Mead argued that mind and self are not innate but emerge through social interaction. Through 'taking the role of the other,' children develop a sense of self by imagining how others perceive them. The 'I' (spontaneous self) and 'Me' (socialized self aware of others' expectations) constitute the mature self.
Symbolic interactionism, your prerequisite, establishes that humans act on the basis of meanings they assign to things, and that those meanings arise through social interaction. George Herbert Mead went one step further and asked a more radical question: where does the *self* come from — the very subject who assigns meanings and acts? His answer, developed in *Mind, Self, and Society*, is that self and mind are not natural endowments but social achievements. They are created through interaction, not prior to it.
The key mechanism is taking the role of the other: the ability to imaginatively occupy another person's perspective and see yourself through their eyes. Watch a young child playing: they treat a doll as a teacher, then switch to being the student, then switch back. They are practicing role-taking — rehearsing social positions and their associated expectations. Mead calls this the play stage. As children mature into the game stage, they learn to simultaneously hold in mind not just one other's perspective but the expectations of all players — what Mead calls the generalized other. A child playing baseball cannot just know what the pitcher expects; they must track all field positions at once. The generalized other is the internalized composite of social expectations — the social community speaking through the self's conscience. When you imagine how "people in general" would judge your behavior, you are consulting your generalized other.
This process produces the self as a dual structure. The "I" is the spontaneous, impulsive, creative response to a situation — the part of you that acts before fully reflecting. The "Me" is the socialized, reflective component — the internalized attitudes and expectations of others that you carry within you and that monitor your conduct. Every act begins with the "I" and is shaped by the "Me": you want to say something rude (I), but your internalized awareness of how others would react gives you pause (Me). Neither alone constitutes a full self. A pure "I" would be impulsive and socially unregulated; a pure "Me" would be a conformist automaton. The tension between them is productive — it is the internal dialogue through which persons navigate social life.
Language is central to Mead's whole framework. Significant symbols — gestures and words that carry shared meaning — are what make mind possible. When you use a word, you evoke in yourself roughly the same meaning you evoke in others, which is what allows thought (internal conversation with your generalized other) to map onto communication (external conversation with actual others). This is why Mead matters beyond developmental psychology: he grounds individual psychology in social process, showing that thinking itself is internalized conversation. Mind is not the seat of a private interior; it is the social turned inward.
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