The generalised other is George Herbert Mead's name for the organised attitudes of the community as they come to be held inside the individual. It is not a person and not a crowd of persons; it is the standpoint of the group as a whole — its shared expectations, rules and evaluations — which the actor takes towards their own conduct. When someone hesitates before an act because it is not done, without any particular observer present, they are responding to the generalised other.
Mead's argument, set out in the posthumous Mind, Self and Society (1934), is that the self is social in origin. It arises not from introspection but from the capacity to become an object to oneself, acquired by taking the attitude of others towards oneself through significant symbols — above all language, whose gestures mean roughly the same to the one who makes them as to the one who receives them. The generalised other is the most abstract stage of that process: the point at which the child ceases to borrow one attitude at a time and internalises a whole system of them.
The stages of play and the game
Mead traced the emergence of the self through two phases whose contrast is the core of the concept. In the play stage, the young child takes the role of one other at a time — mother, shopkeeper, doctor, engine driver — moving from one to the next with no requirement that the roles cohere. The child is a set of successive characters rather than an organised self.
In the game stage, the child must hold several roles at once. A fielder in a game of cricket cannot act without anticipating what the bowler, the wicketkeeper, the other fielders and the umpire will each do, and each expectation is tied to every other by the rules. The rules of the game are the generalised other in miniature: a unified organisation of attitudes to which the player refers all conduct. Once such an organisation is internalised the self is complete, and Mead held that the same structure is later extended to the school, the neighbourhood and eventually to abstract collectivities such as a nation or a profession.
Relation to the I and the Me
The generalised other supplies the content of the Me — the self as object, the accumulated attitudes of others as the individual has taken them over. The I is the responding phase, the spontaneous and unpredictable act that occurs before it can be reflected upon. Conduct, for Mead, is a continuous conversation between the two: the I acts, the Me registers how the community would see the act, and the next act is adjusted accordingly. This is why the generalised other does not abolish agency. Because the I is never fully governed by the Me, the individual may resist, reinterpret or reform the community's attitudes — social change enters Mead's scheme at exactly this point.
Significant others, socialisation and conscience
Significant others are the particular persons whose attitudes matter most to an individual — parents, siblings, teachers, a respected elder — and they dominate the earliest phase of socialisation. The generalised other is impersonal, and survives the absence of any particular significant other. Berger and Luckmann described the move from one to the other as the decisive step of primary socialisation: the child ceases to think mother disapproves and begins to think this is wrong.
That shift is what allows self-control without surveillance — the community's standpoint is carried within, so the policeman need not be present — and it yields a sociological account of conscience: not an innate faculty, but the organised voice of the group, which is why its content varies so predictably with the society that produced it. In complex societies there may be a plurality of generalised others, as profession, religious community and family press inconsistent demands and the actor arbitrates between them.
Application to gender and caste socialisation
In India the concept helps explain how inequality is reproduced without continuous coercion. A girl learns not merely that a particular parent objects to her being out after dark, but the generalised expectation of what a respectable young woman does — an expectation she comes to apply to herself and to police in others. Caste works similarly: rules about whom one may eat with, marry or touch are absorbed as the community's standpoint, so that a violation produces shame in the violator and not only sanction from outside. The concept also allows for change, since where the reference community shifts — from village to city, from jati to college cohort — the internalised standpoint shifts with it.
Criticisms
Mead's account has been criticised as overly consensual: it presumes a community with organised, shared attitudes and says little about societies split by class, caste or conflicting moral orders, where there may be no single generalised other to take. The line between the I and the Me is analytically elusive, since the I is by definition never available for observation. Critics have also found the scheme cognitively overloaded, resting heavily on language and reflective role-taking while neglecting emotion, embodiment and the unconscious. Structural sociologists add that Mead explains how norms are internalised but not where they come from or whose interests they serve. Much of the theory rests on lecture notes compiled by students rather than texts Mead prepared himself, which accounts for some of its unresolved ambiguity.
For the UPSC answer
Define the generalised other as the organised attitudes of the whole community internalised by the individual, and mark it off firmly from significant others — this distinction is what most answers get wrong. Use the play-and-game contrast as your engine, with the rules of the game as the concrete image of an organised system of attitudes, and connect it to the I and the Me so that agency survives the account. An Indian illustration from gender or caste socialisation, showing shame rather than sanction doing the work, adds analytical weight. Finish with the consensus criticism, noting that in a divided society there may be several competing generalised others rather than one.
References & further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press.
- Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribner.
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Prentice-Hall.
- Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday.
- Joas, H. (1985). G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. MIT Press.
- Miller, D. L. (1973). George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. University of Texas Press.