We all have various perception, feelings, and beliefs about who we are and what we are like. We were not born with these understandings. Sociologists recognize that we create our own designation: the self. The self is a distinct identity that sets us apart from others. It is not a static phenomenon but continues to develop and changes throughout our lives. Sociologist and psychologists have expressed interest in how the individual develops and modifies the sense of self as a result of social interaction.
Sociologist Approaches to the Self
Cooley: Looking Glass Self
In the early 1900s, Charles Horton Cooley advanced the belief that we learn who we are by interacting with others. Cooley used the phrase looking glass self to emphasize that the self is the product of our social interactions.
The process of developing a self identity or self concept has three phases.
- We imagine how we present our self to ourselves to others
- We imagine how others evaluate us
- We develop some sort of feeling about ourselves
A critical aspect of Cooley's looking glass self is that "the self" result from individual's imagination of how others view him or her. As a result we can develop self identities based on incorrect perception of how others see us.
Mead: Stages of the Self
George Herbert Mead developed a useful model of the process by which the self emerges, defined by three distinct stages.
The Preparatory Stage
In this phase children merely imitate the people around them. As they grow older, children become more adept at using symbols to communicate with others. Symbols are the gestures, objects, and words that form the basis of human communication.
Like spoken language, symbols vary from culture to culture and even from subculture to another. In multicultural societies, such differences in the meaning of symbols create the potential for conflict. For the French, the headscarfs symbolize the submission of women. But to Muslims, the headscarf symbolizes modesty and respectability.
The Play Stage
During the play stage, children begin to pretend to be other people. Mead noted that an important aspect of the play stage is role playing. Role taking is the process of mentally assuming the perspective of another and responding from that imagined viewpoint.
The Game Stage
In the game stage the child of about eight or nine years old no longer just plays roles but begins to consider several actual task and relationship simultaneously. Consider a girl or boy who is part of a scout troop out and a weekend hike in the mountains. The child must understand what he or she is expected to do but also must recognize the responsibilities of other scouts as well as the leaders.
Mead uses the term generalized other to refer to the attitudes, viewpoints, and expectations of society as a whole that a child takes into account in his or her behavior. The child comes to understand that courtesy is a widespread social value endorsed by parents, teachers and religious leaders.
At the game stage, children can take more sophisticated view of people and the social environment. They now understand what specific occupation and social positions are and no longer equate.
Mead: Theory of the Self
According to Mead, the self begins at privileged, central position in a person's world. Young children picture themselves as the focus of everything around them, and cannot accept the perspectives of others. This childhood tendency to place ourselves at the center of events never entirely disappears.
As people mature the self changes and begins to reflect greater concern about the reactions of others. The term significant others is used to refer to those individuals who are most important in the development of the self.
Goffman: Presentation of the Self
How do we display the other who we are? Erving Goffman suggested that many of our daily activities involve attempts to convey impressions of who we are.
Early in life, the individual learn to slant his or her presentation of the self in order to create distinctive appearance and satisfy particular audience. Goffman (1959) referred to this altering of the presentation of the self as impression management. According to this perspective, people resemble performers in action. For example, a clerk may try to appear busier than he or she actually is if a supervisor happens to be watching.
Goffman has also drawn attention to another aspect of the self, face work. How often do you initiate some kind of face saving behavior when you feel embarrassed or rejected.
Psychological Approaches to the self
Psychologists have shared the interest of sociologist in the development of the self.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud believed that the self is a social product, and that aspects of one's personality are influenced by another people. Sigmund Freud suggested that the self has components that work in opposition to each other. According to Freud, our natural impulsive instincts are in constant conflict with societal constraint. By interacting with others, we learn the expectations of society and then select behavior most appropriate to our own culture.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) found that newborns have no self in the sense of a looking glass image. They demand that all attention be directed toward them. As they mature, children are gradually socialized into social relationships, even within their self centered world.
In his cognitive theory of development, Piaget (1954) identified four stages in the development of children's thought process.
- Sensorimotor: Young children use their sense to make discoveries
- Preoperational: Children begin to use words and symbols to distinguish objects and ideas
- Concrete operational: Stage in that children engage more logical thinking
- Formal operational: adolescents become capable of sophisticated abstract thought, and can deal with ideas and values in logical manners
Piaget suggested that moral development becomes an important part of socialization as children develop the ability to think more abstractly. When children learn the rules of a game such as checkers or black jack, they are learning to obey societal norms.
According to Jean Piaget, social interaction is the key o development. As they grow older, children pay increasing attention to how other people think and why they act in particular ways.
