Culture, Identity and Socialisation
This domain tests your grasp of how culture is learned and how identities are formed through social interaction. Expect questions on norms, values, socialisation agents and the nature–nurture debate.
Core rules and concepts
- Culture: the learned, shared way of life of a society. It includes norms (rules of behaviour), values (shared beliefs about what is good), mores (strong moral norms), folkways (customs) and sanctions (rewards and punishments).
- Cultural variation: subcultures share some mainstream culture but differ in values or style; countercultures reject key mainstream norms. Ethnocentrism judges others by one's own culture; cultural relativism understands a culture on its own terms.
- Socialisation: primary socialisation occurs in early childhood, usually in the family; secondary socialisation occurs later through school, peers, media, religion and work.
- The self: Cooley's looking-glass self and Mead's 'I' and 'me' explain how identity develops through interaction. Piaget and Gilligan show staged moral and gender development.
- Nature versus nurture: feral-child cases such as Genie indicate that without socialisation, normal human development is severely impaired.
Worked example
Question: Explain how a child learns gender norms. A strong answer identifies primary socialisation in the family (canalisation, different toys, sanctions), secondary agents such as peers and media, and the interactionist point that the child actively interprets these messages rather than passively absorbing them. Oakley's concept of canalisation and the use of positive and negative sanctions show the mechanism.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing norms with values.
- Claiming socialisation stops in childhood.
- Ignoring human agency and treating people as passive products.
- Using ethnocentric judgements as if they were objective facts.
- Describing agents without explaining what they transmit.