Chapter 3 – Socialization

What is Human Nature?

• social environment – the entire human environment, including direct contact with others
• feral children – children assumed to have been raised by animals, in the wilderness, isolated from other humans (Nell IS NOT a feral child)

Feral Children

Isolated Children

Institutionalized Children

Deprived Animals

Socialization into the Self and Mind

• socialization – the process by which people learn the characteristics of their group–the knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and actions thought apprpriate for them
• self – the unique human capacity of being able to see oursleves “from the outside”; the view we internalize of how how others see use
• looking-glass self – a term coined by Charles Horton Cooley to refer to the process by which our self develops though internalizing others’ reactions to us
• taking the role of the other – putting oneslef in somone eles’s shoes; understanding how someone else feels and thinks and thus anticiapting how that person will act
• significant other – an individual who significantly influences somoen else’s life
• generalized other – the norms, values, attittudes, and expectations of people “in general”; the child’s ability to take the role of the generalized other is a significnat step in the development of a self

Cooley and the Looking-Glass Self

Mead and Role Taking

Piaget and the Development of Reasoning

Global Aspects of the Self and Reasoning

Learning Personality, Morality, and Emotions

• id – Freud’s term for our inborn basic drives
• eg0 – Freud’s term for a balancing force between the id and the demands of society
• superego – Freud’s term for conscience, the internalized norms and values of our social groups

Freud and the Development of Personality

Kohlberg, Gilligan, and the Development of Morality

Socializtion into Emotions

The Self and Emotions as Social Control–Society Within Us

Socialization into Gender

• gender socialization – the ways in which society sets chidren onto different courses in life beacuse the are male of female
• mass media – forms of communication, such as radio, newspapers, and television are directed to mass audiences
• gender role – the behaviors and attitudes considered appropriate because one is a female or a male
• peer group – a groupe of individuals of roughly the same age who are linked by common interests
• social inequality – a social condition in which privileges and obligations are given to some but denied to others

Gender Messages in the Family

Gender Messages from Our Peers

Gender Messages in the Mass Media

Agents of Socialization

• agents of socialization – people of groups that affect our self-concept, attitudes, behaviors, or other orientations toward life
• manifest functions – the inteded beneficial consequences of people’s actions
• latent functions – unintended beneficial consequences of people’s actions
• anticipatory socialization – because one anticipates a future role, one learns parts of it now

The Family

The Neighborhood

Religion

Day Care

The School

Peer Groups

Sports and Competitive Success

The Workplace

Resocialization

• resocialization – the process of learning new norms, vaues, attitudes, and behaviors
• total institution – a place in which people are cut off from the rest of society and are almost totally controlled by the officials who run the place
• degredation ceremony – a term coined by Harld Garfinkel to describe an attempt to remake the self by stripping away an individual’s slef identity and stamping a new identity it its place

Total Institutions

Socialization Thought the Life Course

• life course – the stage of our life as we go from birth to death

Childhood

Adolescence

Young Adulthood

The Middle Years

The Older Years

The Sociological Significance of the Life Course

Are We Prisoners of Socialization

Works Cited:

Henslin, James M. Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach, 7th ed. (Pearson: Boston 2005), Chapter 3