Mead - The I, the Me and the Generalised Other

Cooley showed that we assemble ourselves out of imagined reflections (2.3.2). He left the hardest part unexplained: how does a human being become able to imagine another person's viewpoint at all?

George Herbert Mead answered that question, and in doing so produced the most complete sociological account of how a self comes into existence. His lectures were published after his death in 1934 as Mind, Self and Society, and they founded the tradition that became symbolic interactionism (5.3).

Watch children of three different ages, and you are watching a theory being demonstrated.

A toddler, about eighteen months. She has a cloth and is wiping the floor, because her grandmother wipes the floor. She holds a phone to her ear and says something with the intonation of a conversation and none of the words. She is not pretending to be her grandmother. She is doing what she has seen, without any sense that there is a role involved.

A child of four. She is being a doctor. She has a stick for a stethoscope, she says "where is the pain," and she tells the patient not to be afraid. Then, abruptly, she is the patient, and complains. Then she is the mother of the patient, and asks whether it is serious.

Notice what she can now do: she can take a position that is not hers, and speak from inside it. She knows what a doctor is for, what a doctor says, what a patient is expected to do. But she can only be one at a time, and the sequence has no rules — she switches when she feels like it.

A child of nine, playing a game with seven others. Cricket, or kabaddi, or football. And now something much harder is happening. To play her position at all, she has to hold in her head, simultaneously, what everyone else is expected to do: where the fielders are, what the bowler intends, what the batter will attempt, what the umpire will allow, what her team-mates expect of her. She is not taking one role. She is holding the whole system of roles at once — and her own position is defined by its place within it.

She has also, by now, absorbed something larger than any of the players: the rules. Not "what he wants" but "what is done." She will object to a violation even when it benefits her.

The foundation: significant symbols and role-taking

Mead builds from the ground up, and the first two steps matter.

Gestures and significant symbols. Many animals respond to each other's gestures. What is distinctive about humans, Mead argued, is the significant symbol (2.1.5): a gesture that means the same thing to the one making it and the one receiving it. Because I know what my gesture means to you, I can anticipate your response before I make it. I can, in effect, rehearse the interaction internally.

Role-taking. That capacity, extended, becomes the ability to put oneself imaginatively in another's position and see the situation — including oneself — from there. Note the term carefully: role-taking is not role-playing. Playing is performing a role; taking is adopting another's standpoint.

Mead's radical claim follows: you can only become an object to yourself by taking the position of others towards yourself. Self-awareness is not introspection. It is a social operation, performed from outside, imported inward.

The three stages

The preparatory stage (roughly to age two). Imitation without understanding. The child copies actions she has seen, without grasping that they belong to a role or that anyone has a perspective. She is acquiring the raw materials — gestures, sounds, sequences.

The play stage (roughly three to five). The child takes the role of one particular other at a time: the doctor, the mother, the shopkeeper, the teacher. This is the crucial developmental leap, because it means she can now hold a viewpoint that is not her own. Mead's term for these specific figures is significant others — the particular people whose perspectives the child learns to occupy.

But the perspectives are held one at a time and switched arbitrarily. There is no system.

The game stage (roughly seven and up). The child takes the roles of all the other participants simultaneously, and her own position acquires meaning only in relation to theirs. This is what an organised game requires. And in doing so she encounters something that transcends any individual player: the rules, the standards, the shared expectations of the whole.

The generalised other

This is Mead's central concept and the most useful thing in this lesson.

Once the generalised other is in place, you no longer need a particular person to be watching. You have installed a composite audience: what people would think, what is done, what one does not do. You perform for it in an empty room. You check your reflection in an empty lift. You feel shame with nobody present.

Notice what this explains that Cooley's model could not. Cooley needs actual mirrors — specific people whose judgement you imagine. Mead explains behaviour when there are no mirrors at all, and he explains the impersonal quality of conscience: it does not feel like an opinion, it feels like a standard.

Notice also what it links to. This is 1.1.3's internalisation, with a developmental mechanism attached. It is 2.1.4's internal sanctions, given an origin. It is Durkheim's collective conscience (4.2), arrived at from the individual's side rather than the society's. Three traditions converging on one finding, which is a good sign that the finding is real.

And a critical extension worth carrying: there is more than one generalised other. A person internalises the standards of several communities — family, profession, caste, religion, nation, friends — which do not agree. Which one is active depends on the situation, and the conflict between them is a large part of what moral difficulty actually consists of. (This is 2.1.14's repertoire, and 2.2.3's role conflict, at the level of conscience.)

Mead's most difficult and most important distinction, and it solves a problem the rest of this Topic has been accumulating.

If the self is made of internalised social expectations, how does anyone ever do anything new? Why is the world not a perfect reproduction of itself?

Mead's answer is that the self has two phases, in continuous conversation.

The "me" is the self as object: the organised attitudes of others that a person has internalised. It is the social self — conventional, aware of expectations, capable of evaluating conduct. When you consider how something will look, you are consulting the "me."

The "I" is the self as subject: the immediate, spontaneous, unpredictable response of the organism to the situation. It is not determined by the internalised expectations. It is what actually happens when you act — and, crucially, you only know what your "I" did after it has acted.

The relationship is a conversation. The "me" presents the situation and its expectations; the "I" responds, sometimes conventionally and sometimes not; the response becomes part of experience and is absorbed into the "me"; and the sequence continues.

Three things follow, and they are large.

Novelty has a location. The "I" is where the unexpected enters — the joke nobody planned, the refusal that surprises the refuser, the sudden objection. This is Mead's answer to determinism, and it is why he belongs in the agency column of 1.3.1.

Society changes because selves are not copies. Every generation's "I" responses, accumulated, alter what the next generation internalises. Social reproduction is never exact, and the inexactness is structural rather than accidental.

And the self is a process, not a thing. There is no fixed entity inside you. There is an ongoing internal conversation between a social self and a spontaneous response — which is why Mead's is a genuinely sociological theory of the individual, and why it does not collapse into either determinism or the pre-social chooser (1.3.5).

Go deeper

What Mead explains that others do not

The origin of reflexivity. How can a creature think about itself? Only by taking an external position towards itself — which requires having learned to take others' positions. Self-awareness is imported.

Why conscience feels impersonal. Because the generalised other is a composite, not a person. This is why "I would feel terrible" is not the same as "someone would be angry."

Why moral development tracks social participation. The game stage requires organised group life. Children who participate in more complex coordinated activity have more occasion to construct a generalised other — which is an empirical prediction, not merely an interpretation.

And why language is the precondition of the whole thing. Without significant symbols there is no anticipation of response, hence no role-taking, hence no self. Mead's title is Mind, Self and Society in that order for a reason: language makes mind possible, mind makes self possible, and self makes organised society possible.

The criticisms, fairly stated

It is over-cognitive. Mead's self is largely a thinking, symbol-using self. Emotion, the body and desire are thin in his account — which is why Cooley's self-feeling (2.3.2), Hochschild's emotional labour (2.2.3), and Bourdieu's embodied habitus (2.1.13) are needed alongside it.

It underplays power. Whose generalised other gets internalised? Mead writes as though the community's attitudes were simply there, when in fact they are the attitudes of some groups more than others (2.1.12's hegemony). A Dalit child and a Brahmin child internalise different generalised others, and one of them internalises a standard that devalues them (2.3.2, Ambedkar).

The stages are cultural. The game stage example — the organised, rule-governed team game — is culturally specific. Children in societies with different play arrangements, or who work from a young age, or who are raised in large sibling groups, construct a generalised other by other routes. The mechanism generalises; the illustration does not.

And the ages are approximate. Treat them as a sequence, not a schedule.

Mead and Cooley together

Read side by side, they complement each other exactly.

Cooley supplies the mirror and the feeling: the self as an image built from imagined judgements, bound together by pride and shame. Strong on why the self is emotionally weighted and durable.

Mead supplies the mechanism and the structure: role-taking, the generalised other, and the "I"/"me" conversation. Strong on how the capacity develops, why conscience is impersonal, and where novelty comes from.

Between them they establish the position that everything in Part 5's micro-sociology assumes: the self is a social product and an active process, not a thing you have. Blumer's symbolic interactionism (5.3) is built directly on Mead; Goffman's dramaturgy (2.4.2) takes the performing self as its subject.

"The 'I' is the real self and the 'me' is a mask." Both are phases of one self. The "I" is not more authentic; it is simply the unrehearsed response. Neither exists without the other.

"Role-taking means playing a role." Taking is adopting another's standpoint; playing is performing your own. Mead's whole argument depends on the first.

"The generalised other is society's opinion." It is the internalised, organised attitude of a community — impersonal, composite, and plural, because everyone carries several that disagree.

"The stages happen at fixed ages." A sequence, approximate in timing, with culturally variable routes. The team-game illustration is not universal.

"Mead says we are determined by society." The "I" is precisely his answer to that, and it is why he is cited on the agency side of the structure–agency debate.

"Self-awareness is introspection." Mead's claim is the reverse: you become aware of yourself by taking an external position towards yourself, which you learned from others.

Why it matters

It explains the capacity everything else assumes. Roles (2.2.3), norms (2.1.3), sanctions (2.1.4), the looking-glass self (2.3.2) all require a person able to anticipate others' responses and evaluate their own conduct. Mead explains where that comes from and how it is built.

It locates conscience socially without dismissing it. Your sense of what one does is neither a private moral faculty nor mere obedience. It is an internalised community — which is why it feels like a standard rather than an opinion, and why people from different communities have genuinely different consciences without either being insincere.

It gives agency a mechanism. 1.3.1 argued that structures do not act, people do. Mead says where the "do" comes from: the "I," the unrehearsed response, which is never fully predicted by the internalised expectations. That is a small door, and every social change in history has come through it.

And it makes the self examinable. If the self is an internal conversation between a socially assembled "me" and a spontaneous "I," then noticing which generalised other you are consulting — and whose standards it carries — is a genuinely available operation. That is 1.1.3's reflexivity, with an anatomy.

Mead explains the capacity Cooley assumed: how a person becomes able to take another's viewpoint.

The foundation is the significant symbol — a gesture meaning the same to sender and receiver — which permits anticipation of response, and therefore role-taking: adopting another's standpoint towards oneself. Self-awareness is imported from outside, not found within.

Three stages: preparatory (imitation without understanding), play (taking one significant other's role at a time), game (holding all roles simultaneously, and encountering the rules).

The generalised other is the internalised, organised attitude of the whole community, performed for even when alone. It explains the impersonal quality of conscience, and it converges with Durkheim's collective conscience and with 1.1.3's internalisation. Everyone carries several, and they disagree.

The "me" is the internalised social self; the "I" is the spontaneous, unpredictable response, known only after it acts. Their continuous conversation is the self — which is therefore a process, not a thing — and the "I" is where novelty, and therefore social change, enters.

Criticisms: over-cognitive (thin on emotion and body), inattentive to power (whose generalised other?), and culturally specific in its illustrations.

Significant symbol — a gesture that means the same to the one making it and the one receiving it, enabling anticipation of response.

Role-taking — imaginatively adopting another's standpoint, including towards oneself.

Preparatory stage — imitation of observed actions without understanding of roles.

Play stage — taking the role of one particular other at a time.

Game stage — holding the roles of all participants simultaneously within an organised activity.

Significant other — a specific individual whose perspective the developing self takes.

Generalised other — the internalised, organised attitude of the community as a whole.

The "me" — the self as object: the internalised attitudes and expectations of others.

The "I" — the self as subject: the spontaneous, unrehearsed response, known only in retrospect.

Reflexivity (of the self) — the capacity to take oneself as an object of one's own attention.

Symbolic interactionism — the tradition founded on Mead's account, formalised by Blumer (5.3).

One — watch the stages. If you have access to children of different ages, watch them play. Look for the difference between imitation, single-role play and coordinated rule-governed games. It is visible within minutes.

Two — identify your generalised others. List the communities whose standards you carry: family, profession, religion, friends, region. Then find one situation where two of them disagree. That disagreement is what a difficult decision actually is.

Three — catch the "I." Recall something you said or did that surprised you as you did it. That is the "I" in Mead's sense — and note that you only knew what you thought after you heard yourself say it.

Four — the empty room test. Notice one thing you do differently when nobody is present, and one thing you do the same. The second list is the generalised other, doing its work with no audience at all.