What do you, as you’re watching me right
now, have in common with a toddler who’s
being read a bedtime story?
I’ll give you a clue.
It’s also something you have in common with
the kids in The Breakfast Club.
As well as with a soldier going through boot
camp.
Give up?
You’re all being socialized.
It’s also the title of the episode.
You probably saw that.
Each of us is surrounded by people, and those
people become a part of how we act and what
we value.
This is known as socialization: the social process
through which we develop our personalities and human
potential and learn about our society and culture.
Last time, we talked about the HOW of socialization,
how we learn about the social world.
And no matter which of the many theories out there
that you like best, the answer seems to be that we’re
socialized by interacting with other people.
But which people?
What we didn’t talk about last week was
the WHO of socialization:
Who do we learn about the social world from?
What people, and what institutions, have made
you who you are today?
[Theme Music]
Socialization is a life-long process, and
it begins in our families.
Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings – whoever
you’re living with is pretty much your entire
social world when you’re very young.
And that’s important, because your family is the
source of what’s known as primary socialization –
your first experiences with language, values,
beliefs, behaviors, and norms of your society.
Parents and guardians are your first
teachers of everything –
from the small stuff like how to brush your teeth to
the big stuff like sex, religion, the law, and politics.
The games they play with you, the books they read, the toys they buy for you, all provide you with what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital –
the non-financial assets that help people
succeed in the world.
Some of this cultural capital may seem fairly
innocuous – I mean, is reading Goodnight Moon
really making that big of an impact on a toddler?
Yes, actually.
It teaches the “value” of reading as much
as it helps the child begin to recognize written
language.
The presence of books in the home is associated
with children doing well in school.
Another important form of socialization that
starts in the home is gender socialization,
learning the psychological and social traits
associated with a person’s sex.
Gender socialization starts from the moment
that parents decide on a gendered name and when
nurses put a pink or a blue hat on the baby.
Other group memberships, like race and class,
are important parts of initial socialization.
Race socialization is the process through
which children learn the behaviors, values,
and attitudes associated with racial groups.
Racial discrimination is partly the result
of what parents teach their children about
members of other races.
And class socialization teaches the norms,
values, traits, and behaviors you develop
based on the social class you’re in.
This may help explain why more middle- and
upper-class children go to college.
Not only can the families afford to send them,
but these children are expected to attend.
They grow up in a home that normalizes college
attendance.
Now, gender, race, and class socialization
are all examples of anticipatory socialization
– that’s the social process where people
learn to take on the values and standards
of groups that they plan to join .
Small children anticipate becoming adults,
for example, and they learn to play the part
by watching their parents.
Gender socialization teaches boys to “be
a man” and girls to “be a woman”.
But children also learn through secondary
socialization –
that’s the process through which children
become socialized outside the home, within
society at large.
This often starts with school.
Schools are often kids’ first introduction
to things like bureaucracies,
as well as systems of rules that require them to be
in certain places at certain times, or act in ways that
may be different from what they learned at home.
Not only do schools teach us the three r’s
– reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic –
but they come with what sociologists call a hidden
curriculum – that is, an education in norms, values,
and beliefs that are passed along through schooling.
Take, for example, a spelling bee.
Its main goal is to teach literacy and encourage
kids to learn how to spell.
But something as seemingly benign as a spelling
bee can have many hidden lessons that stick
with kids, too.
For example, it teaches them that doing better
than their peers is rewarding – and it enforces
the idea that the world has winners and losers.
Another hidden curriculum of school in general
is to expose kids to a variety of people.
When your only socialization is your family,
you just get one perspective on race, class,
religion, politics, et cetera.
But once you go out into the world, you meet
many people from many backgrounds,
teaching you about race and ethnicity, social class,
disability, gender and sexuality, and more.
School becomes not just a classroom for
academic subjects, but also for learning
about different kinds of people.
And, of course, schools are also where kids
are exposed to one of the most defining aspects
of school-age life: peer groups.
Peer groups are social groups whose members
have interests, social position, and usually
age in common.
As you get older, your peer group has a massive
impact on the socialization process.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to to see
just how big that impact can be.
In the late 1950s, American sociologist James
Coleman began studying teenagers –
how they interacted and how their social
lives affected their education.
He interviewed teens in 11 high schools in the Midwest, asking them questions about what social group they identified with and who else they considered members of their group.
Based on these interviews, Coleman identified
four main social categories.
And, uh, the names of these categories will
probably sound familiar to you:
They were nerds, jocks, leading crowd, and burnouts.
Basically, he discovered the 1950s version
of The Breakfast Club.
And with these social categories came social
prescriptions – behaviors that were expected
of people in those groups.
Coleman found that certain things were important to
the members of certain groups, like being a good dancer
or smoking or having money or getting good grades.
He also tested the students’ IQs and assessed
their grades.
And surprise!
It turned out that who you hung out with affected
how well you did in school.
In some of the schools, getting good grades was considered an important criterion for the “leading group” – aka the popular kids– but in other schools, it wasn’t.
And in the schools where good grades
were not a sign of popularity,
students who scored high on IQ tests actually did
worse on their exams than similarly smart students
at schools where good grades made you popular.
Thanks Thought Bubble!
Now, Coleman’s study might seem like common
sense – of course you and your friends are
gonna be pretty similar.
Don’t we choose to be friends with people
who are like us?
Well, not entirely.
Coleman’s study showed that we don’t just
pick peer groups that fit into our existing traits –
instead, peer groups help mold
what traits we end up with.
OK, so far, we have family, schools, and peers
as the main forces that influence someone’s
socialization.
But what about me?
Yes, me, Nicole Sweeney.
Am I part of your socialization?
Or more precisely, are youtube videos considered
a form of socialization?
Short answer: yes!
Long answer: The media you consume are
absolutely a part of your socialization.
TV and the internet are huge parts of Americans’
lives.
And how we consume our media is affected by
social traits, like class, race, and age.
A teenager or twenty-something in 2017 is
much more likely to watch online media, like
Netflix or youtube, than television.
And low-income Americans watch much more TV
than their higher-income counterparts.
The media we consume also impact us dramatically.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example,
has said there are connections between excessive
television viewing in early childhood and
cognitive, language and social emotional delays.
But TV can also influence the attitudes of
viewers, especially young ones.
For example, studies have found that kids exposed to Sesame Street in randomized-controlled trial settings, reported more positive attitudes toward people of different races –
most likely a result of the program’s wide variety of characters from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
TV also affects us well beyond childhood.
One recent study found that MTV’s “16 and
Pregnant” may have acted as a cautionary tale,
helping to change teen girls’ attitudes toward
birth control and contributing to declining rates
of teen pregnancy.
So far, the types of socialization we’ve
talked about have been fairly subtle — but there are
also more intense types of socialization.
Total institutions are places where people
are completely cut off from the outside world,
and face strict rules for how they must behave.
First coined by sociologist Erving Goffman, the term “total institution” refers to places like the military, prisons, boarding schools, or psychiatric institutions that control all aspects of their residents’ lives –
how they dress, how they speak,
where they eat, where they sleep.
And in a total institution, residents undergo resocialization, where their environment is carefully controlled to encourage them to develop a new set of norms, values, or beliefs.
They do this by, basically, breaking down
your existing identity and then using rewards
and punishment to build up a whole new you.
Think about every boot camp movie you’ve
ever seen.
All soldiers are given the same haircut and uniform, expected to reply to questions in the same way, put through the same grueling exercises, and humiliated by the same officer.
This process re-socializes the soldiers to put extreme value on their identity within the group, making them more willing to value self-sacrifice if their unit is in danger.
So whether you’re GI Jane training for a reconnaissance team or Molly Ringwald trying to maintain her queen-bee status in the leading crowd,
the you that you are has been powerfully
shaped by people and institutions.
Now, think back on your own life – who has
been the biggest influence on YOUR socialization?
Who do you think that you yourself have influenced?
Hard questions to answer, maybe, but definitely
worthwhile – and hopefully a little easier now that
you’ve learned how sociologists think about it.
Today, we learned about five different types
of socialization.
We talked about anticipatory socialization
from your family, like gender norms, that
prepare children for entering society.
We discussed the “hidden curriculum” in
schools.
We learned about peer groups through a look
at James Coleman’s study of teenage social
groups.
We explored the role of media in socialization.
And finally, we talked about total institutions
and how they can act as a form of re-socialization.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl
C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s made
with the help of all of these nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash
Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
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