1. Socialization

2. What is Socialization?
process by which an individual learns how to interact with others and becomes a member of society

3. Nature v. Nurture -Innate traits we are born with
Inherited genetic traits
Sex, body build, hair type, eye color, skin color
Aptitudes – capacity to learn particular skills or talents – being “naturally” talented at something
Aptitude for music or art
Instincts - unchanging, biologically inherited behavior patterns
Suckling, mating, hunger
All of these factors can affect your behaviors.

4. Nature v. Nurture Learned behavior
Parental characteristics
religion, education, economic status, cultural heritage, and occupation
Cultures and subcultures
Values and norms, Gender roles
Conditioning and learning
Pavlov’s dogs
All of these factors can influence our behaviors as well.

5. Agents of Socialization
Factors that allow socialization to take place

6. Agents of Socialization: Family
The most important agent of socialization because it stands at the center of children’s lives
Provides for basic needs, and teaches children skills, cultural values, and attitudes about themselves and others
Passes on to children a social position (places them in society in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and class)
Deliberate and unintended socialization
Socializes children into gender roles

7. Agents of Socialization: Family
Research suggests:
nothing is more likely to produce a happy, well- adjusted child than being in a loving family.
class position of parents affects they raise their children.

8. Agents of Socialization: School
Teaches a wide range skills and curriculum that is stated and unstated
Stated – math, science, language, grammar, writing
Unstated - competition, values, fair play, gender roles, patriotism, citizenship, responsibility, working to a deadline
Dances, extracurricular activities socialization children for the larger world

9. Agents of Socialization: School
Schooling enlarges children’s social world to include people with social backgrounds different from their own
School is the child’s first experience with bureaucracy (hierarchy, fixed procedures)
Socializes children into gender roles

10. Agents of Socialization: Peer Groups
Provides children with the opportunity to escape direct supervision of parents and make their own identity.
Adler Study – Boys are made popular through athletics, coolness, and toughness. Girls are made popular through family background, physical appearance, and the ability to attract boys.
Gender roles

11. Agents of Socialization: Peer Groups
Shape themselves into the person they think the group wants them to be
Peers affect short-term interests but parents have greater long-term goals

12. Agents of Socialization: Mass Media
Impersonal – books, movies, TV, internet, magazines, newspapers,
28+ hours of TV/week
Violence
Mirrors our society’s patterns of inequality and rarely challenges the status quo
Reflects the values of the dominant culture

13. Resocializated
A break with past experiences and the learning of new values and norms
Military boot camps, prison, monasteries, psychiatric hospitals, etc
Stripping away of individual identity
Uniforms, haircuts, numbers
Denied freedoms
Leads to new patterns of behavior

14. ON THE BACK OF YOUR 20 STATEMENTS:
Pick one thing about you… it can be anything.
Hobby, Talent, Interest\
For each agent of socialization, tell how that agent affected this aspect of your personality.
For example, I’m a social studies teacher.
Family – My parents were both teachers and they always took my brother and to historical sites.
School – History was always my favorite subject in school.
Peers – All of my best friends are teachers as well.
Mass media – Stations such as the History Channel have allowed me to broaden my interest and taught be about topics I didn’t even know I was interested in.