Socialisation and Identity
Sociology Fundamentals
Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Socialisation and Identity: How a Person Becomes Part of Society
Chapter 3 described culture as a stock of shared meanings that nobody is born knowing. This chapter asks how a person gets hold of those meanings, and how the person they become is shaped along the way. Sociologists call the learning process socialisation. The chapter covers its stages and agents (family, school, peers, media), then three accounts of the self (Cooley, Mead and Goffman), then roles, and ends with the rare cases of children raised with almost no human contact, which show how much depends on this learning.
What Socialisation Is
Wikipedia's Socialization article defines it as "the process through which individuals internalize the norms, customs, values and ideologies of their society." Chapter 3's norms and values are exactly what is being internalised. The article separates two stages: primary socialisation, when a child learns the attitudes, values and actions appropriate to the family and community it grows up in, and secondary socialisation, the learning of appropriate behaviour in smaller social settings such as school or a new job, which it says involves smaller changes than the first stage. (The page uses American spelling; this course uses British spelling throughout.)
Primary
Early childhood learning, mainly through the immediate family, per the Socialization article. It lays the groundwork for everything after.
Secondary
Learning how to behave in a new setting, such as school, which the article says "require very different behavior from the home".
Anticipatory
Rehearsing for a future position or relationship; the article's example is a couple living together before marriage, and it reports research by Levine and Hoffner (2006) naming parents as the main source for career-related rehearsal.
Resocialisation
"Discarding former behavior-patterns and reflexes while accepting new ones" during a life transition; the article gives total institutions such as a prison or the military as common examples.
The Agents of Socialisation
An agent of socialisation is a group or institution through which learning happens. The Socialization article, as I read it, treats each of the following in different amounts, so the table says which claim comes from where.
| Agent | What the source says | Source page |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Primary socialisation is mainly influenced by the immediate family and friends | Socialization |
| School | A site of secondary socialisation with demands very different from home | Socialization |
| Peers | Under Judith Harris's group socialisation theory (1995), peer groups can become the main influence on personality | Socialization |
| Mass media | Named in the gender section as one of several groups, with friends, peers, school and work, that reinforce gender roles | Socialization |
| Total institutions | Settings such as hospitals where a person is socialised into a passive role; Goffman called this institutionalisation | Erving Goffman |
Beyond what is stated in that table, the page as I read it gave no detailed account of media effects, so any claim that television or social media shapes children in a particular way would be my own and is not made here (check).
Cooley: The Looking-Glass Self
Wikipedia's Looking-glass self article credits the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley with the idea, put forward in Human Nature and the Social Order in 1902. The core of the idea is that people build their self-concept by imagining how others see them. The article quotes the line "I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am." It gives three steps.
- You imagine how you appear to another person.
- You imagine that person's judgment of you.
- You feel something, such as pride or shame, in response to that imagined judgment.
The page's own illustration is a job candidate whose confidence rises or falls with the interviewers' expressions. Notice that the judgment that matters is the imagined one, which can be wrong. A pupil who believes the teacher thinks she is slow may act as if it were true even when the teacher thinks nothing of the kind (this school example is my own) (check).
Mead: The Self as a Social Process
Wikipedia's George Herbert Mead article reports that Mead held the self emerges socially and quotes him: "the self is a social process." People first become objects to other people, it says, and only later to themselves, by taking other people's perspectives. It describes three linked ideas.
| Idea | What the article says |
|---|---|
| The "me" and the "I" | The "me" is "the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes"; the "I" is the individual's more spontaneous response to the "me". Thinking is described as an internal dialogue between the two. |
| Play stage | Children first learn social roles by acting them out, such as police officer or doctor; they can take distinct individuals' roles but have no fully organised sense of self. |
| Game stage | In a game, the child "taking one role must be ready to take the role of everyone else"; Mead's example is baseball. This brings organised group participation. |
| Generalised other | Understanding an activity, and one's place in it, from the viewpoint of all the participants, which shows what behaviour is expected in a given setting. |
Chapter 2's symbolic interactionism comes in here: the self is not a fixed inner object but something built through interaction and the meanings others give to us. Whether Cooley influenced Mead is not something I read in these pages beyond the Mead article saying the two met at the University of Michigan in 1891 (check against a biography before relying on any stronger claim).
Roles: Scripts for Social Positions
Wikipedia's Role theory article says role theory treats much everyday activity as the enactment of socially defined categories, and defines a role as "a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms, and behaviors that a person has to face and fulfill." Roles are one way the norms of Chapter 3 attach to particular positions: the same person is expected to act differently as a student, a sibling and an employee.
Role conflict
The article describes this as a conflict among the roles that go with two or more statuses held at once. It credits Merton with distinguishing conflict among one's own roles (intrapersonal) from conflict between a role and others' expectations (interpersonal).
Role strain
Pressure that can arise when the demands of roles conflict, from disagreement over one's performance, or from accepting more than one can manage, per the article.
Role-making
The article credits Ralph Turner with the view that defining a role means negotiating it with other roles, and with role-making, in which people reshape roles while performing them.
Goffman: Presenting the Self
Wikipedia's Erving Goffman article calls The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life his first and most famous book, published in 1956 and revised in 1959 (a gap of 3 years, computed in Python). It describes how people manage the impressions they give in face-to-face encounters, and the article defines impression management as "a person's attempts to present an acceptable image to those around them." Goffman used the language of theatre, which is why the approach is called dramaturgy. The article also explains two settings.
- Front stage. The public area where people perform a positive self-concept for an audience.
- Back stage. A hidden, private area where people can drop their social roles.
The article also says Goffman popularised the term total institution in Asylums (1961), a book it describes as an ethnography of the concept, which examines how psychiatric hospitalisation socialises patients into a passive "good patient" role. That ties this section back to resocialisation above. An everyday case of front stage and back stage is a waiter who is polite in the dining room and relaxed in the kitchen (this example is my own, not the article's) (check).
What Happens Without Socialisation?
Wikipedia's Feral child article defines a feral child as "a young individual who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age", with little or no experience of human care, social behaviour or language. It says such children "lack the basics of primary and secondary socialization" and that many have "almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language", which it links to the critical period hypothesis. The article is careful about evidence, so this chapter is too.
| Case | What the page says | How the page treats it |
|---|---|---|
| Genie | Born 1957 in Los Angeles, found 1970; confined to one room with almost no stimulation from about 20 months to roughly 13 years 7 months; attempts to teach her language "were limited" | Documented, with studies by Susan Curtiss and others; "Genie" is a pseudonym |
| Victor of Aveyron | "A feral child in the forests of Aveyron for twelve years" around 1800; sources include Itard's reports of 1801 and 1806 | The page does not question the case |
| Amala and Kamala | Described by Reverend J. A. L. Singh in 1926 as "raised by wolves" | The page says Serge Aroles argues the story was a fraud, and elsewhere calls it a hoax; its own dates for the discovery (1920 and 1926) disagree |
Where to Read More
- Pages used. This chapter uses six Wikipedia pages: Socialization, Looking-glass self, George Herbert Mead, Role theory, Feral child and Erving Goffman. The Looking-glass self, Mead and Role theory articles appeared complete in the fetch. For the other three the fetch tool read only the first 100,000 characters: Socialization (148,578 characters in all, so about 67 percent), Feral child (121,003, about 83 percent) and Erving Goffman (138,537, about 72 percent). The percentages are my own arithmetic from the character counts. For Goffman the cut fell in the navigation after the article, so little article text was probably missed (that is the fetch tool's own estimate, not something I verified).
- Summaries. The fetch tool returns a summary made by a small model, not the raw page, so a quotation here is only as exact as that summary.
- Primary texts. I have not read Cooley, Mead or Goffman directly; everything above comes from the Wikipedia pages.
Exercises
Classify each of these as primary socialisation, secondary socialisation, anticipatory socialisation or resocialisation, giving a reason from the chapter: (a) a toddler learning to say "please" at home; (b) a first-year pupil learning to put a hand up before speaking; (c) a student shadowing a nurse in a hospital before training as one; (d) a recruit adapting to military life; (e) a new employee learning the workplace's unwritten rules. Then say which one is hardest to classify and why.
A pupil reads a teacher's raised eyebrow during her presentation and goes quiet for the rest of the lesson. Walk through Cooley's three steps for this moment, then say where the idea could go wrong, using the chapter's point about the judgment being imagined. Finally, explain in one sentence how Mead's "me" and "I" would describe the same moment.
Using only the dates and figures in this chapter, work out (a) the gap between Cooley's 1902 book and the posthumous 1934 Mead volume, (b) how many years separate Victor of Aveyron's 1800 from the 1970 discovery of Genie, and (c) what percentage of the Feral child page was read, given 100,000 of 121,003 characters (round to one decimal place). Then rank the three cases of Genie, Victor and Amala and Kamala by how safe each is to use as evidence about socialisation, using the page's own treatment of them, and say why you placed them in that order.
Quick Reference
- Socialisation: the process of internalising a society's norms, customs, values and ideologies (Wikipedia, Socialization)
- Primary and secondary: family-centred early learning, then learning in settings such as school or work
- Anticipatory and resocialisation: rehearsing a future position; discarding old patterns for new ones
- Looking-glass self: Cooley, 1902; imagine how others see you, imagine their judgment, feel pride or shame
- Mead: the self is a social process; "me" and "I"; play stage, game stage, generalised other
- Role: a set of rights, duties, expectations, norms and behaviours; role conflict and role strain
- Goffman: impression management; front stage and back stage; total institutions
- Feral children: Genie and Victor documented; Amala and Kamala disputed
- Check: the school, waiter and comparison examples, the media point, and the conflicting Mead and Cooley dates between pages