1. Socialization
Socialization: the social interaction process through which individuals acquire personality and learn the way of life of their society.
Socialization=link between the individual and society – neither can survive without it.
Primary socialization: the initial socialization, lasting roughly 6 years, in which the infant acquires a personality. **most important phase**
Secondary socialization: all additional socialization after primary socialization, lasting the rest of one’s life.

2. Personality
Personality: an individual’s typical patterns of thought, feeling and action.
Emerges via primary socialization.
3 components of personality:
1. Cognitive: thoughts, beliefs, memories, etc.
2. Emotional or Affective: feelings like love, pride, guilt, anger,etc.
3. Behavioral: patterns of physical behavior, skills, etc.
The norms and value of a culture influence the socialization process as well as the personality traits we exhibit.

3. Nature versus Nurture
We are the products of the interaction between heredity and learning.
Genetic factors provide the basic potentials of an individual. Social experience may develop or discourage these potentials.
Similar to seeds and soil. Both need each other, and the same seed grows differently in different soils.

4. Effects of Childhood Socialization
Children raised in childhood isolation.
The case of Anna ( ): 5 years in near total isolation. Raised in a storage room in a Pennsylvania farm house by an unstable mother from a strict family where illegitimate children were taboo.
When rescued by a social worker, she was a zombie – unresponsive to the social world. Re-socialization helped her a little – she learned to smile - but she was permanently stunted in virtually every way: cognitive, affective and behavioral.

5. Conclusion
Children raised in near total isolation suffer along all three dimensions of personality.
Long term isolation – the duration of the primary socialization period - seems to produce permanent or irreversible delay.
Short term isolation – perhaps a few years during primary socialization – produces initial delay, but these effects may be reversible with effective re-socialization.

6. Children Raised in Total Institutions
Total Institution: residence where inmates are cut off from society, under the control of a hierarchy of official.
Examples: prison, boarding school, asylum, boot camp.
Many orphanages in the 50s were total institutions.
Studies revealed som children didn’t have chance to est. close emotional ties with others.
The result was slight physical, social, and emotional stunting for some, particularly in emotional empathy skills. They were a bit more emotionally aloof or “cold” than other children.

7. Monkeys raised in total isolation
Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments revealed that in monkeys, social behavior is largely learned, not inherited.
Isolated monkeys didn’t know how to mate.
Female mothers who are artificially impregnated treat their offspring in an unloving and abusive manner, or simply ignore them.
This suggests there may not be a “maternal instinct.”
Infant monkeys, if given a choice, prefer a “cuddly” cloth doll with no feeder bottle to a wire doll that has a feeder bottle attached, suggesting an instinct for emotional/physical contact.

8. The Harlow Research - Conclusions
1. Isolated monkeys become asocial.
2. Infant monkeys seem to derive emotional benefits with physical contact/hugs.
3. Social contact – not necessarily with the mother – is the key.
4. Short periods of isolation (3 months or less) produce damages which can be reversed, but long term isolation produces irreversible damage to the monkeys.

9. Implications for Humans
Humans, lacking the complex instincts that guide behavior in most other species, can become fully human only by learning in social interaction with other people.
Intimate contact appears to be a critical need, especially during primary socialization.

10. The Emergence of the Self
The self : an individual’s conscious experience of a distinct personal identity separate from all other people and things.
Humans are capable of thinking about themselves as “objects” to be reflected upon.
In other words, humans are self-aware.
At birth we have no self, or self-awareness. It’s learned and emerges during primary socialization.
The self is a social product-created and modified via social interaction.
Research such as the “Who am I” test suggests that the social statuses we acquire influence how we perceive and feel about ourselves.

11. Theories About the Self

12. Sigmund Freud ( )
Conventional view of self and personality=they are products of heredity.
Freud believed that, while biological forces were paramount, cultural forces did play a (small) role.

13. Freud – Elements of Personality
Freud argued there are 3 components of personality:
1. The id. Rooted in biology, it represents the person’s basic needs or drives. It exists at birth.
It reflects the needs of the individual.
2. The ego. The person’s conscious attempt to balance the id-drives with the demands of society. The ego develops out of the awareness that society exists apart from the id. A healthy ego successfully manages the opposing forces of the id versus the superego.
It reflects the balance between ego and superego
3. The superego. Developed during socialization. The superego reflects the presence of society’s mores, internalized into the self as our conscience.
It reflects the needs of society.

14. Charles Cooley: The Looking-Glass Self
Basic insight: we develop a self-image based on how we think others perceive us.
Three steps in the formation of self-concept:
1. We observe how others react to us.
We want to know whether we are loved, attractive, etc.
2. We interpret other’s reactions.
We note whether others’ reactions are consistent with what we imagine ourselves to be.
3. We develop a self-concept based on that interpretation.
Based on how we perceive others’ reactions, we form a self-opinion. We may like ourselves, or we may hate ourselves.

15. George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)
Mead distinguished between the “I” and the “me” components of the self.
The me component refers to the self as object - or the self as seen by society (or at least how the individual thinks they are seen). This is similar to Cooley’s Looking-Glass self.
The I component refers to the self as subject. The I is the response of the organism to how it is viewed by society.
To Mead, the self is dynamic. It is constantly interpreting and acting in context of society.

16. George Herbert Mead, continued
Mead developed the theoretical paradigm of symbolic interactionism.
Social interaction occurs between individuals via symbols (gestures, signs, language, etc).
Language is a crucial symbolic system. To Mead, without language there cannot be a mind. The mind is essentially a “symbol processor.”
All symbols – including language - are socially constructed.
Therefore, the mind itself is a social product.

17. Mead’s Theory of Role-Taking
Mead argued that socialization occurs through the process of role-taking.
Role-taking occurs over 4 stages:
1. Imitation. The infant simply mimics the particular others around it. This lasts about 2 years.
2. Play. Age 2-6. The child pretends to take the roles of specific others by playing doctor, or playing mommy.
3. Games. By roughly 6 years old, the child is capable of taking the roles of many others in one situation, such as grasping how a baseball infield will react to a fly ball. Here there are multiple roles, but there is only one social situation.
4. Generalized Other. Soon after, the young boy or girl becomes capable of grasping the nature of how roles operate across different social situations. They can generalize about what society expects of people across different social situations.

18. Learning to Think – Jean Piaget
Piaget ( ) was interested in mental development and is one of the influences behind the discipline of cognitive psychology.
He emphasized that social life is needed for the individual to become conscious of their own mind.
Cognitive development occurs across a series of stages.

19. Four Stages of Cognitive Development
1. Sensorimotor stage. (0-2 years). The infant experiences the world only via sensory contact.
Reliance upon physical/sensory contact with the environment.
World is seen as a shifting chaos in which objects have no permanence. Out of sight is out of mind.
Rooted in the here and now.
Infant is egocentric, incapable of much empathy.

20. Four Stages of Cognitive Development
2. Pre-operational stage. (Roughly 2 – 7 years old).
Child acquires language.
Child acquires object permanence.
Awareness of the results of one’s actions.
Inability to do simple mental operations. Example: the larger object “must be” heavier to the child.
Still egocentric. Still has difficulty taking the views of others.

21. Four Stages of Cognitive Development
3. Concrete operational stage. (Roughly 7-12 years).
Child can reason about concrete situations, but has trouble with abstract ideas.
First use of logic to understand events, such as grasping cause-effect relationships.
Able to simultaneously juggle multiple roles.
No longer egocentric. Child is able to take others’ views into account. They are now empathetic and show real concern for the plight of others.

22. Four Stages of Cognitive Development
4. Formal operational stage. (Roughly 12+ years old).
The individual is able to think abstractly and critically and can learn highly abstract theories and concepts.
The individual is no longer tied to the concrete environment.
While the stage process is universal, not everyone reaches the formal operational stage.
This stage is more common in developed societies and appears to be affected by exposure to high-level education.
Industrial societies encourage formal operational thinking for many members, but agrarian societies only encourage it among elites.

23. Learning to Feel Basic findings:
Socialization includes learning how to develop emotional capacities.
Social scientists know relatively little about emotions, largely because they are so difficult to operationalize.
Basic findings:
1. The process of learning emotions is the same in all humans. Feelings develop in an orderly sequence – as building blocks beginning with simple emotions like pleasure and pain and progressing toward complex emotions like joy and angst.
2. The expression of emotions differs across societies, and even by gender. Social factors influence what, when, and how emotions are expressed (as well as how we learn to interpret emotions).
In our patriarchal society men learn to hide their expression of grief, but not anger; while women learn to hide their expression of anger, but not grief.

24. Lawrence Kohlberg: Moral Development Occurs Across 3 stages:
1. Pre-conventional stage. (Young children).
What is right is that which is pleasurable to me; what is wrong is that which is painful to me. Note the egocentrism.
2. Conventional stage. (Many teens and adults).
What is right is what society says is right. Note the absence of egocentrism. Many people (especially conformists) remain in this stage.
3. Post-conventional stage (Some teens and adults).
What is right is that which is consistent with ethical principles, regardless of what society says. Many never reach this level, but certainly independent thinkers like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King did.

25. Carol Gilligan: The Gender Factor
Moral development is influenced by gender socialization.
Boys tend to be taught a justice perspective. They are taught to rely upon formal rules. Therefore something is wrong if it is illegal.
Girls tend to be taught a care and responsibility perspective. They are taught to judge a situation by how it relates to personal relationships. An illegal act may not be wrong if the act was intentioned to help people.

26. Agents of Socialization

27. 1. The Family The most significant agent of socialization.
A primary group, and therefore very powerful.
Responsible for primary socialization.
Much family socialization is unconscious and unintentional.
The family provides an immediate ascribed status for the infant.
Social class
Ethnic identity

28. The Family, continued
Research suggests there are social class differences in family socialization messages that help perpetuate the social class structure..
Working class families: actions speak louder than words.
Emphasis is on conformity to rules and staying out of trouble, with strict punishment for deviant behavior.
This tends to reinforce working class job culture, as many working class jobs are order-taker jobs where conformity to rules is important.
Middle class families: words speak louder than actions.
Curiosity and taking initiative or risk is encouraged in the child. Discipline is less strict.
This tends to reinforce middle class job culture, as many middle class jobs are order-giver jobs requiring independent thinking.

29. 2. School
A form of anticipatory socialization – learning that helps a person achieve a desired position.
Functions to socialize people into certain forms of knowledge.
Functions to socialize people into core values and belief systems. Schools may indoctrinate.
Primary school is often the child’s first experience with formal organizations, specifically, the bureaucracy.
Most schools are secondary groups (formal, task oriented).
Given the changes in the family toward 2-parent workers, school functions have changed to offer more day-care.
School provides a setting for the child to develop peer group friendships.

30. 3. Peer Groups
Peer groups are people with similar social characteristics who hang out with each other. Members treat each other as relative equals.
They are primary groups with typically high levels of solidarity.
They are particularly powerful during late childhood and adolescence.
Identity formation during adolescence is in context of peer group subcultures, which may offer different values, beliefs, and tastes than parents.
Among teens, short term style preferences, sexual activity, popular culture taste, and other teen behaviors are shaped mainly by peer groups.
Peer pressure brings norms of conformity within the in-group.

31. 4. The Mass Media
The mass media: impersonal communications directed toward a vast audience.
Relatively new and controversial agent of socialization.
Unlike the family, school, church, and peer groups, the commercial mass media does not have the child’s interests as their main goal.
Capitalist media prioritize private profit above most other considerations. Their primary goal is to make money for their stockholders.

32. The mass media, continued
The commercial mass media serve 2 interests:
1. The private interest.
Because they operate for profit, capitalist media tend to offer lots of sex and violence. While profitable, excessive sex and violence generally does not serve the public interest.
2. The public interest.
The commercial mass media offer entertainment and information that serves the public interest.

33. The mass media, continued
The most powerful mass media today is television.
The average American has the TV turned on for 7 hours each day, and actually watches it for 2 to 3 hours per day.
Children watch TV an average of almost 3 hours per day.
Commercial TV socializes the child to become a consumer and to prioritize materialism, competition, status consciousness, and other consumer-capitalist values.
Often the values on commercial TV contradict the parents’ values.
Heavy TV watchers are more likely to develop a mean world syndrome – a sense that the world is a mean and dangerous place.
The mean world syndrome has social and psychological consequences.
While commercial TV does well at entertaining, many think it does poorly at educating Americans about important issues necessary for our democracy.

34. The mass media, continued
The mass media are not objective. They present a distorted reality to their audience.
Excessive sex and violence.
Emphasis on stereotypes. Sexism, classism and other group superiority values are common in the commercial mass media.
Normalcy, according to the commercial mass media is the upper middle class lifestyle – something available to only 15-20% of the population.
The commercial mass media emphasize the beauty myth for women.
This myth says that women should remain young and physically attractive at all costs. The result is a decline in self-esteem among American female teens, who cannot live up to the thin Eurocentric runway-model ideal promoted by the commercial media. This false ideal is highly profitable, but does not serve the public interest.

35. Resocialization
Resocialization refers to deliberate socialization aimed at radically altering the self. It is re-creating the self, and it involves an abrupt break from the former self.
Resocialization is often done within a total institution.
Total institution: residence where inmates are cut off from society, under the control of a hierarchy of officials.
Examples: prisons boot camp, asylum, boarding school.

36. Brainwashing
Brainwashing is persuasion or indoctrination, often by force, to get someone to adopt a particular set of beliefs and values. It is a type of resocialization.
Brainwashing is most effective under the following 4 conditions:
1. The person is isolated from their former surroundings, people, and self. Total institutions serve this purpose.
2. They are subjected to peer pressure to conform to the new reality.
3. They are subjected to legitimate authority, which tells them what to think.
4. The person is willing to change.

37. The Life Course Both a biological and a social construction.
Society imposes its own conception of a life course upon the physical process of aging.
Society slices up the aging process arbitrarily into a series of stages.
The number, length and content of these stages varies across societies.

38. The Life Course Traditional societies have only a few stages:
Infancy(immaturity)-adulthood-death
Adulthood is usually defined by acquiring key roles, like “craft-worker” or “parent.”
These roles are acquired at a very young age in traditional cultures.
Industrial societies have more stages:
Infancy-childhood-adolescence-adulthood-old age-death

39. Childhood
Childhood was constructed by industrial cultures - around 1850 in the U.S. - as public schools emerged for children.
The “child” was expected to go to school by 1850 to learn literacy skills necessary to industrial societies and to engage in re-creative activities. Playgrounds, schools, and child clothing styles emerged around this time.
Children were “innocent” and loveable – almost the opposite of adults. Now, children were exempted from adult roles.
Families had become child-centered and were now expected to nurture the child.
The mother was also sentimentalized by now and was expected to be the primary nurturer of the children, giving them love.

40. How was the child seen before industrialization?
Most agrarian cultures did not recognize childhood because they attached adult roles to children beginning around 8 or 9 years old.
Farming families needed as much labor as they could get, so the child was quickly given economic roles and was expected to learn skills in an apprenticeship system.
Agrarian families were work-centered and used strict physical discipline upon the child.
“Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
In Puritanical America adults were expected to “beat the devil out of the child” when they misbehaved.
The original Grimm’s Fairy Tales were quite dark and graphic, but as childhood emerged they were softened and sweetened with happy endings.

41. Adolescence
Emerged around 1880, as it was necessary to postpone adulthood even more in order to further educate the population.
The college system became available to an expanding middle class around this time.
Industrial societies require a mass workforce that delivers professional, specialized services.
Adolescence is a new stage in a rapidly changing society. It is a relatively anomic stage and can be confusing to teenagers.
Contradictory demands and mixed messages
Physically, the teen is an adult capable of reproduction; but socially, the teen is treated as a dependent.
American society poorly equips individuals for the challenges of adolescence.

42. Mature adulthood
This is the stage where anticipatory socialization is basically completed, and the individual’s core identity is formed.
Responsible roles (career, marriage, parenthood) demand a responsible, stable self.
However, modern rapidly-changing society poses problems for adults. Rapid social change destabilizes jobs and marriages, threatening the stability of the self.
Generally this is the most enjoyable life stage because one is most socially productive during this period.
Suicide rates are relatively low for this life stage.

43. Old Age
Modern society is less successful at facing old age than traditional societies. Our society worships youth.
Traditional societies show respect for senior citizens.
Traditional (slow-change) cultures allow seniors to have wisdom – experiential knowledge relevant to young people. They also place seniors within the extended family system and the community, giving them visibility.
In rapidly changing modern cultures, the knowledge of seniors may be obsolete and irrelevant to young people.
They also tend to disappear due to the emphasis on the nuclear family in Western cultures.
Finally, in modern societies seniors have fewer constructive or productive roles.
Hence, there is an increase in ageism in modern societies.

44. Death
Industrial societies postpone death an additional 20 years beyond the life expectancy of agrarian societies.
The life expectancy of the typical middle-class American is almost 80 years today.
American culture does not socialize people to deal with death.
Consequently, death is a taboo subject.
We use euphemisms like “passed away.”

45. What explains the “death taboo”?
1. Individualism. Americans see themselves as the tree, not the leaf on the tree, so death means the end of everything. Also, we stress being in control, yet death is beyond our control.
2. Faith in technology to conquer everything, even death. We learn that death is something to “conquer” – rather than accept the naturalness of death.
3. Decline of religious influence that defines death as heaven. If there is a heaven, one can look forward to it.
4. Institutional differentiation has created specialized institutions like hospitals and nursing homes that hide the dying process. It becomes more mysterious.
5. Rising sentimentalism and emotional intensity of the family experience makes a family death more painful.

46. The history of death perception Source is Philippe Aries
1. Until the 12th century, people didn’t perceive themselves as individuals. Rather, they were part of nature, society, and the collective destiny. One’s own death did not mean a lot.
2. From the 12th to the 15th century, people began to see themselves as individuals. This led to the beginning of wills, tombs, and a “death anxiety.”
3. Beginning in the 18th century through the Victorian Era, the intensity of the family experience led people to fear the loss of a family member more than their own death. Mourning took on hysterical tones.
4. By the 20th century death became a taboo subject and people tried to avoid the emotions it caused. Death cut into happiness. Hushed up procedures in hospitals replaced home deaths. Death was hidden from children. Fear of death increased.

47. The dying process
Today it is excluded from our lives. Death occurs not within the family environment but often in a bureaucratic hospital or nursing ward, surrounded by strangers.
What is the role expectation attached to the dying? We expect the dying to keep it to themselves. This is harmful.
Research reveals that people seem to die more happily if death is openly discussed beforehand.
Yet the death taboo prohibits this discussion in many families.
Talking about death frankly with others encourages our acceptance of it as a natural process.

48. Erik Erikson
According to Erik Erikson, human development does not end at age 6 or 7. It continues over the lifetime.
Erikson presented a social-psychological examination of life challenges across 8 stages.

49. Erik Erikson: 8 stages of life challenges
1. Infancy (0-1.5 years old). The challenge of trust versus mistrust of others.
2. Toddlerhood ( years old). The challenge of autonomy and confidence versus doubt and shame.
3. Pre-school (3-5). Initiative vs. guilt from not pleasing parents’ expectations.
4. Pre-adolescents (6 – 13). Industriousness to make friends vs. inferiority and failure to measure up to school and social standards.
5. Adolescents (teens). To establish one’s own identity vs. identity confusion.
6. Young adulthood. Maintaining intimacy vs. social isolation.
7. Middle adulthood. Making a difference vs. self-absorption and complacency.
8. Old age. Integrity and satisfaction vs. despair and regret.

50. Conclusion Socialization is never fully successful.
We retain a measure of free will that makes our choices in life unique to ourselves.

51. End of Chapter 5