The "Me" is what is learned in interaction with others and (more generally) with the environment: other people's attitudes, once internalized in the self, constitute the "Me". This includes both knowledge about that environment (including society), but "also" about who the person is: their "sense of self". "What the individual is for himself is not something that he invented. It is what his significant others have come to ...treat him as being." This is because people learn to see who they are (man or woman, old or young, etc.) by observing the responses of others to themselves or their actions. If others respond to a person as (for instance) a woman, the person develops a sense of herself indeed as a woman.