Process of Socialization
Goals to Be Met
• Goal 5: The learner will analyze the process of
socialization.
• Objectives
▫ 5.01 Define socialization.
▫ 5.02 List the agents of socialization.
▫ 5.03 Describe how the process of socialization is
culturally determined.
▫ 5.04 Explain the various theoretical perspectives
on socialization.
▫ 5.05 Trace how socialization is a life-long process.
▫ 5.06 Evaluate the functions and roles of
socializing agents.
Essential Questions
• What are the primary agents of socialization?
• How does socialization occur?
• Why is socialization important around the
world?
• What are the theoretical perspectives of
socialization?
• Socialization shapes the development of
personality through the interaction of biology
and environment, but the relative roles of each
are not fully understood.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
• Focuses on the intellectual part of personality
• Cognitive skills develop through a set of stages:
▫ Sensorimotor (Birth – 2 years)
 Children experience the world through movement and senses
▫ Preoperational (2 – 7 years)
 Thought processes are developing
 Egocentric (only able to see their point of view)
 Motor skills acquired
▫ Concrete Operational (7 – 11 years)
 Children begin to think logically, but are very concrete in their
thinking
 No longer egocentric
▫ Formal Operational (11 – 16 years)
 Development of abstract reasoning
 Can easily conserve and think logically
• Example
Emotional Socialization
• Emotional Socialization: Learning how to
identify feelings and how to manage them
• Gender roles and social classes exert a strong
influence on emotional socialization
Freud’s Psychoanalytical Theory of
Personality
• Argued that personality is made up of the:
▫ Id
 Only component present from birth
 Irrational pleasure seeking
 Primary component of personality
▫ Ego:
 Conscious mind
 Responsible for dealing with reality
 Develops from the id and ensures that impulses of the id
can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world
▫ Superego:
 Represents morality which sets limits for the id
 Acts to perfect and civilize our behavior
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
• Children go through 3 levels of moral development
1.
Preconvential:
 Obedience and Punishment: Children see rules as fixed
and absolute; obedience is important
 Individualism and Exchange: Children account for
individual points of view and judge actions based on how they
serve individual needs
2. Conventional:
 Interpersonal Relationships: Focused on living up to
social expectations and roles; emphasis on conformity
 Maintaining Social Order: Begin to consider society as a
whole when making judgments
3. Post Conventional:
 Social Contract and Individual Rights: People begin to
account for the differing values, opinions, and beliefs of other
people
 Universal Principles: Based upon universal ethical
principles and abstract reasoning
Gender Identities
• Feminist theory has studied how boys and girls
learn to be “masculine” and “feminine”
• Gender Identities: People’s images of what
they are socially expected to do based on their
sex
Sociological Perspectives on
Socialization
• Functional
▫ Socialization serves a number of functions for society
and provides children with love and emotional support
• Conflict
▫ Sees socialization as harmful to children because too
much power is placed in the hands of parents, leading
to child abuse, treating infants as property, the use of
physical punishment, and other problems.
• Symbolic Interaction
▫ Relied on to understand how the self-concept develops
Cooley’s Looking-Glass Self
• Looking-Glass Self: Interactive process by which
we develop an image of ourselves based on how we
imagine we appear to others
• Others act as a mirror, reflecting back the image we
project through their reactions to our behavior.
• Development is a 3-step process
▫ We imagine how we appear to others
▫ Based on reacts, we attempt to determine whether
others view us as we view ourselves
▫ We use our perceptions of how others judge us to
develop feelings about ourselves
Mead’s Role-Taking
• Role-taking: Taking or pretending to take the role of others
▫ Forms basis of socialization process by allowing us to anticipate
what others expect of us
• We first internalize expectations of significant others
• Generalized Other: Internalized attitudes, expectations,
and viewpoints of society
▫ We internalize generalized others through process of role-taking
• Role-taking is a 3-step process
▫ Imitation: (Birth – 3 years) Imitate others
▫ Play Stage: (3 years – school age) Play and act out roles of
specific people
▫ Game Stage: (school age – older) Organized games; take on
roles of their own but have to anticipate the actions and
expectations of others
Mead’s “I” and “Me”
• According to Mead the self has 2 sides
▫ “Me”: Unsocialized, spontaneous, self-interested
component of personality and self-identity
▫ “I”: Part of our self that is aware of expectations
and attitudes of society’s socialized self
• In childhood, the “I” is more important than
“me,” but through socialization it changes
Locke’s Tabula Rasa
• Locke believed that each newly born human
being is a tabula rasa (clean slate) on which
just about anything can be written
• We are born without a personality and we can be
molded into any type of character
Social Diversity of Socialization
• Different groups socialize their children in different ways
▫ Native Americans
 Socialized through an extensive network of relatives who teach tribal values,
beliefs, traditions, and rituals
 Little if any corporal punishment is used and praise is reserved for special
occasions
▫ African Americans
 Grandparents or “informal adoptions” are often used to raise children
 Caregivers use strict discipline to discourage inappropriate behavior and to
teach children to be strong and independent at an earlier age than other groups
▫ Hispanics
 Children occupy a central position and learn a strong sense of femilisim (family
loyalty) and identification
 Male and female children are brought up differently
 Motherly love is stronger than wifely love
▫ Asian American
 Parents indulge their very young children, but older children have set limits
and discipline
 Children are taught to identify with their family and to practice family duty
 Group-oriented
Adult Socialization
• Adult Socialization: Ongoing learning throughout
one’s life
• Adults continue to learn new roles through:
▫ Anticipatory Socialization: Learning to assume
roles in the future
▫ Development Socialization: Process of learning to
be more competent in playing currently assumed roles
▫ Resocialization: Forceful abandonment of an old
self and the development of a new identity and usually
occurs in prisons and mental institutions
 Institutionalization (deep sense of helplessness) that
some inmates can experience
Erikson’s Life Cycle
• Traces the emergence and resolution of several
development crises during childhood and adulthood
▫ 2 Pre-Adult Stages:
 Childhood establishment of independence
 Adolescent determination of identity
▫ 3 Adult Stages:
 Early Adulthood resolution of demands for love and work
 Middle Adulthood where youthful dreams disappear and
awareness of death appears
 Late Adulthood where persons must deal with integrity
and despair
Kübler-Ross Stages of Dying
• Society does not fully prepare adults for aging
and dying and it leads to the stages of dying:
▫
▫
▫
▫
▫
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Giraffe - Stages of Dying
Stages of Grief
Daycare and Socialization
• This segment is about researchers’ findings regarding
the relationship of early childhood development,
individual attention or lack of it, and later criminal
behavior.
• While viewing this segment:
▫ Identify the factors that are important to a child’s
development
▫ Explain why children who did not receive enough
personal attention during the first 5 years of life are more
likely to commit crimes for which they feel no remorse
▫ Explain what can be done to help a child who did not
receive the attention he or she needed in the critical earl
years
▫ Describe the social implications of an expanding group of
young people who did not receive enough personal
attention during the first 5 years of life.