Culture and Socialisation: Norms, Values, Culture and Agents of Socialisation
Domain 4: Culture and Socialisation - Norms, Values, Culture and Agents
This domain tests how culture is learned and how socialisation makes individuals members of society. Questions often ask you to distinguish norms, values and culture, and to identify agents and stages.
Core rules
- Culture is the learned, shared way of life: material culture (tools, buildings) and non-material culture (beliefs, values, norms, symbols, language).
- Norms are rules of conduct. Folkways are everyday conventions; mores are strongly held moral rules; laws are formalised and backed by the state. Values are general ideals such as equality or honour. Sanctions enforce norms, from informal disapproval to legal punishment.
- Socialisation is lifelong. Primary socialisation occurs in the family; secondary socialisation in school, peers, workplace and media. Re-socialisation occurs in new settings such as prison or migration.
- Agents include family, school, peer group, mass media, religion and workplace. Cooley's looking-glass self, Mead's 'I' and 'me', and Freud's id-ego-superego are classic explanations of how the self develops.
- Ethnocentrism judges other cultures by one's own; cultural relativism understands them in their own terms.
Worked example
A child is praised for touching elders' feet and scolded for speaking back. The family is transmitting a norm (respect) backed by informal sanctions; the school reinforces gender and caste expectations through seating, language and textbooks. The child is not passively moulded but interprets and sometimes resists these messages.
Traps
Do not define culture as 'high culture' or only the arts. Do not say socialisation ends in childhood. Do not equate norms with values. Do not treat cultural relativism as agreeing with every practice.