Test 2 Flashcards
Culture
1.The ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together form a people’s way of life
2.Nonmaterial culture: ideas created by members of a society
3.Material culture: the physical things created by members of a society
Nation
A political entity
Society
Organized interaction of people who typically live in a nation or some other specific territory
Language
Language is a system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another.
- Cultural transmission
- Sapir-Whorf thesis
Symbols
Humans transform elements of the world into symbols.
- Symbols: anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share a culture
- Societies create new symbols all the time.
- Reality for humans is found in the meaning things carry with them.
- Meanings vary within and between cultures.
Norms
Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members
Mores
Widely observed and have great moral significance
Folkways
Norms for routine and casual interaction
Social Control
Attempts by society to regular people’s thoughts and behavior
Ideal Culture
Way things should be
Social patterns mandated by values and norms
Real Culture
- Way things actually occur in everyday life
- Social patterns that only approximate cultural expectations
Material Culture
- Includes a wide range of physical human creations or artifacts
- Contains artifacts that partly reflect underlying cultural values
- Reflects a society’s technology or knowledge used to make a way of life in particular surroundings
Technology
Knowledge that people use to make a way of life in their surroundings
High Culture and Popular Culture?
- High culture: cultural patterns that distinguish a society’s elite
- Popular culture: cultural patterns that are widespread among society’s population
Counterculture
Cultural patterns that strongly oppose those widely accepted within a society
Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism
Ethnocentrism
- Practice of judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture
Cultural relativism
- Practice of judging a culture by its own standards
Sociobiology: Evolution and Culture
Sociobiology: a theoretical approach that explores ways in which human biology affects how we create culture
Socialization
Lifeline social experience by which individuals develop human potential and learn patterns of their culture
Personality
A person’s fairly consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting built through internalization
Sigmund Freud’s Elements of Personality
Elements of Personality
- Basic human needs: Eros and thanatos as opposing forces of basic needs
Developing personality
- The id: Basic drives
- The ego: Efforts to achieve balance
- The superego: Culture within
Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Studied cognition
-How people think and understand
Identified four stages of development
- Sensorimotor stage: experience only through senses
- Preoperational stage: first use language and other symbols
- Concrete operational stage: first see causal connections in surroundings
- Formal operational stage: think abstractly and critically
Lawrence Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Built on Piaget’s work on moral reasoning
Ways in which individuals judge situations as right or wrong
Proposed developmental stages of moral development
-Preconventional
*Young children experience the world as pain or pleasure.
- Conventional
*Teens lose selfishness
- Define right and wrong in terms of what pleases
- Postconventional
*Final stage
*Consider abstract ethical principles
Carol Gilligan’s Theory of 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.
Resocialization
Radically changing an inmate’s personality by carefully controlling the environment
Total institution
A setting in which people are isolated from the rest of society and manipulated by an administrative staff
George Herbert Mead’s Theory of the Social Self
Social behaviorism explains how social experience develops an individual’s personality
The self is a product of social experience.
-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 intentions.
- Understanding intention requires imagining the situation from the other’s point of view.
- By taking the role of the other, we become self-aware.
Erik H. Erikson’s Eight Stages of Development
Challenges occur throughout the life course
Stage 1: Infancy—the challenge of trust
Stage 2: Toddlerhood—the challenge of autonomy
Stage 3: Preschool—the challenge of initiative
Stage 4: Preadolescence—the challenge of industriousness
Stage 5: Adolescence—the challenge of gaining identity
Stage 6: Young adulthood—the challenge of intimacy
Stage 7: Middle adulthood—the challenge of making a difference
Stage 8: Old age—the challenge of integrity
