Chapter 5: SOCIALIZATION

5.1 DESCRIBE HOW SOCIAL INTERACTION IS THE FOUNDATION OF

PERSONALITY

Socialization is so basic to human development that we sometimes overlook its

importance.

Unlike other living species, whose behaviour is mostly set by biology, humans
need social experience to learn their culture to survive. Social experience is also
the foundation of personality

Socialization: Lifeline social experience by which individuals develop human

potential and learn patterns of their culture.

Personality: A person’s fairly consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting

built through internalization.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: NATURE AND NURTURE

A century ago, however, people mistakenly believed that humans were born with
instructions that determined their personality and behavior.

The role of Nature

Centuries of world exploration had taught Western Europeans that people

behaved quite differently from one society to another. But Europeans linked these
differences to biology rather than culture.

The role of Nurture

In the 20th century, biological explanations of human behavior came under fire.
The psychologist Watson developed a theory called behaviourism, which holds
that behaviour is not instinctive but learned. These people everywhere are equally
human, differing only in their patterns. In short, Watson rooted human behaviour
not in nature but in nurture.

Today, social scientists are cautious about describing any human behaviour as
instinctive. This does not mean that biology plays no part in human behaviour.
Human life, after all, depends on the functioning of the body.

Elements of society have a naturalistic root. Nature or nurture?

It is both, but from a sociological perspective, nurture matters more.

Social science: the role of nurture.

 1. Most of who and what we are as a species is learned, or social in
nature.
2. Behaviorism.

Human infants display various reflexes, biologically patterns that enhance

survival: Sucking reflex (reflejo de succión)

Grasping reflex (reflejo de agarre) Moro reflex (reflejo de Moro)

SOCIAL ISOLATION

For ethical reasons, researchers can never place people in total isolation to study
what happens. But in the past they have studied the effects of social isolation on
nonhuman primates.

Research with monkeys

They found that complete isolation for even six months seriously disturbed
monkeys’ development. When returned to their group, these monkeys were
passive, anxious and fearful. But monkeys in a third category, isolated with an
artificial wire mesh “mother” covered with soft Terry cloth, did better. Each of these
monkeys showed less developmental damage than earlier groups, the Harlows
concluded that the monkeys benefited from this closeness. The experiment
confirmed how important it is that adults cradle infants affectionately.

Finally, the Harlows discovered that infant monkeys could recover from about
three months of isolation. But by about six months, isolation caused irreversible
emotional and behavioral damage.

Effect on children (Anna, Isabelle and Genie)

Tragic cases of children isolated by abusive family members show the damage
caused by depriving human beings of social experience. We will review three such
cases.

1. Isolation left children damaged

2. Success after intensive treatment was related to mental functioning and
age at rescue.

ANNA: Five long years of social isolation had caused permanent damage. At age
eight, her mental development was less than that of a two-year-old. Not until she
was almost ten did she begin to use words. Because Anna’s mother was mentally
retarded, perhaps Anna was also. The riddle of Anna’s life was never solved,
however, because she died at age ten of a blood disorder, possibly related to the
years of abuse she suffered.

ISABELLE: After more than six years of virtual isolation, this girl, named Isabelle,
displayed the same lack of responsiveness as Anna. But Isabelle had the benefit
of an intensive learning program directed by psychologists. Within a week,
Isabelle was trying to speak, and a year and a half later, she knew some 2,000
words. The psychologists concluded that intensive effort had pushed Isabelle
through six years of normal development in only two years. By the time she was
fourteen, Isabelle was attending sixth-grade classes, damaged by her early ordeal
but on her way to a relatively normal life.

GENIE: A more recent case of childhood isolation involves a California girl abused
by her parents (Curtiss, 1977; Rymer, 1994). From the time she was two, Genie was
tied to a potty chair in a dark garage. In 1970, when she was rescued at age
thirteen, Genie weighed only fifty nine pounds and had the mental development
of a one year-old. With intensive treatment, she became physically healthy, but
her language ability remains that of a young child. Today, Genie lives in a home
for developmentally disabled adults and rarely makes a sound.

5.2 EXPLAIN SIX MAJOR THEORIES OF SOCIALIZATION

Freud - Elements of personality

–Elements of Personality
Basic human needs: Eros and thanatos as opposing forces of basic needs
–Developing personality
The id → Basic drives. Which are unconscious and demand immediate
satisfaction. Society opposes the self-centered id.
The ego → a person’s conscious efforts to balance innate pleasure seeking
drives with the demands of society. Face the fact that we cannot have
everything we want.
The superego → the cultural values and norms internalized by an individual.
It operates as our conscience, telling us why we cannot have everything we
want.
Evaluation of Freud

•Freud’s work presents humans in male terms and devalues women.

•Freud’s theories are also difficult to test scientifically.

•Freud influenced everyone who later studied human personality,

internalization of social norms, and the importance of childhood experience.

Piaget - Theory of cognitive development

–Studied cognition (How people think and understand)
–Identified four stages of development
 1. Sensorimotor stage: Sensory contact understanding
2. Preoperational stage: Use of language and other symbols
3. Concrete operational stage: Perception of causal connections in
surroundings
4. Formal operational stage: Abstract, critical thinking

Evaluation of Piaget

•Differed from Freud, viewing the mind as active and creative.

•Proposed ability to engage the world as a result of biological maturation
and social experience.
•Universality of stages is questioned

Kohlberg - Moral development

–Built on Piaget’s work on moral reasoning
Ways in which individuals judge situations as right or wrong
–Proposed developmental stages of moral development

•Pre Conventional
–Young children experience the world as pain or pleasure

•Conventional
–Teens lose selfishness as they learn to define right and wrong in terms of
what pleases parents and conforms to cultural norms

•Postconventional
–Final stage, considers abstract ethical principles. They think about liberty,
freedom, or justice, perhaps arguing that what is legal still may not be right.
Evaluation of Kohlberg

•Like Piaget, viewed moral development as stages

•Final stage not reached by everyone

•Research limited to boys, generalized to the general population.

Gilligan - Gender and moral development

–The two sexes use different standards of rightness.
Boys develop a justice perspective: Formal rules define right and wrong.
Girls develop a care-and-responsibility perspective: Personal relationships
define reasoning.
Evaluation of Gilligan
•Cultural conditioning accounted for the differences.
•Male and female morals probably become more similar as more women
enter the workplace.

Mead - Social self

–Presented the theory of social behaviorism to explain how social experience
develops an individual’s personality

•The self is a product of social experience.

–Self is not present at birth; it develops.
–Self only develops with social experience.
–Social experience is exchange of symbols.
–Seeking meaning leads people to imagine other people’s intentions.
–Understanding intentions requires imaging the situation from the other’s
point of view.
Evaluation of Mead

•Mead found the root of both self and society in symbolic interaction.

•Mead does not allow biological elements.

Cooley - Looking-glass self

–Self-image is based on how we think others see us. I and Me: The self has two
parts.
● Active side of the self is “I”
● Objective side of the self is “me”
–Generalized other widespread cultural norms and values we use as a
reference in evaluating ourselves

The key to developing the self is learning to take the role of the other.

Self-Development
–Imitation: Infants mimic behavior without understanding intentions.
–Play: Through language and symbol learning, children take the roles of
significant others.
–Games: With age, children take the roles of several others at once in games.

Building on Social Experience

 –George Herbert Mead described the development of the self as a process of
gaining social experience. That is, the self develops as we expand our
capacity to take the role of the other.

Erikson: Challenges occur throughout the life course

–Stage 1: Infancy-trust
–Stage 2: Toddlerhood-autonomy
–Stage 3: Preschool-Initiative
–Stage 4: Preadolescence-Industriousness
–Stage 5: Adolescence-Gaining identity
–Stage 6: Young adulthood-Intimacy
–Stage 7: Middle adulthood-Making a difference
–Stage 8: Old age-Integrity
Evaluation of Erickson

•Not everyone confronts the challenges in the same order.

•It is unclear if failure to meet one challenge predicts failure in other stages.

Erickson’s definition of successful life may not be universal

5.3 ANALYZE HOW THE FAMILY, SCHOOL, PEER GROUP, AND THE MASS MEDIA
GUIDE THE SOCIALIZATION PROCESS

AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION

THE FAMILY

The family affects socialization in many ways. For most people, in fact, the family
may be the most important socialization agent of all.

Nurture in early childhood

Infants are totally dependent on others for care. The responsibility for providing
a safe and caring environment typically falls on parents and other family
members.

Children also learn from the type of environment adults create for them.

Race and class

Through the family, parents give a social identity to children. In part social
identity involves race. Racial identity can be complex because societies define
race in various ways.

Social class, like race, plays a large part in shaping a child’s personality. Whether
born into families of high or low social position, children gradually come to realize
that their family’s social standing affects how others see them and, in time, how
they come to see themselves.

In addition, research shows that class position affects not just how much money
parents have to spend on their children but also what parents expect of them.

The family is the most important socializing agent:

Teaching children skills, values, and beliefs. Loving family makes happy
well-adjusted child

Through the family, parents give a social identity to children, racial identity and
ethnicity. Social position: religion and social class.

THE SCHOOL

Schooling enlarges children’s social world to include people with backgrounds

different from their own.

Gender

Schools join with families in socializing children into gender roles. Studies show
that at school, boys engage in more physical activities and spend more time
outdoors, and girls are more likely to help with various housekeeping chores.

What children learn

Schooling is not the same for children living in rich and poor communities.
Children from well-off families typically have a far better experience in school
than those whose families are poor.

Schools also informally teach many things, which together might be called the
hidden curriculum . Activities such as spelling bees teach children not only how
to spell words but also how society divides the population into “winners” and
“losers”. Organized sports help students develop their strength and skills and
also teach children important life lessons in cooperation and competition.

For most children, school is also the first experience with bureaucracy. The school
day is based on impersonal rules and a strict time schedule.

In school, children:
 ❖ Experience diversity
❖ Follow hidden curriculum
❖ Experience first bureaucracy
❖ Begin gender socialization
❖ Accumulate cultural capital.

PEER GROUPS (grupos de pares, de homólogos)

By the time they enter school, children have joined a peer group, a social group
whose members have interests, social position, and age in common. The
importance of peer groups typically peaks during adolescence, when young
people begin to break away from their families and think of themselves as adults.

Even during adolescence, however, parental influence on children remains strong.

Peers may affect short-term interests such as music or films, but parents have
greater influence on long-term goals, such as going to college.

In addition, people are influenced by peer groups they would like to join, a
process sociologists call anticipatory socialization, learning that helps a person
achieve a desired position.

Peer groups are a social group whose members have interests, social position,
and age in common.

Allow escape from direct adult supervision.

Help develop a sense of self that goes beyond family. Often govern short-term
goals. Are often influenced by anticipatory socialization

THE MASS MEDIA AND TELEVISION

Mass media are the means for delivering impersonal communications to a vast
audience. The mass media have an enormous influence on our attitudes and
behaviour.

The extent of mass media exposure

Years before children learn to read, television watching is a regular part of their
daily routine. As they grow, children spend as many hours in front of a television
as they do in school or interacting with their parents. This is the case despite
research suggesting that television makes children more passive and less likely to
use their imagination.

Television in the U.S: Hours of viewing television Negative consequences

Computers in the U.S: 76% of U.S households have a personal computer. 72% of
households are connected on the Internet.
TELEVISION AND POLITICS

For a number of reasons television provokes plenty of criticism. Research

suggests that a wide range of political opinion is available in today’s mass media
and most of us tend to focus on those media sources, whether more liberal or
more conservative, that are closer to our own personal opinions.

Some concerns about race and gender inequality in representation and

stereotyping.

Some conservative concerns that politically correct media have advanced liberal
causes.

TELEVISION AND VIOLENCE

Almost 2/3 of television programs contain violence, and in most such scenes,
violent characters show no remorse and are not punished.

Television and other mass media enrich our lives with entertaining and
educational programming. The media also increase our exposure to diverse
cultures and provoke discussion or current issues. At the same time, the power of
the media to shape how we think remains highly controversial.

Violence in mass media:

Survey: ⅔ of TV contains violence; characters show no remorse (remordimiento)

and are not punished.

About ⅔ of parents say that they are “very concerned” that their children are
exposed to too much media violence.

In 1997, the television industry adopted a rating system (sistema de calificación).

Televisions manufactured after 2000 have a “V-chip” (parental control).

5.4 DISCUSS HOW OUR SOCIETY ORGANIZES HUMAN EXPERIENCE INTO

DISTINCTIVE STAGES OF LIFE

SOCIALIZATION AND LIFE COURSE

1. Childhood has special importance in the socialization process,

learning continues throughout our lives.
2. Each stage of life is linked to the biological process. Societies organize
the life course by age.
3. Other factors shape lives: Race, class, ethnicity and gender.
4. Stages present problems and transitions that involve learning.

THE LIFE COURSE

Childhood (birth through 12)

Because childhood in the US lasts such a long time, some people worry when
children seem to be growing up too fast. In part, this hurried child syndrome
results from changes in the family (including high divorce rates and both parents
in the labor force) that leave children without supervision. In addition, adult
programming on television carries grown up concerns such as sex, drugs, and
violence into young people’s lives. Today 10 to 12 years have the same interests as
12-14 years ago. Perhaps this is why today’s children compared to kids fifty years
ago, have higher levels of stress and anxiety.

Adolescence (the teenage years)

We generally link adolescence, with emotional and social turmoil as young people
struggle to develop their own identities. Again, we are tempted to attribute
teenage rebelliousness and confusion to the biological changes of puberty. But it
is in fact the result of cultural inconsistency.

In short, adolescence is a time of social contradictions, when people are no

longer children but not yet adults.

As is true of all stages of life, adolescence varies according to social background.

Most young people from working-class families move directly from high school
into the adult world of work and parenting.

Wealthier teens, however, have the resources to attend college and perhaps
graduate school, stretching their adolescent years into the late twenties and even
the thirties.

Adulthood:

Is the time when most of life’s accomplishments take place, including pursuing a
career and raising a family. Personalities are largely formed by then, although
marked changes in a person’s environment such as unemployment, divorce… may
cause significant changes to the self.

Early: 20-40 years, conflicting priorities

Middle: 40-60, concerns over health, career and family

Old age (mid-60s and older):

More seniors that teenagers

Less anti-elderly bias (parcialidad) Role exiting

DYING
After observing many people as they were dying, the psychiatrist Ross described
death as an elderly transition involving five distinct stages. Typically, a person
first faces death with denial, perhaps out of fear and perhaps because our
culture tends to ignore the reality of death. The second phrase is anger, when a
person facing death set it as gross injustice. Third, anger gives way to negotiation
as the person imagines the possibility of avoiding death by. Striking a bargain
with God. The fourth response, resignation, is often accompanied by
psychological depression. Finally, a complete adjustment to death requires
acceptance.

As the number of women and men in old age increases, we can expect our culture
to become more comfortable with the idea of death.

86% of Americans die after age 55

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Death is orderly transition involving five distinct stages of

dying:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Negotiation
4. Resignation
5. Acceptance

*Cohort: category of people with something in common, usually their age.

5.5 CHARACTERIZE THE OPERATION OF TOTAL INSTITUTIONS

Total institution, a setting in which people are isolated from the rest of society
and manipulated by an administrative staff.

Total institutions have three important characteristics. First, staff members

supervise all aspects of daily life, including when and where residents eat, sleep
and work. Second, life in a total institution is controlled and standardized, with
the same food, uniforms, and activities for everyone. Third, formal rules dictate
when, where, and how inmates perform their daily routines.

The purpose of such rigid routines is resocialization, radically changing an

inmate’s personality by carefully controlling the environment.

Resocialization is a two-part process. First, the staff breaks down the new inmate’s
existing identity. For example, an inmate must give up personal possessions
including clothing and grooming articles used to maintain a distinctive
appearance.

In the second part of the socialization process, the staff tries to build a new self in
the inmate through a system of rewards and punishments
Total institutions affected people in different ways. Some inmates may end up
“rehabilitated” or “recovered”, but others may change little, and still others may
become hostile and bitter.

Erving Goffman:

Staff supervises all daily life activities. Environment is standardized.

Formal rules and daily schedules are established.

Staff breaks down identity: staff rebuilds personality using rewards and
punishments. Institutions affect people in different ways: some develop an
institutionalized personality.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead