Chapter 6

Socialization and Social Roles

Chapter Outline

Human Development Cognitive Development Emotional Development Culture and Personality Differential Socialization Sex-Role Socialization

Suppressing Development

Monkeys raised in isolation fail to develop normal monkey skills.

They show acute maladjustment when placed with normal monkeys.

Cases of child neglect have supplied comparable data.

Despite a normal biological heritage, infants who were unattended and unstimulated in orphanages failed to develop normally.

Accelerating Development

Two reasons to doubt claims about accelerating the development of infants and young children:– In most societies, nearly all infants receive

adequate stimulation to achieve normal development.

– Children cannot develop faster than their physiological development will permit.

Stimulus Response (S-R) Theory

Proposes a simple model of learning in which humans play only a passive role.

Maintains that behavior is a response to external stimuli.

Humans whatever behavior has been reinforced by their environment in the past.

Stimulus Response (S-R) Theory

Example: Language Dismisses the idea that people acquire

grammatical rules while learning to talk. Instead, it postulates that we acquire

language word by word and sentence by sentence as we repeat what we hear.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Stages

Piaget was convinced that the human mind develops on the basis of cognitive structures.

He administered IQ tests to youngsters and found consistent patterns of wrong answers to open-ended questions.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Stages

Piaget concluded that the children were applying the same, but incorrect, rule to a problem.

Piaget set out to discover basic rules of reasoning and the ages at which normal children acquire them.

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Stages

Cognitive development passes through four fundamental stages:

1. sensorimotor

2. preoperational

3. concrete operational

4. formal operational

Sensorimotor stage

Begins at birth and lasts until around two years.

Infants discover and develop their senses and their motor skills.

A major discovery during this stage is that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.

Preoperational Stage

Begins at about age 2 and ends at about 7. Earliest years of this period are devoted to

language learning. The other major task during this stage is to

learn to take the role of the other. Until they pass through this stage, children

cannot solve problems that require them to put themselves in someone else’s place.

Concrete Operational Stage

Begins at about 7 and ends at about 12 (although many people never progress beyond this stage).

Children develop a logical principles that permit them to deal with the concrete world.

One principle is the rule of conservation, which states that a given amount of material does not increase or decrease when its shape is changed.

Formal Operational Stage

Generally begins at about age 12. At this stage, people can formulate and

manipulate theories and deduce from these theories that certain things are likely to be true or false.

With this comes the ability to ask “What if ?” Researchers have concluded that perhaps

half of all adults do not reach this stage of cognitive development and are limited to literal interpretations of the world.

Chomsky: Three Key Aspects of Language

Language does not consist of a set of learned words and sentences stored in a mental “hard drive”.

Children develop complex programs or grammars rapidly and at a very young age.

Infants learn one language as easily as another.

Chomsky: Universal Grammar

Chomsky dismissed the seemingly immense variety in human languages as “superficial”.

The same underlying principles are observed in each language.

Universal Grammar is an instinctive awareness of nouns and verbs and how they can be combined.

When infants begin to observe the world and hear language, they instinctively distinguish between things and actions relating to things.

Personality

Personality is a consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions.

No two people ever have identical biographies, and therefore, no two people ever have the same personality.

External Pressures and Socialization in Premodern Societies

Societies somewhat isolated from other

societies

Societies with other societies

close by

Rarely engage in wars 44 5

Prefer male infants 17 44

Parents often hit kids 31 55

Emphasis on aggression and competitiveness in males.

35 70

Emphasis on aggression and competitiveness in females.

12 50

Stress virtues of inflicting violence on outsiders.

39 39

Melvin Kohn: OccupationalRoles and Socialization

People with self-directed personalities are more likely to obtain jobs with opportunity for individual initiative.

Less self-directed people gravitate toward structured, more supervised occupations.

People in highly structured jobs become less self-directed, people in less-structured jobs become more self-directed.

Child-Rearing Values: Importance of Good Manners to Independence

1.1 and above = good manners more important1.0 = equal importance

0.9 and below = independence more important

Nigeria 6.1 Ireland 1.8

Turkey 4.8 South Korea 1.7

Slovak Republic 4.4 Canada 1.7

Portugal 4.0 Mexico 1.6

Romania 3.8 United States 1.5

India 3.1 Japan 1.3

Great Britain 2.2 Germany 0.9

Russia 2.0 China 0.6

“Do you think a woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled?”

Necessary

Nation Total (%) Men (%) Women (%)

Russia 92 91 92

India 89 89 89

Japan 76 79 74

Italy 64 64 65

Mexico 52 52 52

Switzerland 34 36 33

Canada 24 27 20

United States 20 22 19

Sex-role Socialization

Most societies have sharp distinctions between male and female roles.

To the extent that a culture defines gender roles as distinctly different, parents will raise boys and girls so they will be different.

These boys and girls will grow up wanting to be different, believing these differences in sex roles are not only normal but necessary.