looking-glass self: a standalone construct

The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the looking-glass self in his 1902 book Human Nature and the Social Order to describe how a person's self-concept, their understanding of who they are, is built from how they imagine they appear to other people. Cooley broke the process into three moments: we picture how we look to another person, we picture that person's judgment of that appearance, and we then feel a self-feeling such as pride or mortification in response to the imagined judgment. The term names the idea that the self is social, formed by taking others as a mirror rather than by private introspection, a founding claim of the symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology. Later work refined what the theory does and does not predict: J. Sidney Shrauger and Thomas J. Schoeneman's 1979 review found that self-views track how people believe others see them more closely than how others actually see them, and Kwang-Tae Yeung and John Levi Martin's 2003 study tested and elaborated the three-stage model with survey data. What makes the construct a landmark is its scope: it explains the origin of the self-concept through everyday social interaction and anchors the sociological position that identity is produced in relationships rather than fixed from within.[1][2][3]

Unit

A person's self-concept, treated as shaped through imagined social judgment

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through self-report surveys that compare a person's self-view with their beliefs about how specific others see them (their reflected appraisals), sometimes set against those others' actual ratings