THE PARADOX AT the center of sociology is the fact that although we are individuals, we are not, have never been, and were never meant to be alone. This chapter attempts to resolve that paradox by arguing that our individuality doesn’t bubble up from some place deep within us but instead emerges out of interactions with others.
Humans have the remarkable ability to think about ourselves. That is, we can both do the thinking and be the thing that’s being thought about. The sociologist George Herbert Mead captured this by suggesting that we all have an “I” that contemplates a “me.” When we see ourselves in a mirror and say, “That’s me,” our I does the recognizing, while our me is recognized.
We’re concerned with how others see us, too, and that influences how we see ourselves in turn. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley theorized that in forming our self-concept, we imagine what other people think about us. He described the self that emerges out of this process as the looking-glass self, one that’s a consequence of seeing ourselves as we think other people see us.
We also place ourselves on a life trajectory. We have a sense of where we’ve been and where we’re going. This is our self-narrative, a story we tell about the origin and likely future of our selves. Our self-narratives are stories, built only partly on facts and written in collaboration with others.
For all these reasons, our sense of self is a product of human interaction; that is, a social fact.
As you read this chapter, you’ll also notice introductions to two research methods:
The in-depth interview is a research method that involves an intimate conversation between the researcher and a research subject.
The laboratory experiment is a research method that involves a test of a hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions.
“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
—JEFFREY EUGENIDES
One day, a researcher installed a very large mirror in an enclosure containing three Asian elephants: Happy, Patty, and Maxine.1 The elephants poked and prodded the mirror. They probed underneath, around, and over it.
With a little experimentation, they recognized that they were the animals in the mirror. They then showed curiosity as to their own appearance. Maxine, for example, was seen opening her mouth to get a good look at her teeth.
This is an example of the mirror test. It’s a way to find out whether animals can learn to recognize themselves. Passing the test—being able to tell the difference between another animal and one’s own reflection—is taken as strong evidence that a species has the capacity for self-awareness, the ability to be conscious of and able to reflect on one’s own existence. To be self-aware is to be a thinking thing that thinks, among other things, about itself.
Though failing the mirror test is not conclusive evidence that an animal isn’t self-aware, it’s surprising how many animals have not yet passed. Sea lions, giant pandas, octopuses, many species of monkeys, and several species of apes have failed the mirror test. Only a handful of animals pass. Seeing themselves in the mirror, magpies will preen. A dolphin will swirl its head and flip upside down. A manta ray will blow bubbles out of curiosity. A chimpanzee, our closest relative, often takes the opportunity to turn around, look over its shoulder, and inspect its rear end.
Like elephants, magpies, and chimpanzees, humans are self-aware. None of us is born this way. Until about four months old, infants are just bundles of perception. They can’t differentiate between objects, other people, their environment, and their own bodies. They certainly haven’t learned to notice their own existence. Humans won’t pass the mirror test until they’re between sixteen and twenty-four months old.
Slowly, the brain puts the information together. It notes the synchronized activity in the brain cells that control motion (telling the arm to swing), the ones that process vision (of a flailing fist), and the ones that recognize sensation (when it whacks the side of its crib). Over time, the brain is able
to separate the child’s body from the other things in its environment. I did that, it might understand. I am a thing.
Dolphins, chimpanzees, orcas, and magpies have passed the mirror test, a demonstration of self-awareness. Gorillas have not yet conclusively passed.
I am. This is quite a remarkable thing to think, and this chapter is about what it means for humans to be able to think it. It’s about how we become aware of ourselves and others, how those others shape the person we become, and how we maintain a sense of self over a lifetime. Ultimately, this chapter is about how our connections to others make us who we are, ending with the startling idea that we are each a social fact. We start with a careful consideration of what it means to recognize the self.
Note 01: Joshua M. Plotnik, Frans B. M. de Waal, and Diana Reiss,
“Self-recognition in an Asian Elephant,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 103 (November 2006): 17053–17057.Return to
To think I am is to make oneself simultaneously the subject and the object of thought. When we think it, we’re both the thing doing the thinking (the subject) and the thing we’re thinking about (the object). We can think about ourselves, in other words, the same way that we think about other things. If I scan a typical bathroom, for example, I might see a bathtub, a sink, a towel rack, and myself in the mirror. Among the things I see is me, and I can think about myself in the same way that I can think about the fixtures in the room.
In the early 1900s, the sociologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) described this dual thinking by differentiating between the “I” and the
“me.”2 The me is the object of thought: the self we see in the mirror, our personal person, the one that is us. As we grow up, the me is the us that we try to get graduated from school and employed in a good job. When one day we see our picture on the wall as Employee of the Month, we say, “That’s me!” The me is whom we’re proud of being when things go well. It’s also whom we’re ashamed of when we make decisions that embarrass us.
The I, in contrast, is the subject of thought, the person feeling pride or embarrassment. The I is the part of the self that’s judging and making judgment calls. It’s the part of the self that sets our goals and evaluates our progress. The I is the one that monitors our behavior, trying to ensure that we make the impressions we want to make. It’s the part that thinks Don’t mess this up! during a job interview, Do they like me? when we’re talking to someone cute, and What will people think of me? when we’ve been caught doing something wrong. Mead described the I as a “running current of awareness,” an observer of the me, always watching, planning, and considering.3
As an example, think about how people manage their social media accounts. A typical person will have at least one account that’s either public or followed by a combination of friends, family, and acquaintances. When they post on it, they’ll consider how their followers will perceive the text or
images they upload. They ask themselves, in other words, how the post will make them appear to others. The image they choose to present in light of this consideration is their me. And the person doing the considering is their I. They’re contemplating: What do I want others to think of me? Depending on the desired outcome, the I decides what to post. The me that is then represented is true but also filtered. It’s a specific version of you. It’s the me your I decides to present to the wider world.
Negotiating the sometimes-treacherous currents of social media requires us to be able to think about other people in complex ways. To do that, we need to develop a theory of mind: the recognition that other minds exist, followed by the realization that we can try to imagine others’ mental states.
We begin developing a theory of mind when we’re babies. About the same time that toddlers start to recognize themselves in the mirror, they begin to notice that they’re not the only thinking thing in their environment. In other words, they discover not only that they exist, but that other people exist.
Soon a child will be able to imagine what’s going on in other people’s minds and, against all odds, even feel what other people feel.
By two years old, children are able to express themselves—they know they feel, want, and think—and they’re able to imagine that other people also feel, want, and think. Soon they’ll be able to be competitive with a sibling who they think has the same wants, know that their caregivers will be pleased if they follow instructions, and learn to play cooperative games like hide-and-seek. All these things require the ability to imagine what’s going on in someone else’s mind.
We all went through this developmental process, and as we practiced these skills, our theory of mind became quite sophisticated. We practiced gift giving, which requires imagining what someone might like and how an object might fit into their life. We learned to lie, which involves trying to place a false belief into the mind of another. By the time we were in elementary school, we could effectively model the collective effort of many brains at once. Participating in a team sport like basketball or playing multiplayer online games, for example, requires us to coordinate our actions with others by simultaneously imagining what many other minds are thinking.
Within the first few months of life, our brains were also reaching into the brains of other people, closing the distance between them and us. Our brains do this with mirror neurons, cells in our brains that fire in identical ways whether we’re observing or performing an action.4 If I happen to watch you scratch your elbow, for example, the mirror neurons in my brain will light up as if I scratched my elbow. In fact, a scientist watching my brain would not be able to tell if I had scratched my elbow or you had scratched yours. These brain cells, in other words, don’t differentiate between the self and others. Mirror neurons link one brain to another as if they were not two minds but one.
Mirror neurons also respond to emotions. To a mirror neuron, smiling and watching someone else smile are the same. Someone smiles, and our brain smiles with them. So we don’t just understand that the smiling person is happy, we actually feel happy. If your heart has ever been warmed when the couple in a romantic comedy finally admits they’re in love, or if you’ve felt rage tighten your throat in response to someone else’s mistreatment, or if you’ve shared in the joy of a child discovering something new, then you have mirror neurons. My personal weakness is the medal ceremony at the Olympics. How do the happy tears of an athlete I’ve never met, accepting a medal half a world away, threaten to come streaming out of my face? Part of my brain can’t tell the difference between someone else’s joy and my own.
And, so, I am overcome.
Most of us have mirror neuron systems that are just sensitive enough. They allow us to feel what others are feeling without becoming so engrossed in other people’s minds that we forget our own. Some people aren’t in this
“Goldilocks” zone. Their mirror neurons are either too hot or too cold.
Some scientists think, for instance, that a cool system helps explain some of the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.5 People with autism often struggle to understand what other people are feeling. We take for granted that we can tell if someone is happy, sad, or angry. Someone with autism may find this genuinely difficult.
Conversely, some people have mirror neuron systems that are too hot.6
Interviewed on National Public Radio, a woman named Amanda recalled as a child following a young man around at a Christmas party.7 “People were
hugging him like they hadn’t seen him in a while,” she said. And every time he got a hug, she would feel as if she were getting a hug. “It was like a warm rush up the spine,” she said. “And I followed him around, like, the whole entire evening because it was just so nice.” It sounds nice, but ultimately her heightened ability to feel what other people are feeling forced Amanda to restrict her contact with others. If people experience pleasure, she experiences pleasure too. But if people get hurt, so does she. Even mundane activities can be extraordinarily uncomfortable. When she watches other people eat, she explained, “It feels like they’re shoving food in my mouth.” Amanda’s mirror neuron system is too hot.
Luckily, most of us have systems that are “just right,” and it’s a wonderful thing. Scientists and philosophers had long speculated as to the exact mechanism by which humans came to understand and care for one another so intimately. It was a compelling mystery specifically because, in a very real way, we aren’t connected at all. We’re separate, locked up in our own skulls, inescapably and existentially alone. And yet, the human brain has a way to ease this loneliness. Our biology has provided a way to bring the minds of others tantalizingly close.
Paradoxically, it is out of this closeness that our individuality emerges.
the recognition that other minds exist, followed by the realization that we can try to imagine others’ mental states
Note 02: George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934).Return to reference 2
Note 03: George H. Mead, “The Social Self,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 10 (1913): 374–
Note 04: Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy
and How We Connect with Others (New York: Picador, 2008).Return
Note 05: Jillian M. Saffin and Hassaan Tohid, “Walk like Me, Talk like Me: The Connection Between Mirror Neurons and Autism Spectrum
Disorder,” Neurosciences Journal 21, no. 2 (2016): 108–119.Return to
Note 06: Michael J. Banissy, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Gerrit W. Maus, Vincent Walsh, and Jamie Ward, “Prevalence, Characteristics, and a Neurocognitive Model of Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia,” Experimental Brain Research 198, no. 2 (2009): 261–272.Return to reference 6
Note 07: Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, interview with Geoff Brumfiel and Amanda, Invisibilia, NPR, January 30, 2015, podcast, 33:47,
https://www.npr.org/2015/01/30/382453493/mirror-touch.Return to
In 1902, almost one hundred years before scientists discovered mirror neurons, and eighty years before the first mirror test, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) used a different mirror metaphor to explain how humans come to understand themselves, or develop a self-concept. This is more than self-awareness, the simple knowledge of our own existence; a self-concept is our understanding of who we are based on our personality traits, physical characteristics, ancestry, and biographies. Together with George Herbert Mead—he of the I and the me—Cooley became one of the founders of a field called social psychology, the study of the interface between the individual and society. Social psychologists argue that we can’t understand either our psychologies or our societies independently of each other. The “mind is social,” Cooley insisted, and “society is mental.”8
Like all scholars, Cooley was motivated to study the relationship between the self and society in part because of his own experiences. He was a shy child and prone to illness, which left him isolated from his peers.9 He was also intimidated by his high-achieving parents, who had equally high expectations for him. Being socially awkward may have made him hyperaware of the gazes of others, especially if they reflected things he didn’t like.
Ultimately, Cooley developed a new theory of the self. Our self-concepts, he argued, could only arise socially, in the presence of other people, through a process in which we choose, interpret, and imagine the views of others. He called this the looking-glass self, the self that emerges as a consequence of seeing ourselves as we think other people see us.10 According to this theory, other people are looking glasses (or mirrors) reflecting a vision from which we form our self-concepts.
Other people are certainly the source of our first ideas about our selves.
Before we’re even born, our caregivers are busy defining us. To start, they give us our names. We may come into this world as a Charity or a Chardonnay. A Forrest or a Hunter. A Mary or a Jesús. Our parents decide
that we’re sweet, feisty, or curious long before we could possibly come to those conclusions on our own, and certainly before we have the capacity to challenge them. “He’s a kicker,” a soccer-loving expectant mom might say proudly as she cringes, smiles, and rubs her belly. “She’s the shy one,” a dad might tell people about his preschool-age daughter, labeling her with a personality trait that may just be a developmental stage. When parental perceptions stick, kids might grow up to think “I’m sporty” or “I’m an introvert.” Our first self is given to us by the people around us.
Babies are attributed personality traits and talents, engaged in activities, and given toys. Each of these choices by adults can contribute to the formation of a self.
As we get older, we continue to look to the people around us—our friends, family, and teachers—to inform our self-concept. Some are significant figures, others we encounter only in passing, but anyone can influence how we think about our selves. Mercifully, research shows that we tend to overestimate the extent to which other people like us, so the self-concepts we derive from this process are generally pretty positive.11
We also learn to speculate as to what generalized others might think of us.
These are imagined members of specific social groups. Generalized others represent types of people, with a greater or lesser degree of specificity. We easily divide up the generalized other into categories: teenagers, musicians, NASCAR-lovers, dog people. When we think it’s relevant, we tap into our ideas of how an average member of one of these groups might evaluate us.
In doing so, we take the perspective of the generalized other. When we look at our behind in the mirror like a chimpanzee, for example, we might be wondering what a generalized other might think of it.
Consider what’s going on when people text erotic images to one another.
The sociologist Morgan Johnstonbaugh did just this, conducting 101 in-depth interviews with college students (see “The Science of Sociology” ).12
In-depth interviews are intimate conversations between a researcher and a research subject, a person who agrees to participate in a research project. In interviews, research subjects are offered the opportunity to open up about their personal experiences. Johnstonbaugh asked her interviewees about their motivations and experiences with “sexting,” which she defined as the electronic sharing of nude or semi-nude images.
Johnstonbaugh discovered that her female-identified interviewees often sent sexts to their female friends with the express purpose of eliciting positive feedback. “You can’t always count on a guy to give you exactly what you want,” said one woman. “[Y]ou want someone to be like, I see you, I recognize you for the goddess that you are,” she explained. And her female friends were happy to respond that way.
Another interviewee explained why she was happy to see her friends’ nudes and respond with support and encouragement. “[G]irls just like don’t hear that enough,” she told Johnstonbaugh. “[W]e have to struggle already so much in the society as it is [so] women supporting other women and just being like . . . ‘you look wonderful and you should know that,’ is important.” These young women sought the gazes of friends whom they trusted to be complimentary. In doing so, they cultivated looking glasses that would reflect them back as they wanted to see themselves and hoped generalized others would see them that way too.
In-depth Interviews
The in-depth interview is a research method that involves an intimate conversation between the researcher and a research subject. Interviews are designed to capture the responses of a few people in great depth (a couple dozen, perhaps, or up to several hundred). Interviews tend to be semi-structured, meaning that questions are decided ahead of time, but the researcher is allowed to ask different questions depending on the flow of conversation. And the questions are usually open-ended. That is, instead of asking questions that can be answered with a yes or no, open-ended questions are designed to elicit lengthy, free-ranging answers. The resulting data are excellent for understanding how people experience their lives and form their opinions.
Researchers generally type out their interviews word for word. The resulting documents are then subjected to coding, a process in which segments of text are identified as belonging to relevant categories. These categories, or codes, will refer to concrete or abstract features of the conversation that are relevant to the research question. Johnstonbaugh, for example, coded for whether her interviewees said they sent sexts in the hopes of receiving a compliment, a laugh, or an invitation to come over, among other things. After coding, researchers count how frequently certain codes appear and among whom, looking for patterns in how people experience or explain their lives.
In almost all research involving people, sociologists are ethically obligated to protect their research subjects’ identities. Usually this means ensuring confidentiality. This is a promise that the researcher will not release personal information that can be connected to the research subject, including the fact of their participation. To preserve confidentiality, researchers refrain from releasing the names of people who’ve participated and keep data in secure locations. After research is completed, they may
permanently separate people’s real names from the data and destroy any evidence of the connection. When they talk or write about their findings, researchers will also assign pseudonyms, or fictitious names, to interviewees. ■
All these reflections are at least somewhat distorted.13 The looking glass is a bit like a fun house mirror; we need to do quite a bit of guesswork as to whether the reflected image is accurate. Moreover, as we try to guess what other people really think of us, we often add a fair bit of distortion ourselves. Thanks to the inescapable fact of our separateness, we can never truly see what others see, so we use our theory of mind and our mirroring brains to make guesses. In fact, studies show that our self-concepts have more in common with what we think other people think of us than what they actually think. These observations led Cooley to summarize his theory this way: “I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am. ”14
We’re looking glasses for others too. Other people are trying to discern who they are from us at the same time we’re seeing a vision of ourselves. Like any two mirrors that are opposite each other, the result is a recursive set of reflections: mirrors facing each other in perfect symmetry, each reflecting the other reflecting itself, repetitively into the infinite distance. “I imagine your mind,” Cooley explained, “and especially what your mind thinks about my mind, and what your mind thinks about what my mind thinks about your mind” and so on.15 The only way to opt out of the infinity mirror is to opt out of social interaction altogether.
Christopher Knight tried to opt out. In 2013, Knight was arrested while raiding a summer camp in central Maine. His mug shot revealed an aging White man with a bald head and scraggly beard wearing the same pair of eyeglasses he’d worn for his senior high school portrait in 1984. He was charged with approximately 1,000 burglaries of camp kitchens and lake cabins in the area.
Knight had lived alone in the woods for a long time. “For how long?” asked the police officer after Knight was arrested. He paused and said that he left the same year the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. That was 1986.
“I just walked away,” he said.
While he was in jail awaiting trial, Knight reluctantly agreed to be interviewed by a journalist named Michael Finkel. Sitting across from each other, separated by a pane of plastic, the two squared off. Finkel wanted Knight’s story to tell us something profound about the human condition.
Knight thought this was ridiculous. “Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person,” he said, annoyed. “All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home. ”16
Knight insisted that there wasn’t anything to tell. Out in the woods alone, he said, the human condition didn’t reveal itself. It just went away. Without other people, he explained, “I lost my identity.” His self didn’t change, and he certainly didn’t become more true to himself, more “authentic” somehow.
He continued:
With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. ...... I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.17
Knight had retreated into a world in which there were no individuals, where neither he nor anyone else existed. Without other people, there were no looking glasses to reflect him. No I and no me. With the exception of his
raids of nearby cabins, during which he tried to avoid being caught, he may have even lost the habit of imagining what generalized others might think of him. Why bother? In the woods, without anyone around, and without the anticipation of an encounter, there was no need to define himself. Like a chipmunk, he slept and stayed warm and nibbled on snacks. He existed, but, in a certain way, he had no self-concept. He was, as he put it, “just there,”
unreflective, unreflected. Without looking glasses to peer into, he disappeared to himself.
Very few of us flee the company of others entirely. Instead, like sexting teenagers, most of us curate our collection of looking glasses. We seek ones that reflect the person we want to be and, to the extent that we can, avoid the rest. Sometimes that means changing who we are so as to give the right impression.18 Other times, we manage our self-concept strategically.
Sometimes people’s ideas about us are contradictory, giving us an opportunity to pick and choose the self we want to embrace. Your mom might say “you’re talented” and your dad might say “you’re very hardworking” and you might side with one or the other, or both. Often, we simply reject or accept someone’s ideas about us. My ex might think I’m a jerk, for example, and I may disagree. Your dog might think you’re the best person in the universe, and you might decide that dogs have pretty good judgment.
For twenty-seven years, Christopher Knight lived alone in this secret camp in the woods. In the absence of others, he stopped thinking about what others thought of him, and then stopped thinking much about himself at all.
We may try to pick and choose whose opinions to care about, but this doesn’t mean we’re immune from caring what others think. It’s exactly because we do care that we sometimes insist that we do not. And how could we not? Thanks to mirror neurons, we feel other people’s emotions as if they were our own. So, if someone looks at us with disgust, disdain, or hatred, their negative perception of us threatens to become part of our self-image. Our mirror neurons can’t tell the difference between someone else hating us and us hating ourselves. No wonder we generally avoid people who we think dislike us. From this point of view, that old piece of advice so often given by adults to teenagers—that we shouldn’t care what other people think—sounds pretty unrealistic.
Ultimately, whether we accept or reject someone’s opinion of us is influenced by whether we like it, whether it’s part of our self-concept already, and whether it’s reinforced by other available looking glasses. It
also depends on whether we have an intimate relationship with the person, identify with them as a similar kind of person, or see them as someone who can fairly evaluate us.19 When a person also falls into a group of generalized others that we identify as important, we tend to take their reflections of us more seriously. So, if you’re a young woman growing up in Florida, you may find it somewhat easy to ignore what your seventy-two-year-old Minnesotan uncle thinks of you, and a little less easy to ignore what your friends at school think.
Whatever power we exert in shaping others’ perceptions, and despite our ability to reject at least some of the ones we don’t like, our self is still dependent on those looking glasses. It’s hard to imagine we’re funny if no one ever laughs at our jokes. But, if they do, we may develop our sense of
humor to keep them laughing. In this way, the looking-glass self is a self-
fulfilling prophecy, a phenomenon in which what people believe is true
becomes true, even if it wasn’t originally true.20 Applied to the self, it goes something like this: If enough people consistently reflect us in a certain way, their impressions will shape our impression of ourselves, and we will act accordingly, bringing into existence the self that they originally saw.
In an excellent demonstration of the self-fulfilling prophecy, a group of researchers tested whether wearing cologne changed men’s behavior in ways that made them more attractive to women.21 They did a laboratory experiment, a test of a hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions (see
“The Science of Sociology”). They randomly assigned thirty-five men to apply a scented or non-scented body spray, then asked the men how confident they felt about their attractiveness. Men who applied the scented spray reported feeling more confident than those who’d applied the non-scented spray. All the men were then filmed introducing themselves to a hypothetical “attractive woman.”
A panel of eight women were then asked to watch the videos and judge the men’s attractiveness. They weren’t told that the men had been given body spray of any kind and they, of course, could not smell them. Nevertheless, the men who’d been randomly assigned a fragrance were rated as more attractive. The fragrance made the men feel more attractive, which gave them a boost in confidence; that confidence made them more attractive to
the women observers. The fragrance, in other words, induced a self-fulfilling prophecy. By making the men feel more attractive, it actually made them so. Summarizing the study, the sociologist Bradley Wright explained: “The secret may not be whether a woman thinks a man smells good, but rather whether a man thinks he smells good.”22 To paraphrase Cooley, “I am not as sexy as I think I am. I am not as sexy as you think I am. I am as sexy as I think you think I am.”