Charles Horton Cooley (August 17, 1864 – May 8, 1929) was an American sociologist. He believed that humans are social in nature, but that most of the interaction comes from interacting with other people, including the person it’s self. He is very known for his idea of “looking glass self”, which is an idea that presents how self-image is created based on how people appear to others. He also believed that our society could be “organic”, this means that it can be healthy if people take care of each other and do not believe in being self centered and selfish. He is very known for criticizing nations that could have reached a perfect society if it were not because of conceited people.
George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), also had an idea that ones self, including language influenced the persons development and social interaction. He is known for being one of the most important psychologist and a great American philosopher and social scientist. His students published his theories after his death; they also published his lectures. He strongly believed that people behave according to the studies of cosmology and metaphysics.
Cooley was born on August 17, 1864, in the state of Michigan. His father strongly believed that a good education and a good social status were possible if they moved west and obtained a higher social status. His father, Thomas Cooley, worked as a lawyer and then became the first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Charles was his fourth child, he was diagnosed with speech impairment and partially invalid. These issues became a problem when he had difficulty making friends, which later on transformed into a withdrawn personality. These also influenced on his education; since they resulted in his bachelors finishing after 7 years. Cooley felt pressured to be like his father and achieve his success, so he got his BA in engineering. Later on he got a Ph.D. in economics. His dissertation was based on an ecology called “The Theory of Transportation”. He married Elsie Jones and got a job at the University of Michigan and had three children. He died of cancer in 1929.
Mead was born on 1863, in the state of Massachusetts. He went to Oberlin College and graduated on 1883, later on he went off to Harvard until 1888. After this he went to Berlin where he studied psychology and philosophy and was inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He came back to the United States and taught philosophy at the University of Michigan and three years later taught at the University of Chicago. During his time at the University of Chicago he became an important member of a movement in philosophy with another philosopher, John Dewey. Dewey became head professor and together they created a department so that the new pragmatic philosophy could stand out, without having the resistance of the traditional philosophers, who did not want the discipline to change. "A real school, and real Thought, Important thought too"–this was the reaction of William James to the group of philosophers gathered around Dewey at Chicago in the early 1900'S.
Cooley’s theories were a response to a necessity to understand the phenomenon that focuses on the mental processes of individuals, which at the end realized that these phenomenon’s were causes and effects of society’s processes. Another necessity is the states of chaos that could prepare society for “adaptive innovation”. The last necessity was to exert some “informed moral control” over current problems and future directions. Cooley responded by saying "society and individual denote not separable phenomena but different aspects of the same thing, for a separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals." He worked to resolve this and created a mental and social complex, which he called “Looking glass self.”
This "looking glass self" was created through the imagination of how one's self might be understood by another individual, as if was reflected on a mirror. It was based on William James’s idea of including the capacity of reflection into one’s behavior. Other people’s views and opinions can be related to how people view themselves and to how others view them. According to this concept people create their identity and their habits based on what society thinks of them, and a person tries to keep changing throughout the person’s life spam. The “looking glass self” has 3 steps listed in his work Human Nature and the Social Order:
1 To begin, people picture their appearance of themselves, traits and personalities.
2 They then use the reactions of others to interpret how others visualize them.
3 Finally, they develop their own self-concept, based on their interpretations. Their self-concept can be enhanced or diminished by their conclusions.
Cooley also cared about the relationship between social processes in society; he calls it society as organic. In this he argues that society is dependent on others for it to grow and to survive. It can be described as holistic, because it describes society as an individual. "Our life," Cooley stated, "is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process."
Cooley believed that utilitarian individualism prevented America and England from achieving an ideal society.
Mead’s first lectures explore the ideas of sociality and perspective. In mind, Self, and Society he develops the notion that people achieve a sense of self when they can understand the idea that they can perceive their behavior from another’s perspective. Along to his theory there is the doctrine that self evolves by social interaction. In his final work, The Philosophy of the Present, Mead analyzes how individuals get used to their environments and how this can interfere with the process of evolution. He also explains how concepts like communication, thinking, and novelty, among others are related.
Mead attempted to illuminate his perspective of the social establishment that "the self does not comprise basically in the uncovered organization of social dispositions," by presenting the difference between the "I" and the "me." Both "I" and "me" essentially identify with social experience. "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the "me" is the organized set of attitudes of others which one assumes. The states of mind of the others constitute the sorted out "me," and afterward one responds toward that as an 'I'." As a "me" the individual knows about himself as an object. He responds to himself as far as what others feel toward him. His self-evaluation is the consequence of what he expects to be the examination by others. The "me" is the self as considered and secured as far as the purpose of view of critical others and of the group on the loose. It mirrors the laws and the mores, the sorted out codes and desires of the group. The "I," in contradistinction, is "the appropriate response which the individual makes to the attitude which others take toward him when he expect a state of mind toward them . . .it gives the feeling of flexibility, of activity." What shows up in consciousness is always the self as a protest, as a "me," yet the "me" is not possible without an "I" as an interesting subject for which the "me" can be a question. The "I" and the "me" are not identical, for the "I" is something that is never entirely calculable . . . it is continually something other than what's expected from what the circumstance it self calls for."
"We are," Mead expresses, "people naturally introduced to a specific nationality, located at a specific spot geologically, with such and such family relations, and such political relations. These speak to a specific situation which constitutes the 'me'; yet this essentially includes a proceeded with activity of the living being toward the "me." Men are naturally introduced to social structures they did not make, they live in an institutional and social request they never made, and they are obliged by the confinements of language, codes, traditions, and laws. All of these go into the "me" as constituent components, yet the "I" generally re-acts to preformed circumstances in a one of a kind way, "similarly as each monad in the Leibnizian universe reflects that universe from an alternate perspective, and that is why mirrors an alternate angle or point of view of that universe." To Mead, mind is "the individual importation of the social procedure," in any case, at the same time, "the individual . . . is consistently responding back against . . . society. ''The self in general, as it shows up in social experience, is a compound of the stabilized impressions of the summed up other in the "me" and the incalculable spontaneity of the "I." This is the reason the self-overall is an open self. "On the off chance that it did not have these two stages there couldn't be cognizant duty, and there would be nothing novel in encounter." Mead esteemed individual autonomy, however he saw it rising up out of criticism as opposed to from endeavors at insulation from others. Human on-screen characters are definitely enmeshed in a social world, yet the develop self-changes this world even as it reacts to it.
Mead was to some degree vague in his meaning of social acts. Sometimes he influences it to show up as though these demonstrations essentially include collaboration between the actors. Somewhere else he discusses social acts when alluding to focused and conflictful communication. At a certain point he says particularly: "I wish . . . to re-strict the social demonstration to the class of acts which include the participation of more than one person." Yet in different spots he talks, for instance, of fights among creatures as social acts. No doubt, on adjust, that what he had in mind was not that social demonstrations are confined to participation but rather just that social action is constantly in view of "a protest of regular enthusiasm to all the individuals involved." In this detailing, strife and rivalry, and in addition cooperative conduct, may similarly be viewed as social activity as long as they all involve a shared introduction of on-screen characters to each other. It is just along these lines that Mead's interpretation of the idea of social acts can be verbalized with his often-repeated emphasis on the urgent elements of social clashes. To Mead, just as to Simmel, struggle and participation are correlative to each other and no society can exist without both.
A profoundly created and composed human culture is one in which the individuals are interrelated in a variety of various complex and complicated ways whereby they all offer various basic interests . . .but then, then again, are pretty much in struggle in respect to numerous other interests which they have just independently, or else share with one an other just in little and constrained gatherings.