Personality, Socialization, and Social Control

Unit 5: Personality and Socialization

Concept of Socialization

Socialization is the incorporation of a subject's culture, which exists insofar as it has been acquired by individuals in a group or society.

According to Rocher:

Socialization is the process whereby individuals learn and internalize socio-cultural factors from their environment throughout their lives. These factors integrate into the structure of their personality, influenced by social experiences and significant actors, leading to adaptation within their social environment.

Cases of Failed Socialization

A wild child, for example, is someone who enters human social life late, hindering the learning of basic behaviors and habits, despite the absence of birth defects. They often exhibit rudimentary habits and antisocial behavior.

Personality

Personality is largely the result of the socialization process. It is like a mask or shield worn for different roles. Personality is not what it is but what it seems. It is the set of individual characteristics that distinguish one person from another, a set of subjective traits that determine their unique adaptation to the environment. Personality is influenced by two types of components: innate (biological) and acquired.

Factors of Personality Development

• Biological Factors
  • Heredity: The hereditary biological basis provides the raw material of personality and is unique.
• Environmental Factors
  • Environment: Physical environment, climate, geography, and moral personalities.
  • Group Experiences: Crucial in personality development. Early in life, a child develops a sense of self through relating to others, defining the "I" versus the "other." Self-image is formed through interaction with groups (family, coworkers, etc.).

Personality also forms through unique experiences.

Compliance, Cohesion, Order, and Social Control

Social Norms

All human societies live according to guidelines and social norms acquired through socialization. Social norms are specific behavior patterns, sometimes formal (laws) and sometimes part of customs and social practices. Together, they constitute a cultural attitude about individual conduct and behavior (good-bad, fair-unfair), implying the existence of a social order.

Social conformity is the acceptance of and adherence to these widely accepted rules. Compliance does not depend on genetic factors but on the socialization process. In a stable and well-integrated society, compliance is the common behavior pattern, although complete consensus is impossible, both naturally and coercively. Therefore, control mechanisms are necessary for society to induce individuals to conform to the rules.

Social Control

Social control is a set of regulators of social order by which society encourages individuals to adhere to the rules and represses deviant behavior. It is an important mechanism of socialization, preparing individuals to conform to standards spontaneously or unconsciously. All societies have created social control mechanisms of various types and with different levels of severity (from gestures of disapproval to legal sanctions and punishment).

Social Deviance

Social deviance is behavior that deviates from the social rules regulating social life, such as rape. Social deviance exists to the extent that social rules exist. Without rules, there is no deviation. Deviance is always relative to a reference system: the same behavior may be deviant in one society and accepted in another.

Personality also conforms through experiences, and each experience is unique.

COMPLIANCE AND COHESION. ORDER AND SOCIAL CONTROL

SOCIAL NORMS: all human society lives according to a set of guidelines and social norms (which we have acquired through socialization). Social norms are specific patterns of behavior, and