UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIALIZATION PROCESS

Socialization is a complex, lifelong process. In this lecture we shall focus on the works of three pioneer researchers, namely Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939), George Herbert Mead (1863 -1931), and Charles Horton Cooley (1864 -1929).

Freud’s Model of Personality
Freud believed that biology plays a major part in human development, though not in terms of human instincts. He theorized that humans have two basic needs that are there at birth. First is the need for bonding, which Freud called the “life instinct”. Second, we have an aggressive drive he called the “deathinstinct”. These opposing forces operate at unconscious level and generate deep inner tension. Freud joined basic needs with the influence of society to form a model of personality with three parts: id, ego and superego.
 

The id(the Latin word for it) represents the human being’s basic drives,which are unconscious and demand immediate satisfaction. Rooted in biology id is present at birth, making a new born a bundle of demands for attention, touching, and food. But society opposes the self-centered id, which is why one of the first words a child learns is “no.”

THE ID (“It”): functions in the irrational and emotional part of the mind. At birth a baby’s mind is all Id - want. The Id is the primitive mind. It contains all the basic needs and feelings. It is the source for libido (psychic energy). And it has only one rule --> the “pleasure principle”: “I want it and I want it all now”. In transactional analysis, Idequates to "Child".
Id too strong = bound up in self-gratification and uncaring to others
To avoid frustration, a child must learn to approach the world realistically. This is done through ego (Latin word for I), which is a person’s conscious effort to balance innate pleasure-seeking drives with the demands of society.Ego is the balancing force between the id and the demands of society that suppress it. The ego develops as we become aware of ourselves and at the same time realize that we cannot have everything we want. Ego too strong = extremely rational and efficient, but cold, boring and distant.Finally, the human personality develops the superego(Latin meaning “above” or “beyond” the ego), which are the cultural values and norms internalized by an individual.The superego represents culture within us i.e. the norms and values that we have internalized from our social groups. The superego operates as our conscience, telling us why we cannot have everything we want. As a moral component of the personality, the superego gives us the feelings of guilt or shame when we break social rules or pride and self- satisfaction when we follow them. The superego begins to form as a child comes to understand that everyone’s behavior must take the cultural norms into account.
Superego too strong = feels guilty all the time, may even have an insufferably saintly personality
To the id-centered child, the world is full of physical sanctions that being either pleasure or pain. As the superego develops, however, the child learns the moral concepts of right and wrong. Initially, in other words, the children can feel good or bad according tohow they judge their behavior against cultural norms (doing “the right thing”). The id and superego remain in conflict, but in a well-adjusted person, the ego manages these two opposing forces. Culture, in the form of superego, serves to repressselfish demands, forcing people to look beyond themselves.
 

When conflicts are not resolved during childhood, they may surface as personality disorders later on. Freud emphasized the role of socialization in the personality i.e. that the social group into which we are born transmits norms and values that restrain our biological drives.

George Herbert Mead: The Social Self

G. H. Mead (1863-1931) developed a theory of social behaviorism to explain how social experience creates individual personality. There is the power of environment to shape behavior. Mead’s central concept is self that part of an individual’s personality composed of self-awareness and self-image. For Mead:

 1.  The self develops only with social experience.The self is not part of the body, and it does not exist at birth. Self develops only as the individual interacts with others. In the absence of interaction (as is evident from the cases of isolated children like Anna, Isabelle, Genie) the body grows, but no self emerges.
 

2.  Social experience is the exchange of symbols. Only people use words, or the wave of the hand, or a smile to create meaning. These symbols are parts of the language, which plays a vital part in the development of self. Self is a product of socialization experiences and that it develops along with our ability to think symbolically.
 

3.  Understanding intention requires imagining the situation from the other’s point of view. Using symbols we imagine ourselves “in another person’s shoes” and see ourselves as the person does. We can therefore anticipate how others will respond to us even before we act. A simple toss of a ball requires stepping out of ourselves to imagine how others will catch our throw. You may call it as to think symbolically.

Thinking consists of the conversations we carry on in our minds with ourselves about all sorts of things, especially about ourselves. As a child, you eventually developed cognitively to the point at which you were able to use one symbol (a doll, for example) to represent a parent and another symbol (another doll, for example) that represent you.Only then you could engage in role taking –imagining being someoneelse and looking from that person’s perspective back at yourself as a social object. That is the imitation of the role of others. Out of the early social interactions we develop our ability to communicate, our ability to think, and our social self emerge.
 

4.  By taking the role of the other, we become self-aware.The self then has two parts. As subject, the self is active and spontaneous. Mead called the active side of the self as “I” (the spontaneous form of the personal pronoun). “I” is the self as subject the active, spontaneous, creative part ofself. But the self is also an object, as we imagine ourselves as others see us. Mead called the objective side of the self the “me” (the objective form of personal pronoun). All social experience have both components.

The emergence of self consists of three stages:

1. The Play Stage.During the play stage, a child begins to develop a sense of him/herself as a social object by taking the role of significant others in relation to him/herself. A girl child plays at being her mother or father, which requires investing herself imaginatively into a doll, for example. She then makes the doll behave as she behaves and evaluates and reacts to this behavior of the doll. She mimics the way in which her father or mother reacts to her own behavior. In this way, she begins to make sense of why the parents react to her as they do. At this stage, the child’s self consists exclusively of the ideas she has about herself based on her perceptions of how significant others, one at a time, view that self. (Significant others are the persons who are very important for the individual)
 

2. The Game Stage. In the play stage, the child took the role of one significant other at a time. In order to play games, however, the child must be able to take the roles of other players in the game simultaneously. In a game (cricket, for example) each player must know what all the other players expect of him in any situation that might come up. Being able to evaluate oneself from the perspective of several significant others simultaneously results in more sophisticated self-concept.
 

3.  The Stage of the Generalized Other. The generalized other represents the imagined perspective of the community or society at large. At this stage of development, the child is capable of evaluating himself from the perspective of community, sub-cultural, or cultural norms and expectations. The child tries to shape his behavior in accordance with the expectations of the others and tries to become what others what him to become.

Charles H. Cooley: The looking Glass Self

Others represent a mirror (which people used to call a “looking glass”) in which we can see ourselves. What we think of ourselves, then, depends on what we think others think of us. For example, if we think others see us as clever, we will think ourselves in the same way. But if we feel they think of us as clumsy, then that is how we will see ourselves. Cooley used the phrase looking glass self to mean a self-image based on how we think others see us.
 

Our sense of self develops from interaction with others. The term looking glass self was coined by Cooley to
describe the process by which a sense of self develops. The looking glass self contains three elements:
 

1.  We imagine how we appear to those around us. For example, we may think that others see us witty or dull.
 

2.  We interpret others’ reactions. We come to conclusions about how others evaluate us. Do they like us being witty? Do they dislike us for being dull?
 

3.  We develop a self-concept.Based on our interpretations of the reactions of others, we develop feelings and ideas about ourselves. A favorable reflection in this “social mirror” leads to a positive self concept, a negative reflection to a negative self-concept.
 

Note that the development of the self does not depend on accurate evaluations. Even if we grossly misinterpret how others think about us, those misjudgments become part of our self-concept. Note also that self-concept begins in childhood; its development is an ongoing, lifelong process.The three steps of the looking glass self are a part of our everyday lives, and as we monitor how other people react to us, we continuously modify the self. The self, then is never a finished product, but is always in process, even into old age.