Charles Cooley
Charles Cooley was an American sociologist known for his concept of the "looking-glass self," which suggests that our self-concept is shaped by how we believe others perceive us. He also contributed to the development of symbolic interactionism, emphasizing the importance of social interaction and communication in shaping individual identity and behavior. Cooley's work has had a lasting impact on the field of sociology.
6 Key excerpts on "Charles Cooley"
eBook - ePubGoffman Unbound!
A New Paradigm for Social Science
- Thomas J. Scheff, Bernard S Phillips, Harold Kincaid(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...C HAPTER 3 Looking-Glass Self Goffman as Symbolic Interactionist G OFFMAN’S MOST BASIC WORK can be seen as closely related to “the looking-glass self” (LGS). This idea is of great interest because it connects two vast realms, the social nature of the self, on the one hand, and the intense emotional life that results, on the other. Charles Cooley, who invented the phrase, proposed first that the self is social, that we “live in the minds of others without knowing it.” He went on to say that living in the minds of others, imaginatively, gives rise to real and intensely powerful emotions, pride and shame (Cooley 1922). The importance of Cooley’s idea is not immediately apparent in Goffman’s writing. As already indicated, although seemingly clear on the surface, there are many twists and turns. Read with care, the structure of his most popular work, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, reveals what seems to be two different authors. The first half of the book deals with performances and dramaturgical staging, rituals of theatre (Goffman the Structuralist). Behavior is scripted by the social situation, motives are not important. The first act lulls the sociological reader into the Durkheimian fantasy. However, beginning with Chapter 4 on discrepant roles, the thesis begins to drift toward the motives of the actors. By the sixth and most substantial chapter on “impression management,” the other Goffman has virtually disappeared. This chapter instead concerns actors’ motives, their harried attempts to stave off, or at least manage, embarrassment and related emotions. Without a word of warning, Goffman the Sociological Social Psychologist has reared his head, shape-shifting. The reader has been conned. The idea of impression management underlies many of the examples that enliven Goffman’s work, and makes it understandable and entertaining. One manages one’s image in the eyes of others in order to come to terms with the basic social emotions, pride and shame...
eBook - ePub- Philip Manning(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...2 From Sumnerology to Cooley’s Social Self: Proto-Symbolic Interactionism Introduction The ideas of both William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) and Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) continue to exist for us today, but they do so for the most part only as echoes. It is not easy to establish the moment when they ceased to be the authors of books and became the owners of key concepts, but it has certainly occurred. Perhaps Sumner was still read until World War II. Writing in 1968, Philip Rieff noted that Cooley had been lost to his generation, whose faith in its own “radical contemporaneity” made Cooley appear hopelessly “out of date.” He was in danger of becoming the latest recruit in the army of the “distinguished but ignored” – along with Albion Small and others (in Rieff, 1990: 310–11). Sumner is now remembered as the sociologist who distinguished folkways, mores, and taboos; Cooley is the person who coined the terms “primary group” and “looking glass self.” The downward mobility implied by this transformation makes it hard for us to recognize now the excitement once generated by their books. In fact, there is a double problem: to recognize their importance then and to realize that they can still speak to us now. I want to propose that despite their many differences – political and temperamental, among others – at least aspects of the work of Sumner and Cooley outlined a viable sociological social psychology. Thus, although Sumner and Cooley were antithetical political figures, they were nevertheless convergent sociological theorists. However, it was a strange convergence...
eBook - ePubSelfhood
Identity, Esteem, Regulation
- Rick Hoyle, Michael H. Kernis, Mark R. Leary, Mark W. Baldwin(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As noted in Chapter 1, Cooley likened the process of self-reflection to looking in a mirror. He said that people first imagine the way they must appear to other people, and then they consider the likely evaluation or judgment those people have of them. What people conclude about how other people evaluate them might be based on actual statements or reactions those people make, or they might just be assumed or inferred based on past interactions. Mead (1934) elaborated on this process, writing that "the individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. For he... becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself" (p. 138). Different social perspectives can be used in thinking about the self. One can experience one's self in terms of how one relates to a specific person, such as a particular friend, teacher, or companion. Or one can imagine how one would be seen by some reference group whose acceptance one desires ("I wonder what the cool people at the tennis courts thought of my new plaid socks?"). Mead described a second stage in the establishment of identity, though, in which the person goes beyond imagining how he or she appears to specific other people. Over time, on the basis of experience with many different audiences and a variety of contexts, the individual organizes, and then generalizes, the attitudes of particular others...
eBook - ePubThe Emotions in the Classics of Sociology
A Study in Social Theory
- Massimo Cerulo, Adrian Scribano, Massimo Cerulo, Adrian Scribano(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Socialization implies that the perception of oneself is no longer instinctual, as it is now defined by the way we think other people perceive us. What we perceives as ours is, in fact, dependent on the attitude others have towards us: “The self at any particular moment– Cooley writes – (…) is simply the system of objects and ideas which, because of the attitude of others toward us, we cherish as distinctively our own” (Cooley, Angell and Carr, 1933 : 119). And, as the self is social, it implies a process of differentiation of the individual from the plurality of his fellow people: “It always possesses a social setting; that is, it is an assertion of the ways in which we are distinctive from our fellows” (Cooley, Angell and Carr, 1933 : 119). Self-feeling is hence always connected to our perception of the thought of others, which affects “specialized endeavor of higher as well as lower kinds” (Cooley, Angell and Carr, 1933 : 119). It cannot be limited to the instinctive sense of appropriation, but also to higher motives, connected to our social values (such as the sense of duty). It is, as such, utterly social, as clearly emerges from the following quotation: “There is no sense of “I,” as in pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they” ((Cooley, Angell and Carr, 1933 : 120). It is the reference to the perception other people have of the individual which allows us to domesticate the sense of appropriation characterizing our instinctual self-feeling. The perception of one’s self is no longer a kind of egotistic appropriation of the world, since it is shaped by the mirroring quality of social relations. Cooley breaks up the mirroring effect into three components: “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” (Cooley, (1902) 1922 : 184). In the first stage, we mirror ourselves in the attitude others have towards us...
eBook - ePubUpdating Charles H. Cooley
Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic
- Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Baptiste Brossard, Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Baptiste Brossard(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Rieff linked Cooley with Albion Small, Lester Ward, and others over and against William Graham Sumner in particular (Imber 2015). This contrast over-represents Sumner largely because there were other figures who were more fully in the Social Darwinist camp, for example, Herbert Spencer 2 and W. H. Mallock (1877, 1901). Rieff (1990, p. 296) argued that Cooley wrote for an audience larger and more important than his own profession, and for what he defined as the sociologist’s vocation: “The function of the sociologist is both scientific and pedagogic; dealing with moral problems, he must teach moral lessons – otherwise, his sociology fails to be social enough.” Reflecting on his work on Freud, and in particular his account of the “analytic attitude,” Rieff recognized the precariousness of that attitude in the various analytical perspectives in sociology. He also understood that despite the previous decade (1950s) of debate about the “end of ideology” which proved woefully optimistic, 3 sociology was prone to ideological, indeed, utopian visions that continue to play a role in its professional outlook. 4 Rieff (1990:297) observed: “In the Cooley tradition, a sociologist would learn to be generous to the beautiful, complex ugliness of things as they are.” Cooley acknowledged the roles of both political and economic perspectives in any understanding of society and democracy. But Rieff was correct in opening his introduction to Social Organization with the epigraph from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America that underscored Cooley’s abiding concern about the fate of culture: Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures. .. [democracy] throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. This concern for the loosening of social bonds has a very long and enduring place in the story of America...
eBook - ePubSocial Psychology in Christian Perspective
Exploring the Human Condition
- Angela M. Sabates(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- IVP Academic(Publisher)
...This is the process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings and motives. However, even this apparently independent method of self-examination has some basis in social interaction. Consider one example of how introspection is social in nature. Suppose you took a long walk to have some time for personal reflection about your identity. What is the basis for the content of your thoughts? How did you even come up with the terms that you examine during your introspection? On what basis do you decide that one term better describes you than does another term? Did you, as Bem (1972) suggested, observe your own behavior in order to infer what your characteristics are? Did you form your opinions about yourself based on what you think others think of you, in a process Cooley (1902) called the looking glass self? Has someone else either told you outright or implied that those words apply to you? Did you think about how you compare with others in different ways to come up with these ideas? These are some of the types of questions with which social psychologists are concerned when attempting to understand how we come to form our self-concept, an organizing set of ideas or schemas about who we think we are. The idea of the self has prompted much research by psychologists who are interested in identifying what constitutes self-awareness as a constant, basic feature of human personality. Brewer (1991) noted that this research on the structure and function of the self has traditionally been a “highly individuated” concept. That is, the focus was on understanding the internal structures and differentiation of the self-concept rather than on the connection of the self to the external world (i.e., to others)...
