Charles Horton Cooley explained how we study ourselves by analyzing our social interaction with other people. He illustrated this using the looking glass and how the self is reflected. The theory discusses methods in which individuals value and perceive themselves based on other peoples’ opinions. George Herbert Mead‘s theory looks at how and individual may psychologically act like another person or group so that they may share the same perspective (Kendall, 2012). The theories are part of the symbolic interactions paradigm because they explain how we react to social behaviors by other people’s perspectives.
Family has been the most influential agent of socialization in my life. The family is the basic socialization unit and most values and perspectives carried by an individual reflect those of the family.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
School is another agent which teaches individuals values and skills to be productive in society.
Peer groups acted as a validation mark revealing what culture was expected and providing the pleasure of belonging in return. It enhanced my values by interactions with similar minded people.
The media also acted as an agent of socialization that introduced me to a larger variety of people who would not be met otherwise, and in the process educating about socializing behavior.
Feral children are children who have had very minimal human contact and as a result, they experience development problems and behave in ways incongruent to human behavior. In the cases of feral children, attention is drawn to the nature versus nurture aspects in the development and identification of an individual (Courses.lumenlearning.com, 2019). Nurturing is not in the traditional mother-to-child case as in this discussion, environmental factors (parents, peers, socioeconomic experiences and marketing) are considered as big influences. However, even before that, socialization caters for a more primal tendency to pick up on the expectations of those around us and adjust our conscience and impulse control accordingly. This may explain why feral children have difficulty in learning socializing basics.
References
Kendall, D. (2012). Sociology in our times. Cengage Learning.
Courses.lumenlearning.com. (2019). The Role of Socialization | Boundless Sociology. [online] Available at: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-sociology/chapter/the-role-of-socialization/ [Accessed 8 Jun. 2019].
