The Role of the Other in Self-Evaluation

himself assumes, as Glaser and Strauss (1964) have pointed out, that the encounter of the person with others occurs in what these authors have called an open awareness in which each interactant is aware of the other's true and his own in the eyes of the other. Mead goes further to argue that, not only are persons thus aware of their identities in others' eyes, but that they see their own identities as they perceive these others to see them: The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only insofar as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved (Mead, 1934:138). Self-Evaluation There have been a number of attempts to apply Mead's orientation to an understanding of the social process within which self-evaluations arise. The difficulty in making this application may lie in the problem of applying the open awareness assumption to the field of self-evaluations. When the social origins of personal identity or conception of the Who Am I? variety are being sought, the hypothesis that the person adopts the views of others toward himself as his own view of himself is not easy to challenge. Role-playing to audiences clearly generates identities that match the roles played.' But the idea I am a woman, and the idea I am a beautiful woman, are different in the sense