George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher and sociologist working in the early twentieth century, argued something that still shapes how sociologists think about identity: a person's sense of self isn't something that develops in isolation and then gets expressed to other people. It's built, from the start, out of social interaction — specifically, out of imagining how other people see you, and using that imagined view to build a picture of who you are.
Taking the role of the other
Mead's central idea was that children develop a sense of self by learning to take the perspective of other people — first specific individuals, a parent, a playmate, later an internalised sense of society's expectations in general, which Mead called the "generalised other." A child playing a game learns not just their own role but, gradually, everyone else's roles well enough to anticipate them — and that capacity to imagine how you look from another position is, in Mead's account, the actual mechanism that builds a self capable of reflecting on itself at all.
Symbols do the connecting work
Mead's broader framework, later named symbolic interactionism by his student Herbert Blumer, holds that society itself is built and continually rebuilt through countless small interactions mediated by shared symbols — language, gestures, roles — rather than existing as some fixed, external structure people are simply born into. Meaning isn't inherent in an object or action; it's negotiated and assigned through the shared symbols people use to interpret it together, which is why the same gesture or word can mean something different in a different social context.
What we're still unsure about
Symbolic interactionism has been criticised, including by sociologists working in more structural or conflict-oriented traditions, for focusing so closely on small-scale, face-to-face interaction that it struggles to explain larger, more durable social structures — persistent inequality, institutional power, economic systems — that shape interactions from the outside rather than emerging purely from them. Whether Mead's framework can be scaled up to explain those larger patterns, or is better understood as a genuinely different kind of tool suited to a different scale of question entirely, remains a live methodological debate in sociology rather than a settled division of labour between theories.
This sits inside Symbolic Interactionism (Mead, Blumer), one of seven topics in Social Theory, one of four domains in Sociology, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.