Sociology · Chapter 5

Socialization

A newborn human is one of the most helpless creatures on Earth — unable to walk, speak, feed itself, or even name what it wants. And yet, within a few short years, that infant becomes a person: someone with a language, a name, a conscience, a sense of humor, and a place in a social world. Socialization is the lifelong process through which that transformation happens — the way we absorb the culture, norms, values, and skills of the groups we belong to, and in doing so become who we are. This chapter asks how much of us is born and how much is made, traces how the self takes shape through interaction, introduces the agents that do the shaping, and shows that the process never really stops. It ends in the strangest corners of social life — the prison, the boot camp, the monastery — where society tries to build a new person out of an old one.

By the end of this chapter you can

Define socialization and explain why it, more than biology alone, makes us human.
Weigh the nature–nurture debate and use cases of isolation to show what socialization supplies.
Explain Cooley's looking-glass self and Mead's stages in the development of the self.
Distinguish the “I” from the “Me,” and the significant other from the generalized other.
Identify the major agents of socialization — family, school, peers, and media — and what each teaches.
Describe how socialization continues across the life course, including anticipatory socialization.
Explain resocialization and Goffman's concept of the total institution.
Apply the three sociological paradigms to the process of socialization.

Section 1Nature, nurture, and becoming human

A parent and two young children exploring nature outdoors — **Reference.** A parent and children out in the world — the nurturing bond through which a helpless infant is turned into a social human. Source and licence: see the figure credits

What socialization is

Socialization is the lifelong process by which people learn the culture of their society — its language, its norms, its values, its beliefs, and the skills needed to take part in social life. It is how each new generation is handed the accumulated knowledge of the ones before, and how a biological organism becomes a member of a group. Sociologists treat socialization as the very hinge between the individual and society: it is the mechanism through which society reproduces itself in the minds and habits of its members, and the mechanism through which a person acquires a self. Nothing you consider most personal — your tastes, your morals, your sense of what is funny or shameful — arrived without it.

The nature–nurture question

How much of what we are is written in our genes (nature), and how much is learned from our surroundings (nurture)? For most of the twentieth century this was posed as a contest, and thinkers lined up on opposite sides. Some emphasized biology: the field of sociobiology, associated with Edward O. Wilson, argued that many human behaviors are rooted in evolutionary instinct. Sociologists have historically pushed back hard, insisting that what looks “instinctive” is usually cultural — that a behavior found in one society and absent in another cannot be explained by a gene all humans share. The modern consensus is that the contest was always a false one: nature and nurture are not rivals but partners. Biology gives us capacities — a brain wired for language, a long dependent childhood — and socialization fills those capacities with content. A child is born able to speak some language; which language, and everything it lets her think, comes from the people around her.

Paradigm	Core question about socialization	How it answers	Rooted in
Structural functionalism	How does socialization hold society together?	It transmits shared norms and values across generations, producing the moral consensus and social order that keep society stable	Émile Durkheim
Conflict theory	Whose interests does socialization serve?	It reproduces inequality — teaching people to accept the class, gender, and racial hierarchy they are born into as natural and fair	Karl Marx
Symbolic interactionism	How is a self actually created?	Through everyday face-to-face interaction and shared symbols, individuals build a self by taking the role of others	Mead & Cooley

What isolation reveals

The clearest evidence that socialization — not biology alone — makes us human comes from tragic natural experiments: children deprived of it. Sociologist Kingsley Davis documented Anna and Isabelle, two girls kept in near-total isolation through early childhood in the 1930s and 40s; both arrived unable to speak, walk normally, or respond to others, essentially without a human self. The most studied case, “Genie,” discovered in California in 1970 after years of confinement, never fully acquired language despite intensive help — suggesting that some socialization must happen within critical windows. Psychologist Harry Harlow's experiments with infant rhesus monkeys pointed the same way: given a choice between a wire “mother” that dispensed milk and a soft cloth one that did not, the babies clung to the cloth, showing that the social bond of comfort mattered as much as food. A so-called feral child is not a wild human being; it is a human being who was never made social, and the deficit is devastating and often permanent.

We are not born human in the social sense — we are made human. An infant has the biological hardware of our species, but personality, language, conscience, and the very sense of “I” are installed by other people. Remove the installers, as the isolation cases show, and the hardware never boots into a full social person. That is why socialization is not a soft topic at the edge of sociology — it is the process that produces the human being sociology studies.

Interactive Tap through six documented cases of isolation and deprivation — Anna, Isabelle, Genie, Harlow's monkeys, Spitz's two institutions, and the Bucharest project — and flip each between the deprived condition and the condition with a person to see which human capacities socialization actually supplies, and how much the timing costs. Open full ↑

Key points

Socialization is the lifelong learning of a society's culture, norms, values, and skills.
The nature–nurture debate is best resolved as both: biology supplies capacities, socialization supplies content.
Cases of isolation (Anna, Isabelle, Genie) and Harlow's monkeys show that without social contact, a human self does not develop.
The three paradigms ask different questions of socialization: order (functionalism), power (conflict), and the self (interactionism).

Section 2The development of the self

Diagram of Cooley's looking-glass self, showing a person reflected in others' judgments — **Reference.** The looking-glass self — we come to see ourselves as we imagine others see us. Source and licence: see the figure credits

The self is social, not inborn

The self is your sense of who you are — a distinct identity, separate from others, that you can reflect on. It feels like the most private thing you own, but sociologists in the symbolic-interactionist tradition argue that it is entirely social in origin. You cannot develop a self alone; the self is built out of interaction, out of seeing yourself through the eyes of other people. Two early American sociologists worked out how this happens, and their ideas remain the backbone of how we understand identity.

Cooley's looking-glass self

Charles Horton Cooley proposed that we develop a self by imagining ourselves as others see us — a process he called the looking-glass self. It unfolds in three steps: first, we imagine how we appear to another person; second, we imagine that person's judgment of that appearance; and third, we develop a self-feeling — pride or shame — based on that imagined judgment. The crucial and often-missed point is that we react not to what others actually think, but to what we imagine they think, which can be badly mistaken. A student who is certain a professor finds her foolish may carry real shame built entirely on a misreading. As Cooley put it, we are, in a sense, what we think others think we are.

Mead's stages and the “I” and “Me”

George Herbert Mead, the founder of the interactionist view of the self, argued that the self emerges through role-taking — learning to put ourselves in others' positions — and that children do this in a predictable sequence. In the preparatory stage (roughly birth to age two) they simply imitate the people around them without grasping the meaning. In the play stage they take the role of one significant other at a time — playing “mommy” or “doctor,” trying on a single perspective. In the game stage they can hold the roles of many others at once and see how those roles fit together, the way a shortstop must anticipate every player on the field. From this final stage emerges the generalized other: the internalized attitudes and expectations of society as a whole, the imagined community whose standards we measure ourselves against. Mead also split the self into two phases — the “I,” the spontaneous, creative, unsocialized part that acts, and the “Me,” the socialized part that has internalized society's expectations and judges the “I.” Every act is a conversation between them.

Mead's stage	Typical age	Key ability	Illustration
Preparatory	Birth–2	Imitation without understanding	Babbling into a toy phone because a parent does
Play	~2–6	Takes the role of one significant other at a time	“Playing house” as the parent
Game	~7 and up	Takes the roles of many others at once; grasps rules	Fielding a ball while tracking every teammate
Generalized other	Emerges from the game stage	Internalizes society's overall expectations	“What would people think?”

Your harshest critic is an audience you carry inside your head. Cooley and Mead describe the same quiet miracle: the human capacity to step outside ourselves and look back, to become an object to ourselves. That reflexive glance — seeing yourself as others might — is what a self is. It is also why humiliation and pride are such powerful social forces: they are the levers by which the group shapes the individual from the inside.

Interactive Step through Mead's stages of the self — preparatory, play, game, and the generalized other — then work Cooley's looking-glass self through three everyday situations, tapping the diagram to take a role or move between the three moments. Open full ↑

Key points

The self is not inborn; it is produced through social interaction.
Cooley's looking-glass self has three steps: imagine how we appear, imagine the judgment, feel pride or shame.
Mead's stages — preparatory, play, game — move the child from imitation to taking many roles at once, yielding the generalized other.
The “I” is the spontaneous self; the “Me” is the socialized self that has internalized others' expectations.

Section 3Agents of socialization

Students seated in a school classroom — **Reference.** A classroom — where children learn arithmetic and, quietly, how to line up, wait, obey, and compete. Photograph by Francina Thompson / AusAID, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Family: the primary agent

The people and groups that teach us are called agents of socialization, and the first and most powerful is the family. Long before we can choose, our family gives us a language, a first set of norms and values, a religion or its absence, and — whether anyone intends it — a position in the social structure: a social class, a race and ethnicity, a set of gendered expectations. Sociologist Melvin Kohn found that class shapes what parents prize: working-class parents, whose own jobs reward following orders, tended to stress obedience and conformity in their children, while middle-class parents, whose jobs reward initiative, stressed self-direction and curiosity. In this quiet way, families tend to reproduce the class position of the children they raise — a point conflict theorists press hard.

School and the hidden curriculum

School has an obvious manifest function — teaching reading, arithmetic, history — but sociologists are just as interested in its latent functions, the lessons no one lists on the syllabus. This hidden curriculum teaches punctuality, obedience to authority, standing in line, competition, and respect for rules — exactly the dispositions a worker will later need. Conflict theorists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued that schooling corresponds to the workplace, sorting children and training them to accept hierarchy, so that schools help reproduce inequality across generations. In Mead's terms, the classroom is also where a child first meets the generalized other at full scale: an impersonal set of rules that applies to everyone alike.

Peers and the media

A peer group is made of people roughly equal in age and status, and its power surges in adolescence. Unlike family and school, peers are not authorities; among equals a young person learns to negotiate, to lead and follow, to build an identity partly independent of adults — and sometimes to adopt norms adults would not sanction. Finally, the mass media — and now social media above all — have become a pervasive agent, transmitting norms, ideals of beauty and success, gender scripts, stereotypes, and the habits of consumer culture to audiences of every age, for many hours a day. Religion, the workplace, and the state socialize us too, but family, school, peers, and media do the heaviest lifting.

Agent	When it dominates	What it chiefly teaches	Note
Family	Infancy & childhood	Language, first norms and values, class and identity	Primary agent; most enduring influence
School	Childhood–adolescence	Academics plus the hidden curriculum: punctuality, obedience, competition	Manifest and latent functions
Peer group	Adolescence	Autonomy, negotiation, youth culture	Members are equals, not authorities
Mass & social media	All ages, and rising	Norms, ideals, stereotypes, consumer values	Pervasive and screen-based

The most important lessons are the ones no one announces. A school's stated job is academics, but its lasting imprint may be the hidden curriculum — raise your hand, wait your turn, do as the bell says. Because these lessons are never named, they are rarely questioned, which is precisely what makes them so effective at reproducing a social order. Ask not only what an agent teaches, but what it teaches without saying.

Interactive Tap family, school, peers, and media to see what each one teaches, switch between the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist lenses, then drag an age slider to watch their influence rise and fall across a life. Open full ↑

Key points

Agents of socialization are the groups and institutions that teach us the culture.
The family is the primary agent, transmitting language, values, and social position.
Schools carry a hidden curriculum (obedience, competition) alongside academics; conflict theorists see this as reproducing inequality.
Peer groups socialize among equals; media now reach every age with norms, ideals, and stereotypes.

Section 4Socialization over the life course

A multigenerational family gathered together on a porch — **Reference.** Three generations together — each life stage carries its own roles to be learned. U.S. National Archives — public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

A process that never ends

It is tempting to think of socialization as something that happens to children and then stops. It does not. Socialization is lifelong, because we keep entering new groups and taking on new roles — student, employee, spouse, parent, retiree — and each requires fresh learning. Sociologists organize this with the idea of the life course: the sequence of socially defined stages people pass through from birth to death. The key sociological insight is that these stages are not simply biological facts but social constructions that vary across cultures and history. The historian Philippe Ariès argued that childhood as we know it — a protected, playful, separate phase — is a fairly modern invention; for much of history, children were treated as small adults. Adolescence as a recognized stage emerged only with industrial society, which delayed the entry into adult work.

Anticipatory socialization and role transitions

Much of adult socialization is anticipatory — a term from Robert Merton for learning the norms of a role we expect to occupy before we actually hold it. A student who begins dressing and speaking “professionally,” or a soon-to-be parent who reads every book on the subject, is rehearsing a future self. Cultures also mark major transitions with a rite of passage. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep showed these rituals share a three-part shape: separation from an old status, a transition or in-between phase, and incorporation into the new status. A graduation, a wedding, a retirement party, a religious confirmation — each publicly moves a person from one socially recognized role into the next, and hands them the expectations that go with it.

Type of socialization	What it is	Example
Primary socialization	The basic, foundational learning of early childhood	A toddler learning to say “please” and share
Secondary socialization	Later learning of the norms of specific settings and roles	Absorbing the unwritten rules of a first job
Anticipatory socialization	Rehearsing a role before actually occupying it	A student “acting professional” before graduating
Resocialization	Shedding old norms and adopting sharply new ones	Basic training in the military (see Section 5)

You are never finished being made. The middle-aged worker learning to be a first-time manager, the new widow learning to live alone, the immigrant learning a second culture — all are being socialized, just as surely as a first-grader. Seeing the life course this way is freeing: it means identity is not sealed in childhood but remains, to the end, open to revision by the groups we join.

Interactive Tap six life stages to see which agents are socializing you at each one, switch the whole map between today and 1900 to watch the stages move, then step through the four mechanisms that carry a person across them. Open full ↑

Key points

Socialization is lifelong; adults continually learn the norms of new roles.
The life course and its stages (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age) are socially constructed and vary by time and place.
Anticipatory socialization (Merton) is rehearsing a role before holding it.
A rite of passage ritually moves a person between statuses through separation, transition, and incorporation.

Section 5Resocialization and total institutions

A prison perimeter fence topped with razor wire — **Reference.** Razor wire at a prison — the boundary of a total institution, cut off from the wider society. Source and licence: see the figure credits

Resocialization: unmaking and remaking a self

Sometimes society does not merely add to a person's socialization but tries to replace it. Resocialization is the deliberate process of shedding one set of norms, values, and behaviors and adopting a sharply different set in their place. It can be voluntary — entering a monastery, enlisting in the military, joining a demanding new profession — or involuntary, as in a prison or a psychiatric hospital. What sets resocialization apart from ordinary learning is its intensity and its aim: not to build on the old self, but to break it down and construct a new one in its place.

Goffman's total institution

The most powerful resocialization happens inside what Erving Goffman, in his 1961 book Asylums, called a total institution: a place where a large number of people are cut off from the wider society for an extended period and lead an enclosed, formally administered life under a single authority. Prisons, military boot camps, psychiatric hospitals, monasteries, boarding schools, and some cults all qualify. Goffman noted their shared features: all spheres of life — sleep, work, play — occur in one place under one authority; each activity is carried out in the company of others treated exactly alike; the day is tightly scheduled from above; and the whole regime is bent toward the institution's official goals rather than the individual's.

Mortification and rebuilding

Resocialization in a total institution typically runs in two phases. First comes the mortification of the self — Goffman's term for a systematic stripping away of the old identity. The new arrival surrenders personal possessions and clothes for a uniform, may be assigned a number, submits to a standardized haircut, and loses control over the ordinary details of daily life. Sociologist Harold Garfinkel called the public ceremonies that lower a person's status degradation ceremonies. Second comes the rebuilding: through a tightly controlled system of rewards and punishments, the institution rewards behavior that conforms to the new identity and punishes what remains of the old, until the recruit becomes a soldier, the novice becomes a monk, and the person becomes an inmate. The results are never guaranteed — some resist, and the imprint can fade or, conversely, leave people so “institutionalized” they struggle to live outside — but the design is unmistakable.

Dimension of life	In everyday society	In a total institution
Where you sleep, work, play	Different places, different authorities	One place, one authority
Daily schedule	Largely self-directed	Tightly imposed and uniform
Identity markers	Personal clothes, name, possessions	Uniform, number, standardized
Contact with the outside	Free	Restricted or barred

To build a new self, an institution first tears down the old one. The confiscated clothes, the shaved head, the assigned number — these are not random cruelties but the opening moves of resocialization, clearing away the identity society already built so a new one can be written in its place. Understanding this reveals the deep truth of the whole chapter: the self is not a fixed possession but an ongoing social achievement, and what society makes, society can try to unmake and remake.

Interactive Walk a person through resocialization inside a total institution — barrier, degradation ceremony, mortification, privilege system, adaptation, release — then test ten real settings against Goffman's five criteria. Open full ↑

Key points

Resocialization discards an old set of norms and installs a new one; it can be voluntary or involuntary.
A total institution (Goffman) encloses people under one authority, controlling all of daily life toward the institution's goals.
Resocialization runs in two phases: mortification of the self (stripping the old identity, via degradation ceremonies) then rebuilding through rewards and punishments.
The process confirms the chapter's theme: the self is a social achievement, capable of being remade.

The chapter in one breath

Socialization is the lifelong learning of a society's culture — the process that turns a biological infant into a social person.
The nature–nurture question resolves into both; cases of isolation (Anna, Isabelle, Genie) show that without social contact, no human self develops.
The self is social in origin: Cooley's looking-glass self and Mead's preparatory–play–game stages explain how it forms through role-taking.
The “I” is the spontaneous self and the “Me” the socialized self; the generalized other is society's internalized expectations.
Agents of socialization — family, school (with its hidden curriculum), peers, and media — do the shaping, and often reproduce inequality.
Socialization is lifelong: the life course is socially constructed, and anticipatory socialization rehearses future roles.
Resocialization in a total institution (Goffman) unmakes and remakes the self through mortification and rebuilding.
The three paradigms read socialization as social order (Durkheim), reproduced inequality (Marx), and the making of the self (Mead and Cooley).

ReferenceWords worth knowing

A quick reference for the terms in this chapter — skim it now, or circle back whenever a word trips you up.

Agents of socialization: The groups and institutions — family, school, peers, media, and others — that teach us the culture.
Anticipatory socialization: Merton's term for learning the norms of a role before one actually occupies it.
Degradation ceremony: Garfinkel's term for a public ritual that lowers a person's social status, often opening resocialization.
Feral child: A child raised in isolation from normal human contact, who fails to develop a full social self and language.
Game stage: Mead's third stage, in which a child can take the roles of many others at once and grasp shared rules.
Generalized other: The internalized attitudes and expectations of society as a whole, against which we judge ourselves.
Hidden curriculum: The unstated lessons of school — punctuality, obedience, competition — taught alongside academics.
“I” and “Me”: Mead's two phases of the self: the spontaneous, acting “I” and the socialized, self-judging “Me.”
Life course: The socially defined sequence of stages a person passes through from birth to death.
Looking-glass self: Cooley's idea that we form a self by imagining how we appear to others and how they judge us.
Mortification of the self: Goffman's term for the systematic stripping away of a person's old identity in a total institution.
Nature versus nurture: The debate over how far behavior is shaped by biology versus by social environment; resolved as both.
Peer group: A group of people who are roughly equal in age and social status, influential especially in adolescence.
Play stage: Mead's second stage, in which a child takes the role of one significant other at a time.
Preparatory stage: Mead's first stage, in which a child merely imitates others without understanding the meaning.
Resocialization: The deliberate shedding of old norms and behaviors and the adoption of sharply new ones.
Rite of passage: A ritual (van Gennep) that moves a person between statuses through separation, transition, and incorporation.
Role-taking: Putting oneself in another's position to see the world, and oneself, from their point of view.
Self: A person's distinct, reflective sense of identity, developed through social interaction.
Significant other: A specific person, such as a parent, whose viewpoint strongly shapes a child's developing self.
Socialization: The lifelong process of learning the culture, norms, values, and skills of one's society.
Total institution: Goffman's term for an enclosed setting where an authority controls all of daily life, e.g., a prison or boot camp.

Check yourself

1. Define socialization and explain why sociologists say it, and not biology alone, makes us human.

Socialization is the lifelong process of learning a society's culture — its language, norms, values, and skills. Biology gives an infant the capacity to become a person, but personality, language, conscience, and the self itself are installed through interaction with others; without socialization, that human potential never develops.

2. A debater insists human behavior is “all in the genes.” How would a sociologist reframe the nature–nurture debate?

Nature and nurture are partners, not rivals. Biology supplies capacities (a brain wired for language, a long childhood); socialization supplies the content (which language, which values). A behavior found in one society but not another cannot be explained by a gene all humans share, so culture must be doing much of the work.

3. What do cases of childhood isolation, such as Genie or Kingsley Davis's Anna and Isabelle, demonstrate about socialization?

They show that without early social contact, a human self — language, normal emotional response, a sense of “I” — does not develop. Genie's incomplete recovery also suggests some socialization must occur within critical developmental windows. Harlow's monkeys pointed the same way: social comfort mattered as much as food.

4. Explain the three steps of Cooley's looking-glass self, and note the twist that makes it fallible.

(1) We imagine how we appear to another; (2) we imagine their judgment of that appearance; (3) we develop a self-feeling of pride or shame. The twist: we react to what we imagine others think, not what they actually think — so a self-image can be built on a misreading.

5. Name Mead's three stages in order and give the key ability of each.

Preparatory (imitation without understanding); play (taking the role of one significant other at a time); game (taking many roles at once and grasping the rules). The game stage yields the generalized other — society's overall expectations.

6. Distinguish Mead's “I” from the “Me,” and the significant other from the generalized other.

The “I” is the spontaneous, unsocialized self that acts; the “Me” is the socialized self that has internalized others' expectations and judges the “I.” A significant other is one specific influential person (a parent); the generalized other is the internalized attitudes of society as a whole.

7. Why is the family called the primary agent of socialization, and how can it reproduce social class?

It is first, most intimate, and most enduring — giving language, first norms and values, and a social position. Melvin Kohn found working-class parents tend to stress obedience while middle-class parents stress self-direction, matching their own jobs, so children are prepared for positions like their parents'.

8. What is the hidden curriculum, and how do conflict theorists interpret it?

The hidden curriculum is the set of unstated lessons in school — punctuality, obedience to authority, competition, waiting your turn. Conflict theorists like Bowles and Gintis argue it “corresponds” to the workplace, training students to accept hierarchy and thereby reproducing inequality across generations.

9. How do peer groups differ from family and school as agents of socialization?

Peers are roughly equal in age and status, not authorities. Among equals a young person learns to negotiate, build an identity partly independent of adults, and sometimes adopt norms adults would not sanction; peer influence peaks in adolescence.

10. Give an example of anticipatory socialization and explain the concept, crediting the sociologist who named it.

Anticipatory socialization, a term from Robert Merton, is learning the norms of a role before actually holding it. Example: a student who begins dressing and speaking “professionally,” or an expectant parent reading child-rearing books — rehearsing a future self in advance.

11. Define a total institution and list two of Goffman's defining features.

A total institution is an enclosed setting where people are cut off from wider society and their whole lives are administered by a single authority — e.g., a prison, boot camp, or monastery. Features: all life (sleep, work, play) happens in one place under one authority; activities are done in a group treated alike; the day is tightly scheduled; the regime serves the institution's goals.

12. Describe the two phases of resocialization in a total institution, using the correct terms.

First, mortification of the self — stripping the old identity through confiscated possessions, uniforms, numbers, and standardized haircuts (often via degradation ceremonies). Then, rebuilding — using rewards and punishments to install a new identity. This unmaking-and-remaking is how a recruit becomes a soldier or a novice becomes a monk.

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