Looking-Glass Self

The looking-glass self is a concept introduced by the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in his 1902 book Human Nature and the Social Order, describing how a person's sense of self develops through social interaction rather than forming in isolation. Cooley proposed that self-concept forms through a three-step process: a person imagines how they appear to another person, imagines that other person's judgment of that appearance, and then develops a self-feeling, such as pride or shame, in response to the imagined judgment, so that other people function as a kind of mirror, or looking glass, in which a person comes to see and evaluate themselves. Cooley emphasized that what matters for the formation of self-concept is not necessarily how others actually judge a person but how that person imagines they are being judged, which may or may not match the other person's real opinion. The looking-glass self is widely regarded as an important precursor to symbolic interactionism, the broader sociological tradition that studies how selves and meanings are built up through social interaction and the use of symbols, since Cooley's account already treats the self as something constructed through an ongoing, imagined social process rather than as a fixed, purely internal trait.