Other Influential Contributors

Charles Horton Cooley

One of Mead's contemporaries was Charles Horton Cooley. Cooley was strongly associated with the University of Chicago's school of Symbolic Interaction but was, in fact, a scholar at the University of Michigan. Cooley was aligned with Mead in terms of examining the world through a social-psychological perspective.

Like Mead, Cooley held that sociologists should study social reality, including consciousness and the self (Ritzer 1996). Cooley postulated that the best way for a sociologist to examine the social world was by employing a method called "sympathetic introspection." Sympathetic introspection is a technique where the sociologist analyzes an actors' consciousness by putting themselves in the place of the actor. This allows the sociologist to be an active part of the actors' reality and to experience the social reality through many senses.

While Mead is considered to have had a stronger, more lasting impact on Symbolic Interactionism, Cooley's contributions remain relevant today. Two of Cooley's most lasting contributions to the field of sociology and symbolic interaction are the concepts of the looking-glass self and the concept of primary groups.

In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Cooley introduced the concept of the looking-glass self. The looking-glass self is the reflection of our self that we think we see in the behaviors of others toward us. We notice the way people act towards us and pay attention to their cues. This impacts a person to think about what they think other peoples' opinions are of them. The overall pattern of these reflections of other people's opinions become a dominant aspect of our own identities. Cooley theorized that through this process of considering how others view us, we actually become the kind of person we believe others see us to be (Kornblum 1997).

A second lasting contribution to sociology and symbolic interaction is Cooley's concept of primary groups. By primary groups Cooley (1909) wrote, "I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. [Such a group] involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which 'we' is the natural expression." Cooley saw primary groups as linking individuals to the larger society. Examples of primary groups include the immediate family and the peer group. Through these interactions and group identity, a person grows into a social being. It is through the primary group that the looking-glass self emerges (Ritzer 1996).