Looking Glass Selves: The Cooley/Goffman Conjecture1[1]

Abstract: This article reviews Cooley’s idea of the looking glass self, and Goffman’s elaboration. It can be formulated as a conjecture that links two concepts: shared awareness and the social emotions. Cooley named pride and shame as the social emotions, and Goffman added embarrassment and humiliation as shame variants. Word counts comparing Goffman’s emotion lexicon in Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with other social science texts shows that it is dense with these four emotions and their cognates and derivatives. Goffman’s development of the second concept, shared awareness (the degree of attunement) is also described. Like Cooley, Goffman may have realized that shared awareness is needed as a central concept in social science. The conjunction of shared awareness and emotion in Goffman’s work might be a feature that attracts reader’s sympathy. In concluding, two basic hypotheses are stated, and techniques that might be used to test or apply them. These hypotheses may point toward a general theory of cooperation and conflict: attunement/pride holds relationships and societies together, and lack of attunement/shame burst them apart. Charles Cooley’s (1922) idea of the looking glass self (LGS) is an accepted part o