Understanding Socialization in Sociology

What is Socialization?

Socialization is the lifelong process through which people learn the norms, values, behaviors, and social roles of their society.

It begins in childhood with family and continues throughout life as we interact with peers, schools, media, and institutions.

Through socialization, individuals develop a sense of identity and society maintains stability and culture across generation

More specifically, socialisation can be understood as:

1. Learning culture: The process by which people acquire the knowledge, language, values, customs, and norms of their society.

2. Understanding expectations: The way people come to recognise and accept societal norms, beliefs, and values, shaping how they behave within a community.

3. Becoming human: The process of learning how to act in ways that align with the general expectations of others, without which individuals would lack many characteristics associated with being human.

4. Adopting roles and values: Learning the social norms, roles, and values appropriate to one’s position within society.

5. Connecting individual and society: An essential link that helps individuals see themselves as members of larger groups and organisations, enabling them to develop their potential and participate in collective life.

6. A lifelong process: Socialisation continues throughout life, involving both formal learning (e.g., education, training) and informal learning (e.g., everyday interactions, cultural practices).

Sociologists emphasise that nearly all human behaviour is learned through social and cultural environments, rather than being determined by biological instincts.

Types of Socialization

Primary Socialisation

• Begins at birth and usually occurs in intimate, long-term contact with parents or caregivers.

• Parents act as significant others, shaping a child’s earliest values, norms, and behaviours.

• Involves learning basic skills (how to use objects, interact with others, and understand the world).

• Teaches gender roles – what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine” in a given society.

• Considered the most important and influential stage.

• The family is the first and most crucial agent of socialisation.

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Secondary Socialisation

• Occurs later in life through secondary relationships (less personal and less intimate).

• Key agents include schools, peer groups, media, teachers, and casual acquaintances.

• Can reinforce or challenge values learned in primary socialisation.

• Increasingly significant in modern, rapidly changing societies.

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Anticipatory Socialisation

• This is the voluntary process of preparing for future life roles by learning new norms, values, attitudes, and behaviours in advanc

• Involves “rehearsing” roles by imagining, observing, or studying them.

• Example: a student entering medical school may already know aspects of a doctor’s role from TV or personal experiences.

• Common during adolescence, when individuals prepare for adult roles.

• Reference groups provide models for this type of socialisation.

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Resocialization

• Learning a new set of norms, values, and behaviours, replacing old ones.

• Can be gradual (e.g., transitioning to adulthood) or abrupt (e.g., military training).

• Voluntary resocialisation: becoming a student, employee, or retiree, or converting religion.

• Involuntary resocialisation: occurs in total institutions such as prisons, boot camps, or asylums, where old identities are stripped away.

• Often stressful because it requires unlearning habits and adopting new behaviours.

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Other Aspects of Socialisation

• Gender Socialisation: Messages and practices that teach what it means to be male or female. Can reinforce gender inequality (conflict theory).

• Racial/Ethnic Socialisation: Teaching about cultural heritage, identity, and status linked to race or ethnicity.

• Workplace Socialisation: Learning job-related skills, behaviours, and norms (both formal training and informal culture).

• Differential Socialisation: Different groups (e.g., social classes or subcultures) socialise members differently, which can explain conformity or deviance.

Examples

Socialisation is a fundamental process for human life. It enables individuals to develop their potential, construct identities, and learn the behaviours needed for social interaction.

At the same time, it allows societies to transmit culture, maintain order, and ensure continuity across generations by incorporating new members into the social structure.

Impact on Behaviour

• Acquiring Basic Life Skills: Families, as the first agents of socialisation, teach infants how to walk, talk, and use tools like cutlery – skills that are learned, not instinctive.

• Dining Manners and Customs: Eating practices vary across cultures, from eating with hands to deciding who pays at a meal. These differences highlight how behaviour is socially learned.

• Conformity to Group Expectations: Teenagers may begin smoking to gain acceptance from peers, reflecting the powerful role of conformity. Experiments such as Solomon Asch’s demonstrated that people often deny their own senses to fit in with group consensus.

• Learning Deviant Behaviour: Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory shows that people can learn to commit crimes through interaction with close contacts who provide techniques, motives, and justifications.

• Workplace Behaviour: Employees are socialised into workplace norms both formally (codes of conduct, dress codes) and informally (colleague interactions, “canteen culture”).

• Everyday Social Interactions: Socialisation governs subtle behaviours such as how far apart to stand in conversation, how to shake hands, or when to kiss as a greeting—all of which differ across cultures.

• Influence of Social Class: Parental practices vary by class: working-class families often emphasise obedience, while middle- and upper-class families encourage independence and creativity. This prepares children for class-specific occupations, reproducing social inequality.

• Responses to Social Control: Socialisation teaches people to respond to sanctions. Rewards encourage compliance (e.g., praise or treats), while punishments discourage unacceptable behaviour.

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Impact on Identity

• Development of Self-Concept: Self-identity is not innate but emerges through social experience, making socialisation essential for self-concept formation.

• The Looking-Glass Self: Cooley’s idea explains how individuals imagine how they appear to others, interpret others’ judgments, and form self-concepts accordingly. For example, uncertainty about a new haircut may depend on others’ reactions.

• Role-Taking and the Generalised Other: Mead showed that children learn societal expectations by taking the role of others and internalising the perspective of the “generalised other,” or wider community.

• Gender Identity: From birth, children are socialised into gender roles through clothing, toys, and activities, shaping their understanding of masculinity and femininity.

• Independence and Peer Influence: Peer groups allow adolescents to develop identities separate from parents and to experiment with new ways of thinking and behaving.

• Consequences of Isolation: Cases of feral children raised in isolation show that without socialisation, individuals fail to develop speech, social skills, or a sense of self, behaving more like animals than humans.

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Impact on Norms

• Moral Development: Socialisation enables people to distinguish “good” from “bad,” preventing unchecked behaviour and supporting social stability.

• Cultural Transmission: Social norms, values, and customs are passed from one generation to the next, preserving cultural continuity.

• Gender Norms: Societies establish gender expectations—for example, boys being encouraged to be assertive while girls are expected to be nurturing—often reinforced through stereotypes.

• Racial/Ethnic Norms: Racial and ethnic socialisation includes explicit and implicit messages about group identity, pride, or prejudice.

• Life-Stage Expectations: Socialisation defines expectations for different life phases, such as dating norms in adolescence or age-based responsibilities like voting at 18.

• Social Order and Control: By internalising shared norms, people develop a “collective consciousness” that promotes integration. Laws and formal rules extend this control where informal norms are insufficient.

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Theoretical Perspectives

The three major sociological perspectives – functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism – each offer distinct insights into the process of socialisation.

While all agree that socialisation is essential for individuals to learn cultural and societal values, their interpretations differ significantly.

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Functionalist Perspective

Functionalists see socialisation as an essential process for maintaining stability and order in society. Society is understood as a system of interrelated parts, each performing functions that contribute to overall balance.

• Role in Society and Culture: Socialisation trains individuals to operate within society and perpetuates culture by transmitting it across generations. Without it, a society’s culture could not survive.

• Transmission of Values and Norms: Durkheim argued that schools instil shared cultural values—achievement, competition, individualism, morality, solidarity, and equality of opportunity. Families and religion play similar roles in teaching norms and values, fostering unity.

• Agents of Socialisation: Families are primary agents, providing emotional support and conferring social position. Schools are key secondary agents, transmitting both academic skills and a “hidden curriculum” that teaches respect for authority, discipline, punctuality, individualism, and competition.

• Consensus and Conformity: Functionalists assume a shared value system underpins cooperation in society. Socialisation works best when individuals conform because they believe it benefits both themselves and society.

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Conflict Theory Perspective

Conflict theorists view socialisation as a mechanism that perpetuates inequality and preserves the power of dominant groups.

• Reproduction of Inequality: Socialisation conveys different expectations based on class, race, or gender, creating unequal opportunities. For instance, working-class families often stress obedience, while wealthier families emphasise creativity and independence, reproducing class divisions.

• Hidden Curriculum and Dominant Culture: Schools reinforce inequality through tracking, testing, and a hidden curriculum that trains lower-status groups for obedience, while privileging dominant groups. Education is seen as biased toward ruling-class interests.

• Role of Power: Institutions such as the media and religion impose dominant values on society, fostering false consciousness—a distorted view of reality that discourages disadvantaged groups from challenging inequality.

• Critique of Family: Families can reinforce inequality by transferring wealth, social status, and privilege across generations, thus supporting stratification.

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Symbolic Interactionist Perspective

Symbolic interactionism is a micro-level approach focusing on everyday interactions, shared meanings, and the development of the self through communication and symbols.

• Development of Self-Concept: Socialisation is essential for self-concept formation. Cooley’s looking-glass self explains how individuals imagine others’ perceptions and judgments to shape their self-image. Mead’s concepts of role-taking and the generalised other show how children internalise the attitudes of broader society to develop a sense of self.

• Active Role of Individuals: Children are not passive recipients but active participants, creatively interpreting and shaping their own social experiences.

• Influence of Agents: Families are crucial in early self-development, but peer groups help adolescents form independence and identity. In schools, classroom interactions—such as teacher-student relationships—are central to how children interpret cultural messages.

• Social Construction of Reality: Reality is created through ongoing social interactions, with language and symbols as the primary means of making sense of the social world.

• Limitations: Critics argue this perspective lacks a systematic framework for understanding how culture shapes individuals or how conflicts in meaning are resolved. Some suggest Mead’s ideas may reflect male experiences more than female ones, as women often face contradictions between cultural expectations and personal experiences.

The Purpose of Socialization

Socialisation is a fundamental condition of human existence.

For individuals, it shapes self-identity, teaches essential skills, and enables social functioning. For societies, it transmits culture, maintains order, prepares people for roles, and ensures continuity across generations. Without socialisation, neither individuals nor societies could survive.

Necessity for Individuals

1. Development of Self-Identity and Personality: Socialisation is crucial for individuals to form a distinct sense of self. Without interaction, people cannot develop a self-concept or personal identity. This self-concept – encompassing physical, active, social, and psychological aspects—emerges through experience and is essential for communication with others.

2. Acquisition of Essential Skills: Through socialisation, people learn basic human capacities such as walking, talking, and using tools, as well as emotional skills, moral values, and ways of relating to others. These learned abilities are fundamental for functioning fully as a human being.

3. Prevention of Impaired Development: Research on socially isolated (feral) children and Harry Harlow’s experiments with rhesus monkeys demonstrate the devastating effects of lacking socialisation. Without it, individuals often fail to develop speech, social skills, and the capacity for love, behaving more like frightened animals than human beings.

Necessity for Society

1. Perpetuation and Transmission of Culture: Socialisation is the main way societies pass on language, knowledge, values, and customs from one generation to the next. Without it, cultural traditions would vanish, and societies could not reproduce themselves over time.

2. Maintenance of Social Order and Stability

   • Shared Norms and Values: Socialisation helps individuals internalise rules and beliefs, creating a shared understanding—or “collective consciousness”—that binds people together and promotes integration.

   • Social Integration: By moving beyond family attachments, children learn to navigate the wider world. Parsons argued that secondary socialisation prepares individuals for participation in impersonal, large-scale social systems.

   • Conformity and Social Control: Socialisation ensures conformity to group expectations, promoting uniformity and predictability in behaviour. Without it, societies would descend into disorder and instability.

3. Preparation for Social Roles and Division of Labour: Societies rely on individuals learning and performing specialised roles, each with defined statuses and norms. Socialisation provides the necessary skills and attitudes for roles ranging from parenthood to professional occupations, making complex divisions of labour possible.

4. Economic and Social Reproduction: Families, as primary agents, produce and raise new generations while instilling values and behaviours that sustain the existing social structure. This ensures a steady supply of citizens and workers who can contribute to society’s ongoing functioning.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between formal and informal socialization?

Formal socialization is the process by which people learn the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are expected of them in their culture.

This type of socialization usually takes place in institutions, such as schools, religious institutions, and the military.

For example, children learn how to read and write in school, and they learn about their country”s history and government, as well as how they should interpret and react to that history (Ochs, 1999).

In contrast, informal socialization is the process by which people learn the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are not formally taught but that are transmitted through everyday interactions with others.

For example, children learn how to speak and behave through their interactions with their parents and other adults in their lives.

Similarly, they learn about the roles and expectations of their social class through their exposure to the media, their peers, and other aspects of popular culture (Ochs, 1999).

What is the Difference Between Socialization and Enculturation?

Enculturation is the process by which people learn the norms and values of their culture.

It is a type of socialization that occurs as people grow up and come into contact with their culture”s customs and beliefs.

Socialization, on the other hand, is a much broader concept that refers to all the ways in which people learn to become members of their society.

This includes learning not just the norms and values of one”s culture, but also the skills and knowledge needed to function in society (Tan, 2014).

While enculturation is a relatively passive process that happens without much conscious effort, socialization is the active process of acquiring culture in general.

For example, parents may actively enculturate their children into the norms and values of their culture through stories, traditions, and religion as part of socialization.

What is the Difference Between Socialization and Education?

Socialization is the process of learning the norms and values of one”s culture. Education, on the other hand, is the process of learning academic knowledge and skills.

While socialization is necessary for the stability and survival of any society, education is necessary for the advancement of society (Cromdal, 2006).

People can be socialized by the process of education. As they acquire knowledge and attitudes, they may also learn the norms, beliefs, values, and standards of society.

For example, in a math class, students might learn the correct way to solve a problem, but they might also learn that it is important to be precise and justify one”s reasoning when making arguments. The first of these is education, and the second is socialization.

When does socialization begin?

The family is traditionally considered to be the first agent of socialization . This is because it is the first group that a child interacts with and learns from.

The family teaches children basic norms and values, such as how to speak, behave, and think. It is also the first group to provide emotional support and care.