Transcript Socializing the individual - ekeneavy

SOCIALIZING THE
INDIVIDUAL
CHAPTER 5
SOCIALIZING THE INDIVIDUAL
 How might culture shape an individual’s personality?
 Consider:
 Cultural values and beliefs
 The internalization of cultural norms
SOCIALIZING THE INDIVIDUAL
 How might status and role expectations shape
personality?
 Consider:
 Economic and educational status
 Parental status and personal status
TRUTH OR FICTION
 It has been proven that people’s personalities are
not shaped by their environment
 TRUE: An individual’s personality is based on his or her
genetic makeup
 FALSE: An individual’s personality is the result of both his
or her genetic makeup and experiences
TRUTH OR FICTION
 As long as a child’s basic physical requirements,
such as food and clothing, are being met, he or she
has no need of human contact to develop basic skills
 TRUE: Children develop basic skills as a natural part of
physical development
 FALSE: Children need contact with other people to learn to
model and develop basic skills
TRUTH OR FICTION
 People’s personalities are rarely shaped by their
families and environments
 TRUE: People’s personalities are shaped by their genetic
makeup, intelligence, and knowledge
 FALSE: People’s families, experiences, and interactions
with others play a large role in shaping personality
PERSONALIT Y DEVELOPMENT
 What comes to mind when you hear personality?
 Personality: the total behaviors, attitudes, beliefs,
and values that are characteristics of an individual
 How we adjust to our environment and react to specific
situations
 No two same personalities
 Personalities change throughout our lifetime
 Slower when you reach adulthood
NATURE VS. NURTURE
 Personality, heavily debated between:
 Heredity: transmission of genetic characteristics
from parents to children
 The other is social environment
 Nature viewpoint strong through 1800s
 Human behavior instinct: unchanging, biological, inherited
behavior pattern
 Instinctual behavior drives almost everything
 Nurture: result of a person’s social environment and
learning
HEREDIT Y
 Stuff you’re born with
 Body type, hair type, eye color, skin tone
 Aptitude: capacity to learn a skill or knowledge
 Natural talent in music/art/sports
 Learned or inherited
 Develop because of environmental factors: parents
 Heredity: provides biological needs, culture: how we
meet them
 Limits on individuals
BIRTH ORDER
 Personality influenced by siblings
 Also the order in which we are born
 First borns: achievement oriented and responsible,
conservative in their thinking and defenders of status quo
 Later borns: better in social relationships, more
affectionate and friendly, risk takers and
social/intellectual rebels
PARENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
 Just like siblings, parents have a major impact on
our personality
 Age of parents is a big factor
 Also their; education, religious orientation, economic
status, cultural heritage, and occupational
background
CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
 Strong influences on personality development
 Model personalities
 US: competitiveness and individualism
 Ik people
 Pre WWII: hunters/gatherers, one large family, brothers
and sisters, villager parents
 Post WWII: Ugandan gov’t turned village into Nat’l Park,
moved to barren land, Ik turn on each other
 Children out of home by age 3, age bands, parents don’t
help kids, strongest and clever survive
ISOLATION IN CHILDHOOD
 Feral children: wild or untamed
 Anna:
 Mother unmarried
 Attic room
 Minimum care
 Discovered at 6 yo.
 Isabelle:
 Unmarried mother
 Had contact with mother
 2 years, reached age level of social/mental dev.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION
 Institutions and orphanages
 1940s-50s
 Children received medical and nutritional attention
 W/2 years of the study 1/3 of the children died
 Withered away from lack of love/attention
 < 25% could walk, dress, or hold a spoon themselves
 Importance of human interaction
ISOLATION’S EFFECTS ON RHESUS
MONKEYS
 Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments on rhesus monkeys
demonstrated that being raised in isolation produces
a kind of psychosis. Such monkeys exhibited fear,
hostility, unsociability, and a lack of feeling. Harlow
also offered young rhesus monkeys the choice of two
substitute mothers—one made of soft materials with
no bottle and one made of wire with a bottle. The
monkeys invariably clung to the soft, cuddly dummy
and went to the colder, wire dummy only for the
bottle attached to it.
 Can this study be applied to humans?
THEN AND NOW
 In the 1200s Emperor Frederick II conducted an
experiment in which he isolated a number of very
young children from physical communication and
physical contact with their foster mothers and
nurses. The emperor was curious to see what
languages the children would speak if they were
never exposed to one. When the children all died, the
emperor found out instead the importance of close
emotional contact for young children.
 How does this experiment compare to the cases
studies of feral children that we’ve gone over?
5.2 THE SOCIAL SELF
 When we’re born can we walk, talk, feed or defend
ourselves?
 How do we learn these things?
 Social and cultural interaction
 Socialization: people learning the basic skills,
values, beliefs, and behavior patterns
 How become socialized
 Self: conscious awareness of possessing a distinct
identity that separates you and your environment from
other members of society
 3 Theories of Socialization
JOHN LOCKE: THE TABULA RASA
 English philosopher (1600s)
 Each child born with tabula rasa (clean slate)
 Anything can be written on the slate
 No personality, moldable
 Claimed he could shape any newborn to have a
personality he chose
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY:
LOOKING GLASS SELF
 Part founder of interactionist perspective
 Looking-glass self: the interactive process by which
we develop an image of ourselves based on how we
imagine we appear to others
 other people act as mirrors, reflecting back the image we
project through their reactions to our behavior
LOOKING GLASS SELF
 3 step process
 1. we imagine how we appear to others
 2. based on their reactions to us we determine whether
others view us as we view ourselves
 3. we use our perceptions of how others judge us to
develop feelings about ourselves
 Primary group has important roles
 Redefine self-image throughout life
GEORGE HERBERT MEAD:
ROLE-TAKING
 Another interactionist founder
 Builds off Cooley but we eventually take on roles of
others
 Role-taking: allowing us to anticipate what others expect
of us. Thus we learn to see ourselves through the eyes of
others
 People closest to us (significant others)
 Internalized attitudes, expectations, and viewpoints of
society are generalized others.
ROLE-TAKING
 Children aren’t capable of role -taking, need skills
 3 Step process:
 1. Imitation: children lack sense of self
 2. Play: act out roles of specific people (dress up)
 Attempting to see the world through someone else’s eyes
 3. Games: children take on own roles, also anticipate the
actions and expectations of others
 Closely resembles real life
ROLE-TAKING
 Through role taking, we develop a sense of self
 Self consists of 2 related parts:
 I: unsocialized, spontaneous, self-interested
 Me: aware of expectations and attitudes of soc.
 Childhood: I is stronger
 Me never dominates the I
 Well-rounded member needs to develop both
5.3 AGENTS OF SOCIALIZATION
 Our 3 gentlemen gave us theories
 Agents of socialization: describe specific ppl, groups,
& institutions that enable socialization to take place
 4 primary agents in the U.S.
 1.
 2.
 3.
 4.
Family
Peer Group
School
Mass Media
THE FAMILY
 Most important agent
 Principle socializer for children
 Learning values, norms, beliefs
 Intended:
 Things we deliberately teach our children
 Unintended:
 Things we unintentionally teach our children
 Possibly more influential then intended
 Varies family to family
 Members and subgroups
PEER GROUP
 As we grow, outside influences begin to shape us
 Peer group: group of individuals of roughly = age &
similar social characteristics
 Pre-teen/Teen years
 Peer acceptance
 Family focus = larger culture
 Peer group focus = subculture of group
SCHOOL
 Between 5-18 you spend roughly 7.5 years in school
 Intentional socialization:
 Class activities; reading, writing, math
 Extracurriculars; dances, clubs, sports
 Unintentional socialization:
 Teachers as role models; speech, style, dress, etc
 Peer groups
MASS MEDIA
 Involves no face-to-face contact
 mass media: instruments of comm. That reach large
audiences with no personal contact
 Book, film, internet, magazine, newspaper, radio, TV
 TV=most influential
 Aggression in media
 Expands the viewers world
RESOCIALIZATION
 Prison, boot camps, monasteries, psych hospitals all
have what similarities in common?
 Total institution: setting in which people are totally
isolated from society and under tight control
 Socialization differs in total institutions
 Resocialization: breaking past experiences and learning
new values and norms
 Stripping all semblance of an individual
 Denied freedoms
 Weakened self = easier to conform