Theories of Socialization Reading Sociology

​Sociology unit 6 Theories of Socialization

 Sociology 4. 2 Socialization and Personality Development: Theories of Socialization

1. The term socialization refers to the process of interaction through which the growing individual becomes a social being, how the younger generation learns the adult role which it has to play subsequently by learning the habits, attitudes, skills, values and beliefs of the social group into which the individual is born. Socialization is  way through which society transmits its culture from generation to generation by which the child acquires a cultural content, along with selfhood and personality.

2. Socialization is one of the most important social processes in every human society. With out socialization the human beings would not be able to participate in group life and develop the human characteristics. The important outcome of the socialization is the individual personality, the emergence of a distinct “*self*.” Individual’s personality refers to the  stable patterns of thought, feeling and action that marks one’s personal identity which s/he experiences consciously as distinct from other people and things. It is a process by which the emergence and gradual development of the self or ego happens. It is in terms of the self that personality takes shape and the mind comes to function.

3. Socialization takes place at different stages such as **primary*, *secondary* and *adult**. The primary stage involves the socialization of the young child in the family. The secondary stage involves the school and the third stage is adult socialization.

4. During the first months of life, the infant possesses little or no under­standing of differences between human beings and material objects in the environment, and has no awareness of self. By the age of two the child learns to differentiate between various other people — father, mother and siblings and s/he begins to use “*me*” which is a sign of definite self-consciousness, that s/he is becoming aware of her/himself as a distinct human being. 

5. **Secondary Socialization**includes the acquisition of role-specific knowledge, learned through training and specific rituals. Secondary socialization is the internalization of institutional or institution-based “sub worlds.”

6. The development of our personal identity and the realisation of a distinctive personality is a complicated process, which continues throughout life. Psychologists and social psychologists like **Sigmund Freud, Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead** have formulated different theories to explain the  process of socialization.

7. Sigmund Freud’s comprehensive theory of chilf development, together with the works of  **Carl Jung** and Freud’s daughter, **Anna Freud**, was known as **psychodynamic theories** of development. 

8. Freud’s theory of personality or self development rests on the following process. He divided the self (human mind) into three parts:(1) The *id* (unconscious impulses) (2) The *ego* (conscious control), and (3) The *superego* (unconscious thoughts about what is morally right). These are not separate entities, but three interactive stages in the development of personality.

9. According to Freud, “*Id*” is made up of biologically inherited urges, impulses and desires which may be viewed as an unsocialised aspect of human nature: selfish irrational, impulsive, antisocial and unconscious. It is the obscure inaccessible part of our personality.

10. Infants are said to be controlled totally by ‘*Id*’. They want every desire fulfilled without delay, but parents interfere and infants learn to wait until it is time to eat, to control bowel movements or  to hold their temper.

11. It is in their attempt to cope up with the denial of pleasure children begin to develop the second aspect of their personality called, “*ego*” which is the conscious, rational part of the self that attempts to mediate between the conflicting demands of the social environment and the deep unconscious urges of the “*Id*.”

12. Later, at about four or five years of age, the “super *ego*” or the conscience begins to develop. The child learns about the demands of the society through parents and internalizes them into personality in the form of the superego which is a form of an internal version of the moral authority of the society.

13. The *superego* represents the social ideals such as, norms, values, traditions, the idea of moral and immoral and others. It is seen as internalised parental and social authority. The parent is no longer outside telling the child what to do, but is inside the psyche, invisibly overseeing the child’s thoughts and actions, praising what is right and making the child feel guilty for wrong doing. 

14. We develop feelings of guilt and shame when we cannot cope up with the social expectations and feel good about ourselves when we live up to the standards of the super ego. Through this internal monitoring mechanism we learn to mould our behavior in socially acceptable ways and repress socially undesirable thought and actions.

15. The *id* and the *superego* are in continual conflict. When we are hungry, for example, our id urges us to satisfy’s our hunger in the quickest way possible. Our superego, on the other hand, tells us that this is an unacceptable way to satisfy our hunger. According to **Talcott  Parsons**, the Freudian superego is the key device by which society’s values are transmitted to the child. 

16. Freud emphasizes the instinctual and biological side of human development, rather than the social side of human development as stressed by Mead and Cooley. Freud challenged Mead and Cooley’s concept of socialised self which did not separate identity of self and society. Cooley and Mead have demonstrated that the very emergence of the self is a social process and not a psycho­logical process as contended by Freud. They have viewed self and society as two aspects of the same thing, whereas Freud finds that the self and society are often opponents and self is basically anti-social.

17. Freud’s theory is valuable in the sense that it stressed the personality as the product of the interaction between the human organism and the social forces that surround it and he underlined the importance of early childhood socialization on later conscious motives and behaviour.

18. According to Freud, society prohibits us from expressing certain instincts and desires, especially impulses related to sex and aggression. Social order would be impossible without the regulation of these drives. Hence society imposes its will on the individual, suppressing and channeling the drives for socially acceptable outlets but often doing so in ways that lead to later neuroses and personality disturbances.

19. According to Cooley’s, “**looking glass self**” theory, there are three steps (stages) in the process of formation of self: (1)The imagination of our appearance of how we look to others. (2) The imagination of their judgment of how we look or how we think others judge our behaviour.(3) How we feel about their judgment, i.e., our feelings (self feeling) about their judgments.

20. We know that we exist, that we are beautiful or ugly, serious or funny, lively or dull etc., through the way other people think of us. We can also imagine how we appear to others and how they evaluate our appearance. We often respond to these imagined evalu­ations with pride, embarrassment, humiliation or some other feeling. In conclusion, the looking-glass self means that we see ourselves and we respond to ourselves, not as we are and not as other think we are, but as we imagine others think we are.

21. Several researches have found that there is often a significant variation between individual’s perception of how other pictures us and the views they actually hold. Clearly, it is our perception of the responses of others and not their  responses which determines our self-image, and these perceptions are often inaccurate.

22. American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead gave particular attention to the emergence of a two-part structure of the self  represented by the terms “*I*” and “*me*”.

23. The “*I*” is the immediate response of an individual to others. It is the unpre­dictable and creative aspect of the self. The “*I*” is the unsocialised infant – “a bundle of spontaneous wants and desires.” The “*me*” consists of the attitudes of others that the child adopts and makes her/his own. In other words, the “*me*” is the “**social self**.” 

24. Mead traces the genesis of the self through two stages in child devel­opment:(1) **Play stage (2) Game stage.**

25. At the play stage infants and young children develop as social beings first of all by imitating the actions of those around them. In their play small children often imitate what adults do. They often play ‘house’ (Mummy-Papa) or ‘school’ (Teacher- Student), enacting the role of mother, father, teacher, student or any other person important to them. Mead calls this process as role-taking.

26. The game stage of child development, occurs at about eight or nine, the child starts taking part in organised games. To learn organised games, one must understand the rules of the play, notions of fairness and equal participation. The child at this stage learns to grasp what Mead terms the ‘generalised other’—the general values and moral rules involved in the culture in which he or she is devel­oping, a stage the self develop in the full sense of term.

27. In his theory of ‘**collective representation’, Emile Durkheim ** maintains that the individual’s thought and behaviour are determined by the body of experiences, system of ideas, patterns of behaviour, attitudes and values held in common by a group of people. For him, sociali­zation is a one-way process because his focus has been on how society develops and moulds the individual to fit into the group. Durkheim’s conception left little room for individual’s initiative and freedom in the process of socialization. He utilised his theory of collective representation in explaining the causes of suicide, the social phenomena of religion and the concept of social solidarity and such others.

28. Besides the theories of **Ivan Pavlov and John Watson** (classical Conditioning) as well as that of  **B. F. Skinner and Martin Seligman**  (radical behaviourism) **Albert Bandura** proposed a third type of behaviorism called **social learning theory** (also known as observational learning). According to this theory, people can learn indirectly by watching other’s behaviors. When one person observes another person experiencing a punishment in response to a behavior, the observer generally becomes less likely to engage in that behavior. On the other hand, if one person observes another person being rewarded in response to a behavior, the observer will generally become more likely to engage in that behavior.

29. Another theory known as **family systems theory** emphasizes the role of family factors, such as relationships within families (sibling, parent-child, and parent-parent relationships) and the structure of families in influencing developmental outcomes.

30. Family systems theory differs from many other theories of development in focusing on the family, rather than the individual, as the primary unit of analysis. Family systems theorists conceptualize development in terms of interactions between people, rather than any one individual’s behavior. This is a significant shift in conceptualizing development.

31. **Social ecological systems theory**  emphasizes interconnections among different elements of a child’s environment, including parental influences which affect a child directly, and distant influences, such as the community, which affect a child indirectly. Generally speaking, social ecological models of development focus on an individual child at the center of a complex array of influences.

32. **Biological theories** emphasize biological causes, such as genes, or hormones. In other words, one’s biology is viewed as the underlying cause of behavior, cognition, and emotion within the broader social environment. 

33. **Evolutionary developmental theory** proposes that behavioral patterns  help us to survive, reproduce, or acquire resources that support survival and reproduction. Another way of saying this is that people are born prepared to be social in certain ways because it keeps the species going.

34. Human beings have thinking capacity and language, so they can carry on mental conversation. It is through this facility we can anticipate other’s behavior. Through internal conversation we can imagine the thoughts, emotions, and behavior of others in a given situation.

35. **Social construction** is an ongoing process that is embedded in our everyday interactions. People act in accordance with shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions. **Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory** views social life as a theatrical performance in which we are all actors on metaphysical stages with roles, scripts, costumes, and sets. **Ethnomethodology** is an approach to studying human interaction that focuses on the ways in which we make sense of our world, convey this understanding to others, and produce a mutually shared social order. The Internet has created new types of social interaction that don’t incorporate traditional  verbal and visual reality but rely on **virtual and augmented reality** (e.g.,Pokemon GO). It has also changed society by creating new types of crimes and new ways of communicating. Because our reality is socially constructed, we all have a stake in maintaining consensus on shared meanings.