Sociological Concept Paper

There are many different sociological concepts that can be used to apply to one’s personal life experience. The sociological concept that I chose to apply to my personal life is the looking-glass self. The looking-glass self is a term created by Charles Horton Cooley to refer to the process by which our self develops through adopting others’ reactions to us. The key point of the theory is that people form their self-concepts based on how others view them. The idea is that the people around us serve as the “mirrors” that reflect images of ourselves. According to Cooley, this process has three steps. First, we imagine how we appear to another person. Sometimes this imagination is correct, but may also be wrong since it is merely based on our assumptions. Second, we imagine what judgments people make of us based on our appearance. Lastly, we imagine how the person feels about us, based on the judgments made of us. The final result is that we often change our behavior based on how we feel people perceive us. When I was in high school, I had a friend who suffered from an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa. Bulimia nervosa is a serious eating disorder marked by binging, followed by methods to avoid weight gain. All throughout high school she was an average size girl; she wasn’t skinny and she wasn’t over
An eating disorder is more of a mental disorder. The mind starts to take over the body and cause them to make drastic changes. The reasons we place such high expectations on ourselves as to how we should look is because of the media. An example of the media would be celebrities. The media provides us with what we want to see and hear. They make us believe that these so called celebrities live an interesting and exciting life yet it is complete opposite of that. From what we see through media, we start to build a great desire for their lifestyle not knowing that the lives we live are much