UCSP: Socialization

• Socialization


  The process by which an individual is oriented and taught by his or her society's norms, including beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors
• Individuation


  The compilation of the values, attitudes, and beliefs that individuals receive from their family, peers, and community that enables them to create a personal identity that simultaneously separates them from the other members of the group and incorporates them into its system
• Social Identity


  A person's notion of who he or she is in society, including the roles and statuses that he or she performs in accord to what the society expects
• Types of Identity


  • Primary Identity (roles and statuses learned as a child, including sex, age, and ethnicity)
  • Secondary Identity (achieved roles and statuses, such as occupation, educational background, economic status, and gender)
• Model of Consciousness by Wilber, 1997


  • Presents a fourfold understanding of human identity: the existential "I", the doing "me", the cultural "I", and the performing "me"
  • Promotes a holonic concept of the self as both a whole and a part

  
• Holon


  An autonomous, self-reliant unit able to function without instructions from higher authorities
• Role Learning Theory


  • Individuals learn a repertoire of social roles from their society and reproduce this in their behavior
  • Roles constitute the social facts (e.g. gender, role, occupational role, family role) that inhibit, empower, and influence an individual's actions
  • Conformity to these social facts is rewarded by acceptance from members of society
• Symbolic Interactionism


  • Individuals construct their notion of the self through social interactions performed within the society
  • Roles and their performances are part of a creative process where the individual sees the behavior of others and responds by creating a role they can play
• Cultural Values


  Ideas held in society that are considered good, acceptable, and right, which inform the types of aspirations that members of society aspire for (social goals)
• Conflict Theory


  • Values and goals are sometimes the source of conflict within a society, as individuals have varying access and experiences relating to them
• Functionalism Theory


  • Values exist to create unity and harmony within the structure and fulfill the needs of the individuals
  • Values are created and upheld because they maintain the structure that promotes social order
• Types of Norms


  • Folkways (socially approved behaviors with no moral foundation)
  • Mores (norms related to moral agreements)
  • Taboos (behaviors that are forbidden in a specific culture)
  • Laws (rules and regulations implemented by the state)
• Status


  An individual's position in their society, which carries with it a set of defined rights and obligations
• Role


  Sets of expectations from people who occupy a particular status, including the vocabulary used and the performance of the status
• Role Performance


  • The behavior of an individual within a social space by their status
• Role Set


  A status has multiple roles (e.g. a teacher's role is not just to educate, but also to be a guardian while the student is away from their parents)
• Role Strain


  The individual is having difficulty performing the role required of them
• Role Exit


  The process of discontinuing a role
• Cultural inheritance


  The storage and transmission of information by communication, imitation, teaching, and learning. It is transmitted by the brain rather than by genes.
• Cultural inheritance is considered the latest stage in the evolution of heredity
• Heredity or biological inheritance


  The passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
• Genetic material is physically replicated, directly transmitted, and passively inherited by offspring
• Cultural traits


  Transmitted via an active process of reconstructive phenotypic inference and selective imitation by the learner
• The variation in human behavior is attributed to the differences in cultural templates of every society that the individual learns from
• Sociobiology


  The systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior
• Sociobiology is probably best known as the subject of?

  E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)