SOC100H5 Chapter 3: Chapter 3 Summary
Chapter 3: Socialization
Social Isolation and Socialization
- The ability to learn culture and become human is only potential (which can be seen in stories of people who are
isolated from people for so long that they only develop basic language skills and cannot interact with others)
- To be actualized, socialization must unleash this potential
- Socialization is the process by which people learn their culture. They do so by:
1. Entering into and disengaging from a succession of roles
2. Becoming aware of themselves as they interact with others.
- Role: set of expected behaviours, or the behaviour expected of a person occupying a particular position in society
- Self: a set of ideas and attitudes about who one is as an independent being
- A study conducted by Rene Spitz showed the importance of socialization in unleashing human potential
• Compared children raised in a nursing home and children raised in an orphanage
• In the orphanage, six nurses took care of 45 babies (had much less contact with people), and sheets were
hung from cribs to prevent the infants from seeing the activities of the institution (depriving infants of
social stimuli for most of the day made them less demanding)
• In the nursing home, mothers cared for their babies, and from their cribs, the infants could see a slice of
society through other babies playing and receiving care as well as mothers, doctors, and nurses talking,
cleaning, serving food, and providing medical treatment
• By the age of 9 and 12, the orphans were more susceptible to infections and had a higher death rate
• By the time they were 2 and 3, all of the children from the nursing home were talking and talking,
compared to fewer than 8% of the orphans
• Spitz also suspected that the orphans would have impaired sexual life when they reached maturity
- Without childhood socialization, most of our human potential remains undeveloped
THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF SELF-IDENTITY
- The central growth process in adolescence is to define the self through the clarification of experience and to
establish self-esteem
- To understand the socialization process in its entirety, we first review the main theories of how a sense of self
develops during early childhood
- We then discuss the society’s main socializing institutions or “agents of socialization” (families, schools, peer
groups, and the mass media) where we learn how to control our impulses, think of ourselves as members of
different groups, value certain ideals, and perform various roles
- These institutions don’t always work hard to produce happy, well-adjusted adults (often give mixed messages and
are often at odds with each other; meaning that they teach different and even contradictory lessons)
- We finally examine how decreasing supervision and guidance by adult family members, increasing assumption of
adult responsibilities by youths, and declining participate in extracurricular activities are changing the nature of
childhood and adolescence today
- The development of self-identity is often a difficult and stressful process
THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST FOUNDATIONS OF CHILDHOOD SOCI ALIZATION
Sigmund Freud
- Infants demand immediate gratification but begin to form a self-image when their attitudes are denied (for
example, when parents decide not to feed and comfort them every time they wake up in the middle of the night)
- The infant begins to realize that its needs differ from those of its parents, it has a existence independent of
others, and it must somehow balance its needs with the realities of life
- The child develops a sense pf what constitutes right and wrong, and a personal conscience develops
- A psychological mechanism also develops that normally balances the pleasure-seeking and restraining
components of the self
- Id: Freud’s term for the pleasure-seeking component of the self.
- Superego: Freud’s term for the restraining component of the self
- Ego: Freud’s term for the mechanism that balances the id and the superego
- Freud argued that only social interaction can allow the self to emerge (countering earlier thinkers’ beliefs that the
self emerges naturally)
- Focused on the denial of impulses as the mechanism that generates the self’s objective side
Charles Horton Cooley
- Founder of the symbolic-interactionist study of socialization with his studies of the looking-glass self
- When we interact with others, the gesture and react to us, which allows us to imagine how we appear to them
(and we judge how others evaluate us)
- From these judgements, we develop a self-concept of a set of feelings and ideas about who we are
- In other words, our feelings about who we are depend largely on how we see ourselves evaluated by others
- Looking-glass self: the way our feelings about who we are depend on how we see ourselves evaluated by others
- Example: When teachers evaluate students negatively, that causes them to do poorly in school (poor
performance may have as much to do with teachers’ negative evaluations as with students’ innate abilities)
- Why is this symbolic interactionism? The idea that in the course of face-to-face communication, people engage in
a creative process of attaching meanings to things (this meaning being our sense of self)
George Herbert Mead
- A subjective and impulsive aspect of the self is present from birth (called this the I)
- I: the subjective and impulsive aspect of the self that is present from birth.
- a storehouse of culturally approved standards emerges as a part of the self during social interaction (called this
objective, social component of the self the me)
- Me: the objective component of the self that emerges as people communicate symbolically and learn to take the
role of the other
- Drew attention to the unique human capacity to “take the role of the other” as the source of the me
- Human communication involves seeing yourself from other people’s point of view; you must see yourself
objectively as a me to understand the communicative acts of others
- All human communication depends on being able to take the role of the other
- The self thus emerges from people using symbols (such as words or gestures), to communicate
- The me is not present from birth, it emerges only gradually during social interaction
MEAD’S STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
1. Children use language and other symbols by imitating important people in their lives, such as their mother
and father. Mead called these individuals significant others (people who play important roles in the early
socialization)
2. Children pretend to be other people; they use their imaginations to role-play in games, such as “house”,
“school”, and “doctor”
3. At about the age of seven, children learn to play complex games that require them to simultaneously take
over the role of several other people (in baseball, for example, the players must each be aware of the roles
that will be assigned each of the players and the expectations of each of them)
4. Involves taking the role of what Mead called the generalized other. Years of experience may teach an
individual that other people, employing the cultural standards of their society, usually regard him or her as
temperamental, funny, or intelligent. A person’s image of these cultural standards and how they are applied
to him or her is what Mead meant by the generalized other.
30
SOC100H5 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
30 documents
Document Summary
The ability to learn culture and become human is only potential (which can be seen in stories of people who are isolated from people for so long that they only develop basic language skills and cannot interact with others) To be actualized, socialization must unleash this potential. Socialization is the process by which people learn their culture. They do so by: entering into and disengaging from a succession of roles, becoming aware of themselves as they interact with others. Role: set of expected behaviours, or the behaviour expected of a person occupying a particular position in society. Self: a set of ideas and attitudes about who one is as an independent being. A study conducted by rene spitz showed the importance of socialization in unleashing human potential. Compared children raised in a nursing home and children raised in an orphanage. By the age of 9 and 12, the orphans were more susceptible to infections and had a higher death rate.
