Culture, Socialisation and the Individual
What this domain tests
How does a biological infant become a social person? This domain tests norms and values, the culture–personality link, and the agencies and stages of socialisation.
Core concepts
- Norms are shared expectations for behaviour; values are the broader standards of desirability behind them. Sumner distinguished folkways (customary, mild sanctions) from mores (strong moral sanctions); laws are codified norms backed by the state.
- Culture has material and non-material parts. Ogburn's culture lag describes material culture changing faster than beliefs. Sumner's ethnocentrism is judging others by one's own standards; cultural relativism is understanding a culture on its own terms. Subcultures share the wider culture with distinctive elements; countercultures oppose it.
- Culture and personality: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict showed that child-rearing patterns shape typical personality types - culture is learned, not inherited.
- Stages and mechanisms: Cooley's looking-glass self (we see ourselves as we imagine others see us); Mead's I and Me, significant other and generalised other; Freud's id, ego, superego; Piaget on cognitive stages; Kohlberg on moral reasoning.
- Agencies: family (primary, emotional), peer group, school, mass media, workplace, religion. Berger and Luckmann distinguish primary socialisation in childhood from secondary socialisation later; re-socialisation occurs in total institutions (Goffman) such as the army or a prison.
Worked example
A teenager adopts a peer group's dress and slang, though her parents disapprove. Reasoning: norms here come from the peer group, an agency with high salience in adolescence; the behaviour is conformity to a subculture, mediated by the looking-glass self (she imagines peers' approval). Parental norms retain formal authority but weaker immediate sanction - role conflict between two agencies.
Traps
Calling culture purely biological or "high culture" only; equating ethnocentrism with racism; mixing folkways with mores; claiming socialisation ends at childhood; confusing culture lag with cultural relativism.