Chapter 3 - Chapter 3: Sociology Caelan Ho o Socialization:...

Chapter 3: Sociology – Caelan Ho
o Socialization: It is the process by which people learn their culture. They do so by:
 Entering and disengaging from a succession of roles.
 Becoming aware of themselves as they interact with others.
o Role: It is a set of expected behaviors, or the behavior expected of a person occupying a
particular position in society.
o Socialization can be used to unleash an individual’s potential.
o Evidence of the importance of socialization in unleashing human potential comes from a
study conducted by Rene Spitz.
o Rene Spitz compared children who were being raised in an orphanage with children who
were being raised in a nursing home attached to a women’s prison.
o Rene Spitz found that social deprivation can lead to impaired sexual life when they have
reached maturity.
o Spitz’s natural experiment thus amounts to quite compelling evidence for the importance of
childhood socialization in making us fully human.
o Without childhood socialization, most of our human potential remains undeveloped.
The Crystallization of Self-Identity:
o The formation of a sense of self continues in adolescence.
o Adolescence is a particularly turbulent period of rapid self-development.
o Many people can remember experiences from their youth that helped crystallize their
self-identity.
o Many people can remember experiences from their youth that helped crystallize their
self-identity.
o The central growth process in adolescence is to define the self through the clarification
of experience and to establish self-esteem.
o The crystallization of self-identity during adolescence is just one episode in a lifelong
process of socialization.
o The contours of the self are formed during childhood.
o Self: A set of ideas and attitudes about who one is as an independent being.
o Socialization begins soon after birth.
o Infants cry, driven by elemental needs, and are gratified by food, comfort, and affection.
o Since infant needs are usually satisfied immediately, they do not at first seem to be able
to distinguish themselves from their main caregivers, usually their mothers.
o Social interaction soon enables infants to begin a self-image or sense of self.
o Sigmund Freud:
 Id: Freud’s term for the pleasure -seeking component of the self.
 Ego: Freud’s term for the mechanism that balances the id and superego.
 Superego: Freud’s term for the restraining component of the self.
o Charles Horton Cooley:
o Looking-Glass self: Cooley’s description of the way our feelings about who we are
depend largely on how we see ourselves evaluated by others.
o Cooley observed that when we interact with others, they gesture and react to us.
This allow us to imagine how we appear to them. We then judge how others
evaluate us.

o We use the judgements to develop a self-concept or a set of feelings and ideas
about who we are.