personal relationships.

Self: "The irreducible unit out of which the coherence and stability of a personality emerge" (Zimbardo & Gerrig, 1996, G-11).

Social Self: The self is produced through interaction with other people.

Symbolic Interactionism: An approach to the self-society relation that emphasizes face-to-face interaction, impression management, information control and being ever attentive to what our bodies and faces are 'telling' others.

Bibliography

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Cooley, C. (1918). Social process. New York: Scribner's Sons.

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Hepworth, M. (2000). Stories of Ageing. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Howson, A. (2004). The body in society: An introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jacobs, G. (2012). Charles Horton Cooley, pragmatist or belletrist? The complexity of influence and the decentering of intellectual traditions. Symbolic Interaction, 35, 24–48. Retrieved October 25, 2013, from EBSCO online database Academic Search Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=73908424

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Wozniak, R. (1999). Introduction to the principles of psychology — William James. In Classics in Psychology, 1855–1914: Historical Essays. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press. Retrieved April 21, 2008, from, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/wozniak.html

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Suggested Reading

Hartzler, B., Baer, J., Dunn, C., Rosengren, D., & Wells, E. (2007). What is seen through the looking glass: The impact of training on practitioner self-rating of motivational interviewing skills. Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapy, 35, 431–445.

Scheff, T. (2003, August). Goffman's elaboration of the looking glass self. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association 2003 Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA.

Scheff, T. (2005). Looking-glass self: Goffman as symbolic interactionist. Symbolic Interaction, 28, 147–166.

Scheff, T. (2011). Parts and wholes: Goffman and Cooley. Sociological Forum, 26, 694–704. Retrieved October 25, 2013, from EBSCO online database Academic Search Complete http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=64115403