1. SOCIALIZATION: FROM INFANCY TO OLD AGE
Chapter 3
SOCIALIZATION: FROM INFANCY TO OLD AGE

2. Socialization: From Infancy to Old Age
Learning Objectives
LO 5.1 Describe how social interaction is the foundation of personality.
Nature vs. nurture, isolated children.
LO 5.2 Explain six major theories of socialization.
LO 5.3 Analyze how the family, school, peer groups, and the mass media guide the socialization process.
LO 5.4 Discuss how our society organizes human experience into distinctive stages of life.
LO 5.5 Characterize the operation of total institutions.

3. The Power of Society
How conscious is one’s decision to spend time in front of the television?
People with less than a high school diploma watch considerably more television—spending roughly twice as much time per week in front of the screen—than people who have earned a college degree.
Although we tend to think we make choices about television watching (as well as our use of other mass media), society guides our behavior in this respect as it does in so many others.

4. Social Experience is the Key to Our Humanity
Socialization
Lifeline social experience by which individuals develop human potential and learn patterns of their culture
Personality
fairly consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting built through internalization
LO 3.1 Describe how social interaction is the foundation of personality.

5. Human Development: Nature vs. Nurture
Biological sciences: The role of nature
Elements of society have a naturalistic cause
Social sciences: The role of nurture
Most of who and what we are as a species is learned
Nature or nurture?
It is both, but from a sociological perspective, nurture matters more.
Human infants display various reflexes—biologically based behavior patterns that enhance survival.
The sucking reflex, which actually begins before birth, enables the infant to obtain nourishment.
The grasping reflex, triggered by placing a finger on the infant's palm, causing the hand to close, helps the to maintain contact with a parent and, later on, to grasp objects.
The Moro reflex, activated by startling the infant, has the infant swinging both arms outward and then bringing them together across chest. This action, which disappears after several months of life, probably developed among our evolutionary ancestors so that a falling infant could grasp the body hair of a parent.

6. The personalities we develop depend largely on the environment in
which we live. When a child’s world is shredded by violence, the damage
(including losing the ability to trust) can be profound and lasting. This drawing was made by a child living through the daily violence of the civil war in Syria. What are the likely effects of such experiences on a young person’s self-confidence and capacity to form trusting ties?

7. Social Isolation and Abuse Affects Development
Effect on nonhuman primates: Harlow's experiments
Six months of complete isolation caused irreversible emotional and behavioral damage.
The personalities we develop depend largely on the environment in which we live. When a child's world is shredded by violence, the damage (including losing the ability to trust) can be profound and lasting.

8. Isolation’s Effect on Children
Case Studies: Feral children, Anna, Isabelle, Genie, Oxana
Isolation left children damaged.
Supported critical periods of development
Success after intensive treatment was related to mental functioning and age at rescue.

9. Institutionalized Children
Neglect and abuse = inadequate development
Brain changes
Confirmed by PET Scans
Orphanages studies
Much damage permanent

12. Understanding Socialization: Theories
Sigmund Freud
Jean Piaget
Eric H. Erickson
George Herbert Mead
Carol Gilligan
LO 3.2 Explain six major theories of socialization.

13. Sigmund Freud's Elements of Personality
2 basic opposing drives
Eros…life instinct
Thanatos….aggressive “death instinct”
The id: Basic drives
The ego: Efforts to achieve balance
The superego: Culture within

14. Elements of personality Developing personality
Freud
Elements of personality
Eros
Thanatos
Developing personality Id
Ego
Super ego

15. Jean Piaget: Cognitive Development
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

16. Lawrence Kohlberg: Stages of Moral Development
Built on Piaget's work on moral reasoning
Ways in which individuals judge situations as right or wrong
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

18. George Herbert Mead: Social Self
Social behaviorism …. How social experience develops a personality
Self- composed of self-awareness and self-image
develops
Not present at birth
Need social experience
Symbols & imagination
Exchange of symbols
Imagination of intentions
empathy
Imagining another point of view
Take on the role of other
Self is not present at birth; it develops
Self only develops with social experience
Social experience is exchange of symbols
Seeking meaning leads people to imagine other people's intention
Understanding intentions requires imaging the situation from the other's point of view

19. Cooley: Looking-Glass Self
I and Me: The self has two parts
Self-image based on how we think others see us
Imagination + reaction + interpretation and experience = self

20. Carol Gilligan: Gender and Moral Development
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

21. Gilligan Boys develop a justice perspective.
Formal rules define right and wrong
Girls develop a care-and-responsibility perspective.
Personal relationships define reasoning
The two sexes use different standards of rightness.

22. Eric H. Erickson: Stages 1–4
Stage 1 – Infancy: trust
Stage 2 – Toddlerhood: autonomy
Stage 3 – Preschool: Initiative
Stage 4 – Preadolescence: Industriousness
Challenges occur throughout the life course.

23. Erickson: Stages 5-8 Stage 5 – Adolescence: Identity
Stage 6 – Young adulthood: Intimacy
Stage 7 – Middle adulthood: Making a difference
Stage 8 – Old age: Integrity

25. Agents of Socialization
Settings affect the socialization process
The family
The school
The peer group
The mass media
LO 3.3 Analyze how the family, school, peer groups, and the mass media guide the socialization process.

26. The Family The family is the most important socializing agent.
Teaches children skills, values, and beliefs
Love + care = happy well-adjusted child

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

28. Agents of Socialization: The School
Through school, children are socialized in various ways.
Experience diversity
Are exposed to hidden curriculum
Begin gender socialization
Accumulate cultural capital
Experience diversity
Racial and gender clustering
Are exposed to hidden curriculum
Informal, covert lessons Experience first bureaucracy
Rules and schedule
Begin gender socialization
From grade school through college, gender-linked activities are encountered
Accumulate cultural capital

29. Agents of Socialization: The Peer Group
Peers = members with interests, social position, age in common
Influenced by anticipatory socialization
Allow escape from direct adult supervision
sense of self beyond family
Often govern short-term goals
Allow escape from direct supervision of adults
Help development of sense of self that goes beyond the family
May highlight difference between young and old attitudes creating a“generation gap”
Often govern short-term goals: parents influence long-term plans
Are often Influenced by anticipatory socialization

30. Agents of Socialization: The Mass Media
Mass media - for delivering impersonal communications to a vast audience.
Televisions in the United States
Hours of viewing television
Adverse effects of extensive viewing
Television is popular in high and middle-income countries, where almost every household owns at least one TV set. Source: International Telecommunication Union (2012); TVB (2012).
Televisions in the U.S.
97% of households have at least one TV
Hours of viewing television
Average household = 7½ hours per day
As they grow, children spend as many hours in front of a television as they do in school or interacting with their parents.
Extensive television takes time away from interaction with parents and peers, as well as exercise and other activities that are more likely to promote development and good health.
Almost half of individuals' free time
More than 70%of children claimed that parents do not limit the amount of time they spend in front of the screen

31. Agents of Socialization: Television and Politics
Liberal critics
Racial and ethnic minorities have been excluded or stereotyped throughout television history.
Conservative critics
dominated by a liberal cultural elite that espouses political correctness.

33. Television and Violence
Violence in mass media
About 2/3 of parents say that they are “very concerned” that their children are exposed to too much media violence.
About 2/3 of TV content contains violence; characters show no remorse and are not punished.

34. Television and Violence
Rating systems and control
TV rating system adopted in 1997
Televisions manufactured after 2000 have a “V-chip” (parental control).
Concern with violence and the mass media extends to the world of video games, especially those popular with young boys.
Among the most controversial games, which include high levels of violence, is The Sopranos: Road to Respect.

35. Socialization and Life Course
Each stage of life is linked to the biological process.
Societies organize the life course by age.
Stages present problems and transitions that involve learning.
Other factors shape lives: Race, class, ethnicity, and gender.
LO 3.4 Discuss how our society organizes human experience into distinctive stages of life.

36. Socialization and the Life Course
Childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
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
Old Age

37. The Life Course: Patterns and Variations
Each stage of life is linked to aging, but the life course is largely a social construction (e.g., cohort) .
Stages of the life course present certain problems and transitions involving new learning.
A cohort is a category of similar-age people who share common life experiences.
Just as audiences at Rolling Stones concerts in the 1960s were mainly young people, so many of the group’s fans today are the same people, now over age sixty. Mick Jagger (top) recently turned seventy.

38. Dying Elisabeth Kubler Ross 5 distinct stages
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

40. Total Institutions
A setting in which people are isolated from the rest of society and manipulated by an administrative staff
Erving Goffman
Staff supervises all daily life activities.
Environment is standardized.
Formal rules and daily schedules are established.
Staff breaks down identity.
Goffman: “Abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self”
Staff rebuilds personality using rewards and punishments.
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
LO 3.5 Characterize the operation of total institutions.

41. Total Institution

42. 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