Concept
looking-glass self
Cooley’s concept: a person builds a sense of self through the judgment they imagine others hold of them; the imagined judgment matters more than the mirror in the comparison.
In 1902 Charles Horton Cooley defined the “looking-glass self” as a self-idea with three elements: (1) imagining how our appearance looks to the other person, (2) imagining that person’s judgment of that appearance, and (3) a self-feeling such as pride or mortification.
According to Cooley the mirror comparison hardly suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, yet that is the essential one: what moves us is not the reflection itself but the feeling we assume goes on in the other’s mind in response to it. That is why the looking-glass self can be mistaken: it concerns “how we think we appear”, not “how we appear”.
Who the other person is also matters: we are ashamed to seem evasive before a straightforward man, or cowardly before a brave one.
Example
After a presentation you see the teacher grimace and think “I was awful”, while the teacher may be thinking about a sore back (our own example).