Chapter 4 4th ed

The Real World
An Introduction to Sociology
4th Edition
Chapter 4:
The Self and Interaction

The Real World
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2
What is Human Nature?
• From a sociologists perspective, it is culture
and society that make us human.
• We must learn the meanings we give to
everything in society; food, housing, sex, and
everything else…society is the teacher.
• Culture, which we learned about in our last
chapter, is the “lesson plans” that society uses
when it is teaching us these meanings.

The Real World
3
• The nature vs. nurture debate refers to the
ongoing discussion of the respective roles of
genetics and socialization in determining
individual behaviors and traits.
• Which view is correct? Nature or Nurture?
• The answer is both. Ultimately both sides do
play a role in making us the people that we
are.

 Nature vs. Nurture Continued…
 Example: Research shows that high levels of testosterone
contribute to stereotypically masculine traits such as
aggressiveness and competitiveness. However, it is also true that
facing a competitive challenge (such as playing a sport) causes
testosterone levels to rise. So, is it the hormone that makes us
competitive, or is it competition that stimulates hormone
production?
 Competition, a learned behavior, is causing a biological response.
However, the traits caused by the increase in testosterone is
biology having an effect on behavior.
 You can see from this example that the relationship between
nature and nurture is quite complex.
The Real World
4

The Real World
5
The Process of Socialization
• Socialization is the process of learning and
internalizing the values, beliefs, and norms of
our social group and by which we become
functioning members of society.
• The socialization process begins in infancy and
is especially productive once a child begins to
understand and use language.
• Socialization is a lifelong process.

The Real World
6
• Society, culture, and the groups to which we
belong (family, friends, schools, etc.) teaches
us to become functioning members.
• However, in order for this teaching and
learning process to be complete, we must
internalize the values and norms of our
society…which most of us tend to do.

The Real World
7
• There are 2 main goals of socialization:
–Teach us skills necessary to satisfy basic
needs and defense from danger.
–Teach us the norms, values, and beliefs to
ensure all members adhere to a shared way
of life.

Social Isolation
• Infants have almost no innate capacities making it virtually impossible for
them to develop into full human beings without human contact. Here are a
few examples of this concept.
• Feral Children are children who have grown up in the wild. Supposedly,
there are real cases of children being raised by wild animals. An example of
this concept can be found in fictional works such as The Jungle Book and
Tarzan.
• There are a few examples of children that have been discovered living in the
wild and exhibiting animal like behaviors. However, there are no evidence
that any of these children were “raised” by animals from infancy.
• One example that indicates that an infant would not survive in the wild
comes to us from 13th century Germany and Emperor Frederick II. Frederick
wanted to see if children would revert back to their natural state as in the
Garden of Eden. All of the children died when they were abandoned in the
forest.

Feral Children, Do They Exist?
9

Social Isolation
• Modern examples:
• Isabelle: Kingsley Davis observed a young girl in the 1930s who had been
left in a dark room of her Ohio family’s home since infancy. The deaf-mute
mother did not interact with the child at all. When she was discovered,
the child only made croaking noises and could not interact. It would take
two years after her rescue for her to acquire language and learn to
interact with others, demonstrating that without socialization, we are
almost totally devoid of the qualities we normally associate with being
human.
The Real World
10

Social Isolation
• Modern Examples Continued…
• Genie: In 1970, a 14 year-old Californian girl was discovered in a room
where she had been confined since age 20 months. During her years of
isolation, no family member had spoken to her, nor could she hear
anything other than swearing. She also had no television or radio. She
was virtually non-verbal. After being discovered, she was exposed to
intensive speech therapy. In one year, she had the speech capabilities of
an 18 month old. Today, Genie lives in a home for mentally disabled
adults. However, she never reached her full language ability. This
suggests that without socialization, our mental development could
potentially be stunted; as we also know that our ability to learn certain
things begins to narrow as we age…language being one of these examples.
The Real World
11

Cooley, Meade, and Goffman
SELF DEVELOPMENT

13
The Development of the Self
• The self is an individual’s conscious, reflexive,
experience of a personal identity separate and distinct
from others. It is our distinct identity that sets us apart
from others.
• Consciousness, our ability to develop the “self,” makes
humans unique from other creatures.
• The self is a social product; it is created and modified
through interaction over the course of a lifetime.
• There are a few theories that discuss how it develops…

(Cooley)
• Charles Cooley believed that we learn who we are
by interacting with others.
• Furthermore, one’s sense of self comes not only
from direct contemplation of our personal qualities
but also from our impressions of how others
perceive us.
• His theory, the looking-glass self, refers to the
notion that the self develops through our
perception of others’ evaluations and appraisals of
us.

15
(Cooley)
• Charles Cooley theorized that there were 3
phases in the “looking-glass self” process:
– Step 1: We imagine how we look to others (family,
friends, strangers, etc.).
– Step 2: Then, we imagine other people’s evaluation
of us (attractive, intelligent, shy, strange, etc.)
– Step 3: Finally, we develop some sort of feeling
about ourselves based on our perception of that
evaluation (shame, pride, embarrassment, etc.)

The Looking-Glass Self
16
Step 1: “I think I look
pretty good for this
date.”
Step 2: “Wow..she is looking at
me like I’m a freak!”
Step 3: “I don’t know
what I did wrong! I
must look goofy or
something”

(Mead)
• George Herbert Mead expanded Cooley’s
ideas about the development of the self.
• Mead also believed that the self was created
through social interaction and that this
process started in childhood (that children
began to develop a sense of self at about the
same time that they began to learn language).

(Mead)
• The acquisition of language skills coincides
with the growth of mental capacities,
including the ability to think of ourselves as
separate and distinct, and to see ourselves in
relationship to others.

(Mead)
• He theorized that the self unfolds in stages:
– Stage 1: Preparatory Stage (before age 3) – children
imitate significant others. For example, a child might
bang on a piece of wood while a parent is engaged in
carpentry work, or throw a ball if an older sibling is
doing so nearby.
– Children also begin to learn symbols, gestures, and
language that allow them to begin communicating.
– Mead defined significant others as those who are most
important in the development of the self. These are
the people that we’re closest to (parents, family,
friends, etc.).

(Mead)
 Stage 2: Play Stage (after age 3) – children pretend
to be other people – this is referred to “taking the
role of the other.”
• After children learn to communicate, they gradually
become more aware of social relationships. As a result,
during this stage, they begin to pretend to be other
people. Just as an actor “becomes” a character, a child
becomes a doctor, parent, superhero, or ship captain.
• Mead called this process “role taking.” Role taking is
mentally assuming the perspective of another and
responding from that imagined view-point.

(Mead)
 Stage 3: Game Stage (Early School Years) – children’s self
awareness increases through a process that Mead compared
to games.
• The child no longer just plays roles but begins to consider several
tasks and relationships simultaneously. At this point in
development, children grasp not only their own social positions but
also those of others around them.
• For example, consider sports, a child must understand their own
position as well as everyone else’s positions…hence the name
“Game Stage.” This understanding applies to all aspects of
life…teacher/student, parent/child, coworker/coworker, etc. The
child can now respond to numerous members of the social
environment.

(Mead)
• Stage 3: Game Stage continued…
– Mead uses the term “Generalized Other” to refer to the attitudes,
viewpoints, and expectations of society as a whole that a child takes
into account in his or her behavior. In other words, the “generalized
other” is the perspectives and expectations of a network of others (or
society in general) that a child learns and then takes into account
when shaping his or her own behavior.
– For example: A child will not act courteously to other people merely to
please a parent. Rather, the child comes to understand that courtesy
is a widespread social value endorsed by everyone.
– At the game stage, children can take a more sophisticated view of
people and the social environment. They now understand specific
occupations and social positions.

Mead: The Stages of the Self
The Preparatory
Stage
Children imitate
significant others to
learn meaning behind
symbols, gestures,
and language.
The Play Stage
Children begin “role-
taking” in which they
mentally assume the
perspective of another
and respond from that
view-point.
The Game Stage
Children are now aware
of their position in
relationship to the other
numerous social
positions in society.

(Goffman)
• Erving Goffman believed that meaning is
constructed through interaction. To better
understand where Goffman is coming from, you
need to know the Thomas Theorem:
– The Thomas Theorem states that if people “define
situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
(pg. 123)
– Definition of the Situation – an agreement with others
about “what is going on” in a given circumstance. This
consensus allows us to coordinate our actions with others
and realize goals.

(Goffman)
• Erving Goffman takes the ideas of the Thomas
Theorem as step further…he looks at our definitions
of the situation not just cognitively, but
interactionally as well.
– Expression of Behavior – tools we use to project our definitions of the
situation to others.
– Expressions Given – expressions that are intentional and usually
verbal.
– Expressions Given Off – observable expression that can either be
intended or unintended and are usually non-verbal.

(Goffman)
• Erving Goffman and Impression Management &
Dramaturgy
• Goffman sees social life as a sort of game, where we
work to control the impressions others have of us, a
process he called impression management.
– IM is a person’s efforts to manage the impressions that
others receive of her or him.
– We are constantly managing the impression we want
others to see.

(Goffman)
• His approach, dramaturgy, compares social
interaction to the theater, where individuals
take on roles and act them out to present a
favorable impression to their “audience.”
– Setting (OR Region)
– Front Stage
– Back Stage
– Role Performance/Role Expectation

Family, School, Peers, and Mass Media
AGENTS OF
SOCIALIZATION

Agents of Socialization
• Agents of socialization are the social groups,
institutions, and individuals that provide
structured situations in which socialization
takes place.
• The four predominant agents of socialization
are the family, schools, peers, and the mass
media.

Agents of Socialization (cont’d)
• The family is the single most significant agent
of socialization in all societies and teaches us
the basic values and norms that shape our
identity.
• Where a family is located, both geographically
and socially will affect family members.
• Socialization differs because each family has
its own set of values and beliefs.

• Over the years, schools have gradually taken on
greater responsibilities than merely teaching a
prescribed curriculum.
• Schools help children become less dependent on the
family.
• Schools provide education and socialize us through a
hidden curriculum (a set of behavioral traits such as
punctuality, neatness, discipline, hard work,
competition, and obedience) that teaches many of
the behaviors that will be important later in life.
• Pressure for schools to become even more involved.

• Peers provide very different social skills and often
become more immediately significant than the
family, especially as children move through
adolescence.
• As children age, peers often become more important
than parents as agents of socialization.
• Peer subcultures are formed
• Peer Pressure refers to the influence exerted by a
peer group in encouraging a person to change his or
her attitudes, values, or behavior in order to conform
to group norms.

• The media has become an important agent of
socialization, often overriding the family and
other institutions in instilling values and
norms.
• Sociologists questioned the extent that media
has usurped some of the functions of the
family.
• What affects does television have on our
children?
– Body image is one example.

• Adult Socialization – We are constantly
learning and adjusting to new conditions over
the life course, and thereby participating in
secondary socialization.
–Examples: new job, marriage, divorce,
death, etc.
• Resocialization is the process of replacing
previously learned norms and values with new
ones as a part of a transition in life.

• A dramatic form of resocialization takes place
in a total institution, which is an institution (a
place such as a prison, cult, or mental
hospital) in which individuals are cut off from
the rest of society so that their lives can be
controlled and regulated for the purpose of
systematically stripping away previous roles
and identities in order to create a new one.

Behavioral Expectations
STATUSES AND ROLES

Statuses and Roles
• A status is a position in society that comes
with a set of expectations.
• An ascribed status is one we are born with
that is unlikely to change.
• An achieved status is one we have earned
through individual effort or that is imposed by
others.

Statuses and Roles (cont’d)
• One’s master status is a status that seems to
override all others and affects all other statuses that
one possesses.
• Master statuses carry with them expectations that
may blind people to other facets of our personalities.
– Stereotyping is judging others based on preconceived
generalizations about groups or categories of people.
• Roles are the behaviors expected from a particular
status.

Statuses and Roles (cont’d)
• Role conflict occurs when the roles associated
with one status clash with the roles associated
with a different status.
• Role strain occurs when roles associated with
a single status clash.
• Either of these may lead to role exit; the
process of leaving a role that we will no longer
occupy.

Emotions and Personality
• An aspect of the roles and statuses we assume is our
emotions. Emotions vary from status to status, role
to role.
• Though we tend to believe that our emotions are
highly personal and individual, there are social
patterns in our emotional responses.
• Paul Ekman – Global Emotions
– Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and
surprise
– Universal facial expressions

Emotions and Personality (cont’d)
• Role-taking emotions are emotions like
sympathy, embarrassment, or shame, which
require that we assume the perspective of
another person and respond from that
person’s point of view.

• Feeling rules are socially constructed norms
regarding the expression and display of
emotions and include expectations about the
acceptable or desirable feelings in a given
situation.
–Arlie Hochschild – emotion is guided by sets
of feeling rules, which tell us how to feel in
certain roles or situations
• Gender and emotion

• Emotional work refers to the process of
evoking, suppressing, or otherwise managing
feelings to create a publicly observable display
of emotion.

New Interactional Contexts
• What are the implications of our new forms of
interaction on the “self”? Instant messaging, texting,
Facebook, etc.?
• Though most sociological perspectives on interaction
focus on interactions that occur in copresence (when
individuals are in one another’s physical presence),
modern technology enables us to interact with
people very far away.
• What effect does this have on us?

New Interactional Contexts
(cont’d.)
• Postmodern theorists claim that the role of
technology in interaction is one of the primary
features of postmodern life.
• Interacting through technology exposes us to more
information and diverse perspectives that may shape
our sense of self and socialize us in new ways. This is
another reason why the media is a controversial
agent of socialization.
• We are now exposed to many more sources to help
us shape our sense of self.

Chapter 4 4th ed

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Chapter 4 4th ed

Recently uploaded

Chapter 4 4th ed