Week 5

Courage is to stand up and speak, courage is also to

sit down, and listen. – Winston Churchill
Sociology
Sixteenth Edition

Chapter 5
Socialization

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The Power of Society (2 of 2)
• “Socialization is so
basic to human
development that we
sometimes overlook
its importance.”

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Social Experience: The Key to Our Humanity
• Socialization
• Lifelong 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

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Human Development: Nature and Nurture (1 of 2)
• Human Development: Nature and Nurture
• Elements of society have a naturalistic root.
• Nature or nurture?
• It is both, but from a sociological perspective, nurture matters more.
• Social sciences: The role of nurture
• Most of who and what we are as a species is learned, or social in nature.
• Behaviorism

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Human Development: Nature and Nurture (2 of 2)
• Human infants
display various
reflexes-biologically
based behavior
patterns that
enhance survival.
• Sucking reflex
• Grasping reflex
• Moro reflex

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Social Isolation
• Effect on nonhuman primates
• Harlow’s experiments
• Six months of complete isolation caused irreversible emotional and behavioral damage
• Effect on children
• Anna, Isabelle, and Genie
• Isolation left children damaged
• Success after intensive treatment was related to mental functioning and age at rescue

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Understanding Socialization: Theories
• Sigmund Freud
• Jean Piaget
• Lawrence Kohlberg
• Carol Gilligan
• George Herbert Mead
• Erik H. Erikson
Let’s take a brief look at the theories related to each of these researchers.

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Sigmund Freud’s Elements of Personality
• Freud
• Elements of Personality
• Basic human needs: Eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct) as opposing forces of
basic needs
• Developing personality
• The id: Basic drives
• The ego: Efforts to achieve balance
• The superego: Culture within

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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.

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Jean Piaget: Cognitive Development
• Piaget
• Studied cognition
• How people think and understand
• Identified four stages of development
• Sensorimotor stage: Sensory contact understanding
• Preoperational stage: Use of language and other symbols
• Concrete operational stage: Perception of causal connections in surroundings
• Formal operational stage: Abstract, critical thinking

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Evaluation of Piaget
• Differed from Freud, viewing the mind as active and creative
• Proposed ability to engage the world is result of biological maturation
and social experience
• Universality of stages is questioned

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Lawrence Kohlberg: Moral Development
• Kohlberg
• Built on Piaget’s work on moral reasoning
• Ways in which individuals judge situations as right or wrong
• Proposed developmental stages of moral development

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Lawrence Kohlberg: Stages of Moral Development
• Preconventional
• 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

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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

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Carol Gilligan: Gender and Moral Development
• Gilligan
• 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.

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Evaluation of Gilligan
• Cultural conditioning
accounted for the differences
• Male and female morals
probably become more similar
as more women enter the
workplace.
• After reading about Gilligan’s
theory, can you suggest what
these two children might be
arguing about?

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Eric H. Erickson: Stages of Moral Development
• 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

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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.

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Agents of Socialization
• The Family
• The School
• The peer group
• The mass media

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Agents of Socialization: The Family
• The family is the most
important socializing
agent
• Teaching children skills,
values, and beliefs
• Loving family makes
happy well-adjusted
child

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The Family: Race and Class
• Through the family, parents give a social identity to children
• Racial identity, ethnicity
• Social position
• Religion, social class

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Agents of Socialization: The School
• In school, children
• Experience diversity
• Follow hidden curriculum
• Experience first bureaucracy
• Begin gender socialization
• Accumulate cultural capital

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Agents of Socialization: Peer Groups
• Peer groups are a social group whose members have interests, social position, and
age in common.
• Allow escape from direct adult supervision
• Help development of sense of self that goes beyond family
• Often govern short-term goals
• Are often influenced by anticipatory socialization

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Agents of Socialization: The Mass Media and Television
• Mass media are the means for delivering impersonal communications to a vast
audience.
• Televisions 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 to the Internet.

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Television Ownership in Global Perspective

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Television and Politics
• Television
• Some concerns about race and gender inequality in representation and
stereotyping
• Some conservative concerns that politically correct media have advanced liberal
causes

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Television and Violence (1 of 2)

• Violence in mass media

– Survey: of TV contains violence; characters show
no remorse and are not punished
– About of parents say that they are “very
concerned” that their children are exposed to too
much media violence

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Television and Violence (2 of 2)
• In 1997, the television industry
adopted a rating system.
• Televisions manufactured after
2000 have a “V-chip”
(parental control).
Do you think the current rating codes
are sufficient to guide parents and
children who buy video games, or
would you support greater
restrictions on game content?

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Socialization and Life Course
• Each stage of life is linked to the biological process.
• Societies organize the life course by age.
• Other factors shape lives: Race, class, ethnicity, and gender.
• Stages present problems and transitions that involve learning.

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The Life Course
• Childhood (birth through 12)
• The “hurried child”
• Adolescence (the teenage years)
• Turmoil attributed to cultural inconsistencies
• Adulthood
• Early: 20-40, conflicting priorities
• Middle: 40-60, concerns over health, career and family
• Old age (mid-60s and older)
• More seniors than teenagers
• Less anti-elderly bias
• Role exiting

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Total Institutions
• Erving Goffman
• Staff supervises all daily life activities.
• Environment is standardized.
• Formal rules and daily schedules are established.

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Resocialization
• Staff breaks down identity
• Goffman: “Abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self”
• Staff rebuilds personality using rewards and punishments
• Institutions affect people in different ways
• Some develop an institutionalized personality

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Are We Free Within Society?
• Society shapes how we think, feel and act. If this is so, then in what sense are we
free?
• “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

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Project
• Identify and analyse your ecosystem(s) in depth. Identify its problems
and practical indigenous solutions.
• To be submitted electronically in 14th week at 2000 hrs on the day of
your class. To be sent by one, keeping others in CC, from official email.
Do write group members name at the end of email.
• Groups of 4 to be made as per choice of students, but the students need
to belong to same area.
• The report should not be more than 2 pages. Photos can be attached as
appendix.
• Font size 12.
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Copyright

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