According to Mead the idea of self develops when the individual becomes self-conscious. Explain.

Breaking down the question

The statement is drawn directly from George Herbert Mead's social behaviourism and captures the heart of his theory of the self. To explain it you must show why, for Mead, the self is not given at birth but emerges through a social process, and why self-consciousness — the capacity to become an object to oneself — is the decisive condition of that emergence.

The command word explain requires you to unpack the mechanism: how does an infant, initially without a self, come to reflect upon itself and thereby acquire one? The answer lies in symbolic communication and the ability to take the role of the other. A strong response will move systematically from Mead's premises to his stages of development and finally to the internal structure of the self as the I and the Me.

How to approach it

Begin by locating Mead within symbolic interactionism and social behaviourism, distinguishing his account from purely biological or introspective views of personality. Establish his central claim — that mind and self arise out of social interaction mediated by significant symbols, primarily language.

Then explain reflexivity, the turning back of experience upon itself, as the essence of self-consciousness. Trace the genesis of the self through the play stage, the game stage and the emergence of the generalized other. Conclude with the dialectic of the I and the Me, which preserves both social conditioning and individual creativity. Bring in Cooley's looking-glass self for continuity and Blumer for the interactionist legacy.

Model answer

George Herbert Mead, a founder of symbolic interactionism, argued that the self is fundamentally a social and reflexive phenomenon. His statement that the idea of self develops when the individual becomes self-conscious means that a person acquires a self only when able to become an object of reflection to oneself — to view oneself from the standpoint of others.

For Mead the self does not exist at birth. The infant possesses impulses and a physiological organism, but not yet a self. What distinguishes human beings is the capacity for significant symbols — gestures, above all language, whose meaning is shared and calls out the same response in the one who makes it as in the one who receives it. Through language the individual can respond to their own conduct as others would, and this reflexivity is the ground of self-consciousness.

Mead traces the genesis of the self through developmental stages. In the play stage the child adopts single roles one at a time — playing mother, teacher or doctor — learning to see the self through the eyes of a particular other. In the more advanced game stage the child must internalize the roles of all other players simultaneously, as in a team game, coordinating conduct with a whole system of positions. Out of this arises the generalized other — the organized attitudes of the community as a whole. When the individual takes the role of the generalized other, self-consciousness becomes fully social; one regulates conduct by reference to shared, impersonal standards.

The self that emerges has an internal structure comprising two phases. The Me is the organized set of attitudes of others that the individual has internalized — the socialized, conforming self, the object of self-awareness. The I is the spontaneous, creative response of the organism to the attitudes of others — the acting subject, never fully predictable. Every act is a conversation between the two: the I responds, the Me reflects, and the self is this continuous dialectic. This structure allows Mead to explain both social conformity and individual novelty and agency.

Mead's insight builds upon and refines Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self, according to which we imagine how we appear to others, imagine their judgement, and feel a self-sentiment in response. Mead systematized this intuition into a rigorous theory of role-taking. His work was later carried forward by Herbert Blumer, who coined the term symbolic interactionism and stressed that human beings act towards things on the basis of meanings constructed in interaction.

The significance of Mead's argument is profound. It dissolves the opposition between individual and society by showing that the very interiority of the person is socially constituted, yet without reducing the individual to a passive product. Self-consciousness — the ability to become an object to oneself through the internalized perspective of others — is thus both the mechanism and the proof that the self is a social emergent.

For a detailed exposition, see Mead: Self and Identity.

Examiner's perspective

Examiners expect a candidate to demonstrate genuine command of Mead's technical apparatus rather than a loose account of socialization. The finest answers explain reflexivity precisely, distinguish the play and game stages, define the generalized other, and articulate the I and the Me as a dynamic dialectic rather than two static parts. Connecting Mead to Cooley and Blumer situates him within a tradition and shows intellectual range. A concluding reflection on how Mead reconciles individual agency with social determination lifts the answer into the top band, since it addresses the deeper theoretical stakes embedded in the quoted statement.