Socialisation and personality

Sociology · Culture, socialisation and groups. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Socialisation is the lifelong process by which a person learns the culture of society and develops a self. Its main agents are the family (first and strongest in early childhood), the school, the peer group, the mass media and religion.

Sociologists stress nurture. Cooley and Mead held that the self is not present at birth but grows out of interaction with others. Cases of children raised in isolation, such as Anna and Isabelle described by Kingsley Davis, show that language and normal behaviour do not appear without human contact.

Freud and later stage theorists describe how personality and thinking develop step by step.

Rules to remember

Cooley's looking-glass self: we imagine how we appear to others, imagine their judgement, and feel pride or shame as a result.
Mead: the 'I' is the spontaneous self; the 'me' is the socialised self. Stages: preparatory (imitation), play (one role at a time), game (many roles, the generalised other).
Freud: id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (conscience, the moral demands of society).
Freud's psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital.
Piaget's cognitive stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational.
Erikson: eight psychosocial stages, the first being trust versus mistrust. Kohlberg: three levels of moral development (preconventional, conventional, postconventional).
Hidden curriculum: the informal lessons of school, such as obedience and punctuality.

Common mistake

Mead's 'I' and 'me' are often reversed. The 'me' is the part formed by society's attitudes; the 'I' is the individual's own active, unpredictable response.

Worked example

A boy playing in a hockey team must know what the goalkeeper, the defenders and his fellow forwards each expect of him at the same moment. Which of Mead's stages is this, and which concept does it develop?

In the play stage a child takes the role of one particular person at a time.
Here the boy must hold the roles of several others in mind together and follow shared rules.
That is the mark of the game stage.
From it the child forms a general idea of what the group as a whole expects.

Answer: The game stage, which develops the generalised other.

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