Breaking down the question
The quoted phrase captures the core of Mead's social psychology: the self and society are not separate entities, one prior to the other, but arise together through the same process of symbolic interaction. To "examine" the statement is to explain what Mead meant, show how his account supports it, and offer a brief critical appraisal.
The examiner wants you to demonstrate that for Mead the self is not innate. It emerges only in and through social experience, while society in turn exists only through the selves that communicate within it. The two are, as the phrase says, "twin-born" — born together, mutually constituting.
At 10 marks the answer must be concise yet complete: the social genesis of the self, the mechanism of role-taking, the "I" and the "me", and the generalised other. Our Mead notes develop the framework in fuller detail.
How to approach it
State Mead's central claim at once: the self is a social product that develops through communication using significant symbols, so mind and society are inseparable. This locates him within symbolic interactionism.
Then unfold the mechanism. Explain role-taking, the phases of the "I" and the "me", the play and game stages, and the generalised other as the point at which the organised attitudes of the whole community enter the individual. Show at each step how self and society arise together rather than one preceding the other.
Close by appraising the statement — its strength in overcoming the individual–society dualism, and a brief note on the criticism that Mead underplays the biological and the unconscious.
Model answer
George Herbert Mead held that the self is not something a person is born with but something that develops through social experience. The self has the distinctive capacity to be both subject and object to itself — to reflect upon itself as others see it — and this reflexivity, Mead argued, can arise only in society, through communication using significant symbols whose meanings are shared. The self is therefore, from its very origin, a social product; and society, being a web of communicating selves, exists only through them. This is the sense in which self and society are "twin-born": neither can be conceived without the other, and both emerge through the single process of symbolic interaction.
The engine of this development is role-taking — the capacity to put oneself in the position of another and to view oneself from that standpoint. Within the self Mead distinguished the spontaneous, creative "I", the acting subject, from the "me", the organised set of attitudes of others that the individual has internalised, the self seen from the outside. Conduct is a continual conversation between the two, between the impulsive self and the socialised self.
Mead traced this growth through stages. In the play stage the child takes the role of particular others one at a time — a parent, a teacher — and so learns to see itself through their eyes. In the game stage the child must take the roles of many others simultaneously and grasp how they relate, as in a team game where each player must anticipate all the others. This culminates in the generalised other, the organised attitude of the whole community internalised by the individual. When a person guides conduct by the shared standards of the community rather than by any single individual, society has entered into the self, and the self has become capable of orderly participation in society.
The statement therefore expresses Mead's fundamental achievement: dissolving the old opposition between the individual and society. The self is a social product, yet through the ever-fresh "I" it remains an active, reflexive agent capable of innovation and even of reshaping the society that formed it. Critics note that Mead concentrated on the conscious and the symbolic and gave little attention to biological drives or the unconscious, and that his account is more social-psychological than structural. Even so, the insight that self and society are born together, each the condition of the other, remains a foundational contribution to sociology.
Examiner's perspective
Because the question is built around a specific quotation, the examiner expects the answer to keep returning to its meaning — that self and society arise together — rather than drifting into a general essay on symbolic interactionism. The key is to show mutual constitution: the self is social in origin, and society lives only through selves.
The strongest scripts trace the developmental sequence — role-taking, the "I" and the "me", the play and game stages, the generalised other — and use it to explain how the dualism of individual and society is overcome. A brief critical line, noting Mead's neglect of the biological and the unconscious, and a closing statement that the self is both social product and reflexive agent, lift the answer into the top band at this level.