Understanding Charles Cooley's "Looking Glass Self"

Charles Horton Cooley: Concept of the Looking Glass Self

Introduction
Cooley was influenced by approaches such as Pragmatism and Darwinism.
Even though Cooley was influenced by Weber, Cooley’s examination was more
psychological than Weber’s.
Cooley’s most significant contribution was his idea of the “looking-glass-self.”
The concept of the looking glass self demonstrates that self-relation, or how one
views oneself is not a solitary phenomenon, but rather includes others.
Cooley states that society and individuals do not denote separable phenomena,
but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing.
Developmentally, Cooley theorizes that human beings possess an inherent
tendency to reach out, interact, or socialize with those people and objects that
surround them.
The term looking glass self was created by American sociologist Charles
Horton Cooley in 1902,[1] and introduced into his work Human Nature and the
Social Order. It is described as our reflection of how we think we appear to
others. To further explain would be how oneself imagines how others view
him/her.[2] An example would be one's mother would view their child as
flawless, while another person would think differently. Cooley takes into
account three steps when using "the looking glass self". Step one is how one
imagines one looks to other people. Step two is how one imagines the judgment
of others based on how one thinks they view them. Step three is how one thinks
of how the person views them based on their previous judgments.[3]
According to Lisa McIntyre’s The Practical Skeptic: Core Concepts in
Sociology, the concept of the looking-glass self expresses the tendency for one
to understand oneself through the perception which others may hold of them.
[4]
Essentially, how one views oneself and acts heavily depends on what the
individual believes other people think of the individual. This process is
theorized to develop one's sense of identity. Therefore identity, or self, is the
result of learning to see ourselves through what we perceive to be the
perceptions of others.[5]
The looking-glass self comprises three main components that are unique to
humans (Shaffer 2005).[6]

1. We imagine how we must appear to others in a social situation.

2. We imagine and react to what we feel their judgment of that appearance
must be.
 3. We develop our sense of self and respond through this perceived
judgments of others.
The result is that individuals will change their behavior based on what they feel
other people think about them, even if not necessarily true. In this way, social
interaction acts as a "mirror" or a "looking-glass," since one's sense of self and
self esteem is built off of others. For example, an individual may walk into an
job interview with confidence and attempt to display this confidence. A person
in this situation most often examines the reactions of the interviewers to see if
they are positively or negatively reacting to it. If the individual notices positive
reactions, such as nodding heads or smiles, this might further develop the
individual's sense of self-confidence. If the individual notices negative
reactions, such as a lack of interest, this confidence in self often becomes
shaken and reformed in order to better oneself, even if the perceived judgments
were not necessarily true.

A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise

is society when regarded as something apart from individuals. The real human
life, which may be considered either in an individual aspect or in a social aspect,
is always both individual and general. In other words, society and individuals do
not denote separable phenomena, but are simply collective and distributive
aspects of the same thing.

A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principle 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.