Lecture: Socialization & the Self
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 4
Opening
Picture three people at work. A nurse is learning how a hospital unit really runs, which is not quite what the training manual said. A teacher is wondering what a classroom routine teaches beyond the lesson on the board. A new hire on a retail floor is wondering how the shift lead sees them. All three are living the same question. Who teaches us to be who we are, and how does a self get built out of other people's eyes?
In Week 1, you learned the sociological imagination and the three perspectives. In Week 2, you learned how sociologists gather evidence. In Week 3, you saw what a culture is made of: values, beliefs, and norms. In this lecture I want to show you how each new person learns all of that, and how a sense of who you are grows along the way. We'll meet the teachers, two classic theories of the self, a way a self can be stripped and rebuilt, and the three lenses applied to the whole process. Next week, in Week 5, the course follows this self into everyday encounters and groups.
Let's start with a baby.
1. Become a self through learning
Think about a newborn. The baby can cry, grip a finger, and turn toward a voice. What the baby can't do yet is speak a language, tell a joke, or feel embarrassed. Every item on that second list has to be learned from other people.
Sociologists call that learning socialization: the lifelong process through which a person learns the culture of a group and develops a self. And a self is a person's sense of who they are, separate from others, which develops through social interaction rather than being present at birth.
So where does a self come from, your body or your surroundings? People love to turn that into a fight called nature versus nurture. This course uses a different frame. Nature and nurture is the course's frame for human development: biology supplies the capacity to learn, and social contact turns that capacity into a self, so the two work together rather than compete.
Here's a way to hold it. Think of a phone fresh out of the box. The hardware can run apps, but the box contains none of your contacts, your photos, or your messages. Those arrive only after you start living with it. Nature is the hardware. Nurture is everything that gets loaded onto it.
Take a toddler learning to talk. A human brain and voice give the toddler the capacity for language. Which language, which words count as polite, and how loudly to talk indoors all come from the people nearby. Without the capacity, there's nothing to teach. Without the teaching, the capacity sits unused.
Pause and try this. A friend says, "Language is nature, because babies are born ready to talk." What's missing from that sentence?
Think about which language the baby ends up speaking.
Here's the answer. Nurture is missing. The capacity for language is nature, but the actual language, the words, and the manners all come from the people around the child. The two work together.
One more word from the definition deserves a flag: lifelong. Socialization doesn't stop when childhood does. Hold on to that, because it comes back near the end.
2. Name who does the teaching
Think about one ordinary week of your life. Who taught you something about how to act? Probably a relative, a friend, a teacher, something on your phone, and maybe a boss. Nobody called it teaching. It was teaching anyway.
Sociologists call these teachers agents. An agent of socialization is a person, group, or institution that teaches the culture to a member of society, such as the family, peers, school, media, religion, or the workplace.
This week we'll use one set of made-up scenes, the socialization scene set, to see each idea at work. Six of its scenes show the six agents. A child is taught to greet each relative who arrives at a family dinner: that's the family, teaching first norms and how to treat other people. A youth soccer team has a pregame huddle and its own inside jokes: that's peers, teaching belonging among equals, away from adult authority. A peer group is a group of people of roughly the same age and standing whose approval and company teach belonging, away from adult authority. On a short-video app, the posts with the most likes show a new creator what the audience rewards: that's the media. Young members of a place of worship learn its rituals and moral rules: that's religion. And a new hire at a hardware store learns how the job is done: that's the workplace.
The sixth scene is school, and it teaches more than it says. Students raise a hand to speak, line up when the bell rings, and do what the teacher says. Nobody grades lining up. Everybody learns it. Sociologists call this the hidden curriculum: the unwritten lessons about obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy that a school teaches alongside its official subjects. You'll meet it again in Week 13, when the course studies education.
Pause and try this. In the feed scene, nobody gives the new creator a single instruction. So how does the media teach anything?
Think about what the audience hands out.
Here's the answer. Through rewards. Likes go to some posts and not others, and the creator learns what's admired from that pattern. An agent can teach without ever speaking.
3. See yourself in other people's eyes
Let's stay with that new hire at the hardware store. It's the first day. The new hire is stocking a shelf when the shift lead walks past, and suddenly the new hire wonders, how do I look right now? Too slow? Too careful? By closing time, there's a small glow of pride. Where did that feeling come from?
Charles Horton Cooley gave this experience a name in 1902, in his book Human Nature and the Social Order. The looking-glass self is Cooley's idea that a person's sense of self forms from imagining how they appear to others, imagining how others judge that appearance, and developing a self-feeling from that imagined judgment. A looking glass is an old word for a mirror. Other people work like a mirror, and you read yourself in what you think they see.
Walk the new hire through Cooley's three steps. Step one: the new hire pictures how they look to the shift lead while stocking the shelf. That's the imagined appearance. Step two: the new hire imagines the shift lead thinking "slow, but careful." That's the imagined judgment. Step three: by closing time, the new hire feels proud. That's the self-feeling.
I want you to notice one word, imagined. The shift lead may never have noticed the new hire at all. The pride grew from what the new hire believed the shift lead saw. A self can be built on a guess about other people, and the guess can be wrong.
And here's a slip to guard against. Chatbots, and plenty of students, credit the looking-glass self to George Herbert Mead. Cooley and Mead are both early symbolic interactionists, so their names travel together. But the looking-glass self is Cooley's, from 1902.
Pause and try this. Which of Cooley's steps is the new hire on while picturing the shift lead's thought, "slow, but careful"?
Count the steps in order before you answer.
Here's the answer. Step two, the imagined judgment. Step one was picturing how the new hire looked; step two is imagining what the shift lead thinks of that look.
4. Grow a self in stages
Now come with me to a playground. A toddler pushes a toy broom behind a grown-up who's sweeping. An older child grips a toy steering wheel and calls out bus stops. And over on the field, a child in a soccer game glances at the goalkeeper and the defenders before passing the ball. Three children, three different points in building a self.
George Herbert Mead traced this growth in Mind, Self, and Society, published in 1934 from his lectures after his death. The preparatory stage is the first of Mead's stages, in which a young child imitates the people nearby without understanding what the actions mean. That's the toddler with the broom. The play stage is the second, in which a child takes on the role of one other person at a time, such as pretending to be a bus driver. That's the child with the steering wheel. The game stage is the third, in which a person keeps several roles in mind at once and acts with all of them in view, as a player does in a team game. That's the soccer player.
The game stage leads to one more idea. The generalized other is Mead's term for the broad expectations of the society as a whole, which a person learns to take into account when acting. The soccer player isn't only asking what the goalkeeper will do. The player is holding the shared rules of the whole game in mind. That's the generalized other in miniature. It's the "people" in "what will people think?", not one particular person.
Mead also split the self into two parts. The "I" is the spontaneous, acting part of the self, the part that responds in the moment. The "me" is the part of the self that sees itself through other people's expectations. Back at the hardware store, the "me" knows the team expects a greeting for every customer. Then a customer drops a box of nails, and an unplanned joke slips out. That joke is the "I."
Pause and try this. A student says the generalized other is "my coach's opinion of me." What's wrong with that?
Ask yourself whether the generalized other is one person or many.
Here's the answer. The generalized other isn't one person. It's society's expectations in general. Taking on one specific person's role belongs to the play stage.
5. Strip a self and rebuild it
Picture a recruit stepping off a bus at a military boot camp. Within hours, the recruit's own clothes are gone, the hair is cut short, and every hour has a schedule set by someone else. Weeks later, the recruit walks, talks, and thinks about time differently. A self has been taken apart and put back together.
That rebuilding has a name. Resocialization is the process of unlearning old norms and ways of behaving and learning new ones, often as a person enters a new setting or way of life.
Erving Goffman studied the most complete version in Asylums, from 1961. A total institution is a place where people live apart from society and one authority controls every part of daily life, such as a prison or a military boot camp. And entry often starts with a ritual. A degradation ceremony is an entry ritual that strips away a person's old identity, such as trading personal clothes for a uniform, so that a new identity can be built. The boot camp arrival, with its uniform and regulation haircut, is exactly that.
Here's where people trip. They call any strict place a total institution. So compare the boot camp with a strict office, one with a dress code and close supervision. The office may feel tough. But its workers go home every night and run the rest of their lives themselves. One authority doesn't control everything. So the office is not a total institution. The test isn't how strict a place feels. The test is whether one authority runs every part of daily life.
Pause and try this. A demanding restaurant kitchen has strict rules and a head chef who runs every shift. Is it a total institution?
Ask where the cooks sleep and who runs their weekends.
Here's the answer. No. The kitchen is strict, but the cooks go home after their shifts and run the rest of their lives. One authority doesn't control every part of daily life.
6. Practice a role before you hold it
Imagine a nursing student on a clinical placement. The student watches how experienced nurses talk to worried patients and copies their calm tone. The student doesn't hold the job yet but is already learning to act like someone who does.
That's anticipatory socialization: learning the norms, attitudes, and behavior of a role or group before actually joining it. You've probably done it yourself, maybe by watching how older players carried themselves before you made a team.
Now jump to the other end of a working life. A worker retires. The alarm clock is gone, the coworkers are gone, and the question "what do you do?" needs a new answer. The retiree is learning a new daily rhythm. That's socialization too, and it shows the life course: the sequence of stages and turning points, from childhood through adulthood to old age, across which a person keeps being socialized. Remember that word lifelong? Here's where it pays off. A first job, a move, a new baby, retirement: each one teaches you all over again.
Pause and try this. Which idea fits the nursing student, and which fits the retiree?
Ask: looking ahead to a role, or living through a turning point?
Here's the answer. The nursing student shows anticipatory socialization, rehearsing a role before holding it. The retiree shows the life course, because learning goes on through a late turning point.
7. Run socialization through three lenses
Go back to the school scene one last time. Hands up, line up at the bell, do what the teacher says. Ask three people what that routine is for, and you might get three reasonable answers. Week 1 gave those answers names.
Structural functionalism works at the macro level. It sees socialization passing shared skills and values to new members, so the routine prepares students for a society that runs on schedules and cooperation. Conflict theory also works at the macro level. It asks whose values are taught as normal, and who benefits when people learn to accept a hierarchy. Symbolic interactionism works at the micro level. It sees the self built in everyday interaction, and it's the home of Cooley's and Mead's ideas.
These lenses don't cancel each other out. The same routine can help a society run, teach students to accept being told what to do, and shape how each student sees themselves, all at once. Each lens answers a different question at its own level.
Pause and try this. Which perspective is asking, "Who benefits when students learn to accept being told what to do?"
Find the words "who benefits" in the question.
Here's the answer. Conflict theory. Asking who benefits from an arrangement is its signature question, and it works at the macro level.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Socialization is lifelong learning of a culture and a self, and nature and nurture work together. Six agents do the teaching: family, peers, school, media, religion, and work, and a school's hidden curriculum teaches obedience, punctuality, and hierarchy. Cooley's looking-glass self runs from imagined appearance to imagined judgment to self-feeling. Mead's stages run from preparatory to play to game, toward the generalized other, with the "I" and the "me" talking inside. A total institution controls every part of daily life, and resocialization rebuilds a self there. Anticipatory socialization rehearses a role, and the life course keeps the learning going. And the three lenses read all of it at the macro and micro levels.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Sociology in Action Workshop. Next week, in Week 5, the course turns to social interaction, groups, and organizations, where Goffman's front stage and back stage are waiting.
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