Socialization Study Guide

Socialization study guide

Terms to know

Instinct - an unchanging, biologically inherited behavior pattern

Personality - the sum total of a person’s behavior, attitudes, beliefs and values

Me – the part of our self that is aware of the expectations and attitudes of society

I – the unsocialized, spontaneous, self-interested component of persoanality

Self – your conscious awareness of possessing a distinct identity that separates you and your environment from other members of society

Sociobiology – the systematic study of the biological basis of social behavior

Feral Children - raised without the influence of a cultural environment

Generalized other – the internalized attitudes, expectations and viewpoints of society

The looking-glass self - an image of ourselves based on imagining how we appear to others

Role taking – forms the basis of socialization process by allowing us to anticipate what other expect from us

Peer group – a group primary made up of individuals roughly the same age and similar social characteristics

Total Institution – a setting in which people are isolated from the rest of society for a set period of time and subject to tight control

Resocialization – a break of past experiences and the learning of new values and norms

People to know

Charles H. Cooley

(born August 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) was an American sociologist and the son of Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, and he was a founding member and the eighth president of the American Sociological Association. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the looking glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others.

Rene Spitz

(Vienna 1887 – Denver September 11, 1974) was an American psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin. In 1935 that Spitz turned to the area of child development. He was one of the first researchers who used child observation. Not only disturbed children found his interest, but he also focused on the normal child development. He pointed out the effects of maternal and emotional deprivation. This became the field of his greatest contributions. In 1945 he did research on institutionalization on children. He found that the developmental imbalance caused by the unfavorable environmental conditions during the children's first year produces a psychosomatic damage that cannot be repaired by normal measures. Another study of Spitz showed that under favorable circumstances and adequate organization a positive child development can be achieved. He stated that the methods in foundling homes should therefore be carefully evaluated.

John Locke

(29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa.

George H. Mead

(1863–1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.

Mead theorized that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game". "Play" comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. For instance, he first plays the role of policeman and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers," and plays the role of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor." As a result of such play, the child learns to become both subject and object and begins to become able to build a self. However, it is a limited self because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others, they still lack a more general and organized sense of themselves.

In the next stage, the game stage, it is required that a person develop a self in the full sense of the term. Whereas in the play stage the child takes on the role of distinct others, role taking, in the game stage the child must take the role of everyone else involved in the game. Furthermore, these roles must have a definite relationship to one another. In the game stage, organization begins and definite personalities start to emerge. Children begin to become able to function in organized groups and most importantly, to determine what they will do within a specific group. Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other", which is one of the main concepts Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the (social) self in human beings. "The generalized other" can be understood as understanding the given activity and the actors place within the activity from the perspective of all the others engaged in the activity. Through understanding "the generalized other" the individual understands what kind of behavior is expected, appropriate and so on, in different social settings. The mechanism of perspective taking within social acts is the exchange of social positions.

Ivan Pavlov

(September 26, 1849 – February 27, 1936) was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself and actually had strong distaste for the field. It was though Pavlov work that supposedly instinctual behavior could be taught.

Concepts to know

Agents of Socialization

            Family

            Peer Group

            School

            Mass Media

            Religion

            Club/Social groups

            Ethnic background

            Work

            Government

Unintended Socialization

Example – when your parents tell you to do or act one way but your parents themselves do or act a different way

Symbolic interaction

Interaction between people that takes place through the use of symbols. Interactionist study topics like child development, relationships within groups, and mate selection.

Nature vs Nurture

Birth order

Our personalities are influenced by whether we have brothers and or sisters, and the order in which we are born.

Cultural environment

            Culture has a strong influence on personality development. Our cultural environment determines the basic types of personalities that will be found in a society. Each culture gives rise to a series of personality trait.

Know and understand the personality assessments we did in class:

            Myers-Briggs personality type indicator

You will need to describe what it is, what your assessment revealed about you, whether your agree or disagree and why, and list some reason why your results were what they were (what to you think influenced you)

The test may also include questions from any of the videos we viewed in class.