Ch5: socialization Flashcards
socialization
the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society
it describe the way that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, beliefs, and values
self
a person’s distinct sense of identity as developed through social interaction, doesn’t emerge naturally as a process driven by biological mechanisms
George Herbert Mead
- founder of the school of symbolic interactionism in sociology
- the self that he is concerned with is the ability to be reflexive or self-aware
- self arise in social context through interaction
- impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience
Sigmund Freud
- father of psychology
- influential modern scientist in developing the theory of the sense of self
- believed that personality and sexual development were closely linked, divided the maturation process into psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital
- stated that failure to resolve traumatic tensions of a child’s psychosexual development results in predictable consequences in adulthood
Erik Erikson
- psychologist who creates a theory of personality development based on work of Freud
- believed different cultures handle stages of child development differently
- believed that the environment in which a child was living helped with their growth and adjustment as well as helping them to develop their self-awareness and identity
Charles Horton Cooley
- coined the term “the looking glass self”, people’s self understanding is constructed by their perception of how others view them
- sense of self is not based on internal source of individuality but a result of how we imagine we look to others then develop our personal sense of self
George Herbert Mead broke the self into what two components/phases
the “I” and “me”
“I” represents the part of self that acts on its own initiative or responds to the organized attitudes of others
“me” represents the part of self which one recognizes the “organized set of attitudes” of others toward the self (who we are in other’s eyes, our public personas)
role
the behaviour expected of a person who occupies particular social status or position in society
four stages of child socialization
preparatory stage, play stage, game stage, and generalized other stage
preparatory stage
children are only capable of imitation, copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact
play stage
children begin to imitate and take on roles that another person might have, role play is very fluid and transitory
game stage
children learn to consider several specific roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other
generalized other
children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the common behavioural expectations of general society
Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
important part of socialization process, refers to the way people learn what society considered to be good and bad, important for a smoothly functioning society
doing gender
performing tasks based upon the gender assigned by society, learned through interaction with others in much the same way the Mead and Cooley described for socialization in general
gender schema
rudimentary image of gender differences, enables them to make decisions about appropriate styles of play and behaviour, children integrate their sense of self into this developing schema and adopt consistent and stable gender roles
nurture
the relationships and caring that surround us
nature
our temperaments, interest, and talents are innate (from this perspective, who we are depends on nature)
sociology perspective on nature vs nurture debate
concern with the effect that society has on human behaviour, the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate
agency
the ability to choose and act independently of external constraints
structural functionalists’ approach to the problem of agency
- socialization is essential to society, both because it trains members to operate successfully within it and because it perpetuates culture by transmitting it to new generations
- individuals learn different social roles, which comes with relatively fixed norms and expectations (predictable interactions)
- how individual lives and balances their roles is subject to variation
critical sociologist’s approach to the problem of agency
argue that socialization reproduces inequality from generation to generation by conveying different expectations and norms to those with different social characteristics
symbolic interactionist approach to the problem of agency
- concerned with face-to-face exchanges and symbolic communication
social groups
often provide the first experiences of socialization, people learn to use tangible objects of material culture in social context, as well as being introduced to beliefs and values
