Looking Glass Self Analysis

The self can be understood in two ways, there is the ‘I’ which is the self as the acting subject and the ‘me’ the self as an object. Both Cooley and Goffman explore what the self means and how people portray themselves in society. Cooley uses the ‘looking-glass self’ to illustrate how one’s self is perceived in another’s mind and how humans react to this perception. The ‘looking-glass self’ explains a process of socialisation, it is a view of ourselves that comes not only from direct contemplation of ourselves but also from our perceptions about how we are being perceived by others. Cooley argues that the ‘self’ has 3 principle elements: ‘the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, …show more content…
This idea focuses on the importance humans place on how they are perceived by others and ‘the reflected appraisals of others that are actively interpreted by the actor’. Cooley states that the way we interpret other’s thoughts of us affect how we see ourselves. For Cooley, the ‘looking-glass self’ explains a process of socialisation which begins from childhood. When a child is small they often try to imitate their parents or guardian as they are seen as a figure to look up to, but by copying this action the child may find a sense of control. This is due to the fact that they have ‘tasted the joy of being a cause of exerting social power’. This idea helps to explain how the self develops over …show more content…
These three elements make up the looking-glass self, they question how do I appear to others? What must others think of me? And encourage us to revise how we think about ourselves. Felson (1983) conducted a study of ‘football players and grade school students and found the anticipated responses of others to have more importance than the genuine response of others’. Reflected appraisals are an important aspect in the looking-glass self. This is how one sees how they are perceived in the minds of others and how this perception is evaluated. Cooley argues that we care about what others think of us and ‘the thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind’. Here, Cooley is suggesting that humans place importance not on how we are perceived but on how we think we are perceived and what effect this has on our actions. This is the essence of the looking-glass self. Cooley believed that ‘we are not influenced by the opinions of other people but that we are influenced by what we imagine the opinions of other people to be’. For example, ‘there’s a teacher marking a paper very harshly and critically, and they do so because the student who wrote it has a lot of potential and wants to help them reach it’. In this example, the student