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Chapter 5. Socialization

Learning objectives.

5.1. Theories of Self Development

• Understand the difference between psychological and sociological theories of self development
• Explain the process of moral development

5.2. Why Socialization Matters

• Understand the importance of socialization both for individuals and society
• Explain the nature versus nurture debate

5.3. Agents of Socialization

• Learn the roles of families and peer groups in socialization
• Understand how we are socialized through formal institutions like schools, workplaces, and the government

5.4. Socialization across the Life Course

• Explain how socialization occurs and recurs throughout life
• Understand how people are socialized into new roles at age-related transition points
• Describe when and how resocialization occurs

Introduction to Socialization

In the summer of 2005, police detective Mark Holste followed an investigator from the Department of Children and Families to a home in Plant City, Florida. They were there to look into a statement from the neighbour concerning a shabby house on Old Sydney Road. A small girl was reported peering from one of its broken windows. This seemed odd because no one in the neighbourhood had seen a young child in or around the home, which had been inhabited for the past three years by a woman, her boyfriend, and two adult sons.

Who was the mystery girl in the window?

Entering the house, Detective Holste and his team were shocked. It was the worst mess they’d ever seen, infested with cockroaches, smeared with feces and urine from both people and pets, and filled with dilapidated furniture and ragged window coverings.

Detective Holste headed down a hallway and entered a small room. That’s where he found the little girl, with big, vacant eyes, staring into the darkness. A newspaper report later described the detective’s first encounter with the child: “She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side . . . her ribs and collarbone jutted out . . . her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin . . . She was naked—except for a swollen diaper. … Her name, her mother said, was Danielle. She was almost seven years old” (DeGregory 2008).

Detective Holste immediately carried Danielle out of the home. She was taken to a hospital for medical treatment and evaluation. Through extensive testing, doctors determined that, although she was severely malnourished, Danielle was able to see, hear, and vocalize normally. Still, she wouldn’t look anyone in the eyes, didn’t know how to chew or swallow solid food, didn’t cry, didn’t respond to stimuli that would typically cause pain, and didn’t know how to communicate either with words or simple gestures such as nodding “yes” or “no.” Likewise, although tests showed she had no chronic diseases or genetic abnormalities, the only way she could stand was with someone holding onto her hands, and she “walked sideways on her toes, like a crab” (DeGregory 2008).

What had happened to Danielle? Put simply: beyond the basic requirements for survival, she had been neglected. Based on their investigation, social workers concluded that she had been left almost entirely alone in rooms like the one where she was found. Without regular interaction—the holding, hugging, talking, the explanations and demonstrations given to most young children—she had not learned to walk or to speak, to eat or to interact, to play or even to understand the world around her. From a sociological point of view, Danielle had not had been socialized.

Socialization is the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values. Socialization is not the same as socializing (interacting with others, like family, friends, and coworkers); to be precise, it is a sociological process that occurs through socializing. As Danielle’s story illustrates, even the most basic of human activities are learned. You may be surprised to know that even physical tasks like sitting, standing, and walking had not automatically developed for Danielle as she grew. And without socialization, Danielle hadn’t learned about the material culture of her society (the tangible objects a culture uses): for example, she couldn’t hold a spoon, bounce a ball, or use a chair for sitting. She also hadn’t learned its nonmaterial culture, such as its beliefs, values, and norms. She had no understanding of the concept of “family,” didn’t know cultural expectations for using a bathroom for elimination, and had no sense of modesty. Most importantly, she hadn’t learned to use the symbols that make up language—through which we learn about who we are, how we fit with other people, and the natural and social worlds in which we live.

Sociologists have long been fascinated by circumstances like Danielle’s—in which a child receives sufficient human support to survive, but virtually no social interaction—because they highlight how much we depend on social interaction to provide the information and skills that we need to be part of society or even to develop a “self.”

The necessity for early social contact was demonstrated by the research of Harry and Margaret Harlow. From 1957 to 1963, the Harlows conducted a series of experiments studying how rhesus monkeys, which behave a lot like people, are affected by isolation as babies. They studied monkeys raised under two types of “substitute” mothering circumstances: a mesh and wire sculpture, or a soft terrycloth “mother.” The monkeys systematically preferred the company of a soft, terrycloth substitute mother (closely resembling a rhesus monkey) that was unable to feed them, to a mesh and wire mother that provided sustenance via a feeding tube. This demonstrated that while food was important, social comfort was of greater value (Harlow and Harlow 1962; Harlow 1971). Later experiments testing more severe isolation revealed that such deprivation of social contact led to significant developmental and social challenges later in life.

In the following sections, we will examine the importance of the complex process of socialization and how it takes place through interaction with many individuals, groups, and social institutions. We will explore how socialization is not only critical to children as they develop, but how it is a lifelong process through which we become prepared for new social environments and expectations in every stage of our lives. But first, we will turn to scholarship about self development, the process of coming to recognize a sense of self, a “self” that is then able to be socialized.

When we are born, we have a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops through social interaction. Many scholars, both in the fields of psychology and in sociology, have described the process of self development as a precursor to understanding how that “self” becomes socialized.

Psychological Perspectives on Self Development

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the most influential modern scientists to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of self . He believed that personality and sexual development were closely linked, and he divided the maturation process into psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He posited that people’s self development is closely linked to early stages of development, like breastfeeding, toilet training, and sexual awareness (Freud 1905).

Key to Freud’s approach to child development is to trace the formations of desire and pleasure in the child’s life. The child is seen to be at the centre of a tricky negotiation between internal, instinctual drives for gratification (the pleasure principle) and external, social demands to repress those drives in order to conform to the rules and regulations of civilization (the reality principle). Failure to resolve the traumatic tensions and impasses of childhood psychosexual development results in emotional and psychological consequences throughout adulthood. For example, according to Freud failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage of child development results in predictable outcomes later in life. An adult with an oral fixation may indulge in overeating or binge drinking. An anal fixation may produce a neat freak (hence the term “anal retentive”), while a person stuck in the phallic stage may be promiscuous or emotionally immature.

Making Connections: Sociological Research

Sociology or psychology: what’s the difference.

You might be wondering: if sociologists and psychologists are both interested in people and their behaviour, how are these two disciplines different? What do they agree on, and where do their ideas diverge? The answers are complicated, but the distinction is important to scholars in both fields.

As a general difference, we might say that while both disciplines are interested in human behaviour, psychologists are focused on how the mind influences that behaviour, while sociologists study the role of society in shaping both behaviour and the mind. Psychologists are interested in people’s mental development and how their minds process their world. Sociologists are more likely to focus on how different aspects of society contribute to an individual’s relationship with the world. Another way to think of the difference is that psychologists tend to look inward to qualities of individuals (mental health, emotional processes, cognitive processing), while sociologists tend to look outward to qualities of social context (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behaviour.

Émile Durkheim (1958–1917) was the first to make this distinction in research, when he attributed differences in suicide rates among people to social causes (religious differences) rather than to psychological causes (like their mental well-being) (Durkheim 1897). Today, we see this same distinction. For example, a sociologist studying how a couple gets to the point of their first kiss on a date might focus her research on cultural norms for dating, social patterns of romantic activity in history, or the influence of social background on romantic partner selection. How is this process different for seniors than for teens? A psychologist would more likely be interested in the person’s romantic history, psychological type, or the mental processing of sexual desire.

The point that sociologists like Durkheim would make is that an analysis of individuals at the psychological level cannot adequately account for social variability of behaviours, for example, the difference in suicide rates of Catholics and Protestants, or the difference in dating scripts between cultures or historical periods. Sometimes sociology and psychology can combine in interesting ways, however. Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) argued that the neurotic personality was a product of an earlier Protestant Ethic style of competitive capitalism, whereas late, postindustrial consumer capitalism is conducive to narcissistic personality structures (the “me” society).

Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) created a theory of personality development based, in part, on the work of Freud. However, Erikson was also interested in the social dimension of Freud’s child development schema (1963). He noted that each stage of psycho-social child development was associated with the formation of basic emotional structures in adulthood. The outcome of the oral stage will determine whether someone is trustful or distrustful as an adult; the outcome of the anal stage, whether they will be confident and generous or ashamed and doubtful; the outcome of the genital stage, whether they will be full of initiative or guilt.

Erikson retained Freud’s idea that the stages of child development were universal, but that different cultures handled them differently. Child-raising techniques varied in line with the dominant social formation of their societies. So, for example, the tradition in the Sioux First Nation was not to wean infants, but to breastfeed them until they lost interest. This tradition created trust between the infant and his or her mother, and eventually trust between the child and the tribal group as a whole. On the other hand, modern industrial societies practised early weaning of children, which lead to a different, more distrustful character structure. Children develop a possessive disposition toward objects that carries with them through to adulthood, as the child is eager to get things and grab hold of things in lieu of the experience of generosity and comfort in being held. Societies in which individuals rely heavily on each other and on the group to survive in a hostile environment will handle child training in a different manner, and with different outcomes, than societies that are based on individualism, competition, self-reliance and self-control (Erikson 1963).

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who specialized in child development, focusing specifically on the role of social interactions in their development. He recognized that the development of self evolved through a negotiation between the world as it exists in one’s mind and the world that exists as it is experienced socially (Piaget 1954). All three of these thinkers have contributed to our modern understanding of self development.

Sociological Theories of Self Development

One of the pioneering contributors to sociological perspectives on self-development was Charles Cooley (1864–1929). As we saw in the last chapter, he asserted that people’s self understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them—a process termed “the looking glass self ” (Cooley 1902). The self or “self idea” is thoroughly social. It is based on how we imagine we appear to others. This projection defines how we feel about ourselves and who we feel ourselves to be. The development of a self therefore involves three elements in Cooley’s analysis: “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.”

Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) advanced a more detailed sociological approach to the self . He agreed that the self, as a person’s distinct identity, is only developed through social interaction. He further noted that the crucial component of the self is its capacity for self reflection, its capacity to be “an object to itself” (Mead 1934). On this basis, he broke the self down into two components or “phases,” the “I” and the “me.” The “me” represents the part of the self in which one recognizes the “organized sets of attitudes” of others toward the self. It is who we are in other’s eyes: our roles, our “personalities,” our public personas. The “I,” on the other hand, represents the part of the self that acts on its own initiative or responds to the organized attitudes of others. It is the novel, spontaneous, unpredictable part of the self: the part of the self that embodies the possibility of change or undetermined action. The self is always caught up in a social process in which one flips back and forth between two distinguishable phases, the I and the me, as one mediates between one’s own individual actions and individual responses to various social situations and the attitudes of the community.

This flipping back and forth is the condition of our being able to be social. It is not an ability that we are born with (Mead 1934). The case of Danielle, for example, illustrates what happens when social interaction is absent from early experience: she had no ability to see herself as others would see her. From Mead’s point of view, she had no “self.” Without others, or without society, the self cannot exist: “[I]t is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience” (Mead 1934).

How do we get from being newborns to being humans with “selves?” Mead developed a specifically sociological theory of the path of development that all people go through, which he divided into stages of increasing capacity for role play: the four stages of child socialization . During the preparatory stage , children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their mothers and fathers. A child’s baby talk is a reflection of its inability to make an object of itself through which it can approach itself. This is followed by the play stage , during which children begin to imitate and take on roles that another person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behaviour, like playing “dress up” and acting out the mom role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see their father do. However, they are still not able to take on roles in a consistent and coherent manner. Role play is very fluid and transitory, and children flip in and out of roles easily.

During the game stage , children learn to consider several specific roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. They understand that role play in each situation involves following a consistent set of rules and expectations. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another person clears away dirty dishes).

Mead uses the example of a baseball game. At one point in the life of children they are simply unable to play an organized game like baseball. They do not “get it” that when they hit the ball they need to run, or that after their turn someone else gets a turn to bat. In order for baseball to work, the players not only have to know what the rules of the game are, and what their specific role in the game is (batter, catcher, first base, etc.), but simultaneously the role of every other player on the field. The players have to be able to anticipate the actions of others and adjust or orient their behaviour accordingly.

Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other , the common behavioural expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to internalize how he or she is viewed, not simply from the perspective of specific others, but from the perspective of the generalized other or “organized community.” Being able to guide one’s actions according to the attitudes of the generalized other provides the basis of having a “self” in the sociological sense. This capacity defines the conditions of thinking, of language, and of society itself as the organization of complex cooperative processes and activities.

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development

Moral development is an important part of the socialization process. The term refers to the way people learn what society considered to be “good” and “bad,” which is important for a smoothly functioning society. Moral development prevents people from acting on unchecked urges, instead considering what is right for society and good for others. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) was interested in how people learn to decide what is right and what is wrong. To understand this topic, he developed a theory of moral development that includes three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.

In the preconventional stage, young children, who lack a higher level of cognitive ability, experience the world around them only through their senses. It isn’t until the teen years that the conventional theory develops, when youngsters become increasingly aware of others’ feelings and take those into consideration when determining what’s “good” and “bad.” The final stage, called postconventional, is when people begin to think of morality in abstract terms, such as Americans believing that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At this stage, people also recognize that legality and morality do not always match up evenly (Kohlberg 1981). When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians turned out in 2011 to protest government corruption, they were using postconventional morality. They understood that although their government was legal, it was not morally correct.

Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development and Gender

Another sociologist, Carol Gilligan (1936–), recognized that Kohlberg’s theory might show gender bias since his research was conducted only on male subjects. Would females study subjects have responded differently? Would a female social scientist notice different patterns when analyzing the research? To answer the first question, she set out to study differences between how boys and girls developed morality. Gilligan’s research demonstrated that boys and girls do, in fact, have different understandings of morality. Boys tend to have a justice perspective, placing emphasis on rules and laws. Girls, on the other hand, have a care and responsibility perspective; they consider people’s reasons behind behaviour that seems morally wrong.

Gilligan also recognized that Kohlberg’s theory rested on the assumption that the justice perspective was the right, or better, perspective. Gilligan, in contrast, theorized that neither perspective was “better”: the two norms of justice served different purposes. Ultimately, she explained that boys are socialized for a work environment where rules make operations run smoothly, while girls are socialized for a home environment where flexibility allows for harmony in caretaking and nurturing (Gilligan 1982, 1990).

Making Connections: Sociology in the Real World

What a pretty little lady.

“What a cute dress!” “I like the ribbons in your hair.” “Wow, you look so pretty today.”

According to Lisa Bloom, author of Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World , most of us use pleasantries like these when we first meet little girls. “So what?” you might ask.

Bloom asserts that we are too focused on the appearance of young girls, and as a result, our society is socializing them to believe that how they look is of vital importance. And Bloom may be on to something. How often do you tell a little boy how attractive his outfit is, how nice looking his shoes are, or how handsome he looks today? To support her assertions, Bloom cites, as one example, that about 50 percent of girls ages three to six worry about being fat (Bloom 2011). We’re talking about kindergarteners who are concerned about their body image. Sociologists are acutely interested in of this type of gender socialization, where societal expectations of how boys and girls should be —how they should behave, what toys and colours they should like, and how important their attire is—are reinforced.

One solution to this type of gender socialization is being experimented with at the Egalia preschool in Sweden, where children develop in a genderless environment. All of the children at Egalia are referred to with neutral terms like “friend” instead of “he” or “she.” Play areas and toys are consciously set up to eliminate any reinforcement of gender expectations (Haney 2011). Egalia strives to eliminate all societal gender norms from these children’s preschool world.

Extreme? Perhaps. So what is the middle ground? Bloom suggests that we start with simple steps: when introduced to a young girl, ask about her favourite book or what she likes. In short, engage her mind … not her outward appearance (Bloom 2011).

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live. It illustrates how completely intertwined human beings and their social worlds are. First, it is through teaching culture to new members that a society perpetuates itself. If new generations of a society don’t learn its way of life, it ceases to exist. Whatever is distinctive about a culture must be transmitted to those who join it in order for a society to survive. For Canadian culture to continue, for example, children in Canada must learn about cultural values related to democracy: they have to learn the norms of voting, as well as how to use material objects such as a ballot. Of course, some would argue that it is just as important in Canadian culture for the younger generation to learn the etiquette of eating in a restaurant or the rituals of tailgate parties after softball games. In fact, there are many ideas and objects that Canadians teach children in hopes of keeping the society’s way of life going through another generation.

Socialization is just as essential to us as individuals. Social interaction provides the means via which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, learning who we are and how we fit into the world around us. In addition, to function successfully in society, we have to learn the basics of both material land nonmaterial culture, everything from how to dress ourselves to what is suitable attire for a specific occasion; from when we sleep to what we sleep on; and from what is considered appropriate to eat for dinner to how to use the stove to prepare it. Most importantly, we have to learn language—whether it is the dominant language or one common in a subculture, whether it is verbal or through signs—in order to communicate and to think. As we saw with Danielle, without socialization we literally have no self. We are unable to function socially.

Nature versus Nurture

Some experts assert that who we are is a result of nurture —the relationships and caring that surround us. Others argue that who we are is based entirely in genetics. According to this belief, our temperaments, interests, and talents are set before birth. From this perspective, then, who we are depends on nature .

One way that researchers attempt to prove the impact of nature is by studying twins. Some studies followed identical twins who were raised separately. The pairs shared the same genetics, but, in some cases, were socialized in different ways. Instances of this type of situation are rare, but studying the degree to which identical twins raised apart are the same and different can give researchers insight into how our temperaments, preferences, and abilities are shaped by our genetic makeup versus our social environment.

For example, in 1968, twin girls born to a mentally ill mother were put up for adoption. However, they were also separated from each other and raised in different households. The parents, and certainly the babies, did not realize they were one of five pairs of twins who were made subjects of a scientific study (Flam 2007).

In 2003, the two women, then age 35, reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein sat together in awe, feeling like they were looking into a mirror. Not only did they look alike, but they behaved alike, using the same hand gestures and facial expressions (Spratling 2007). Studies like these point to the genetic roots of our temperament and behaviour.

On the other hand, studies of identical twins have difficulty accounting for divergences in the development of inherited diseases. In the case of schizophrenia, epidemiological studies show that there is a strong biological component to the disease. The closer our familial connection to someone with the condition, the more likely we will develop it. However, even if our identical twin develops schizophrenia we are less than 50 percent likely to develop it ourselves. Why is it not 100 percent likely? What occurs to produce the divergence between genetically identical twins (Carey 2012)?

Though genetics and hormones play an important role in human behaviour, biological explanations of human behaviour have serious deficiencies from a sociological point of view, especially when they are used to try to explain complex aspects of human social life like homosexuality, male aggressiveness, female spatial skills, and the like. The logic of biological explanation usually involves three components: the identification of a supposedly universal quality or trait of human behaviour, an argument about why this behaviour makes it more likely that the genes that code for it will be passed successfully to descendents, and the conclusion that this behaviour or quality is “hard-wired” or difficult to change (Brym et al. 2012). However, an argument, for example, that males are naturally aggressive because of their hormonal structure (or other biological mechanisms) does not take into account the huge variations in the meaning or practice of aggression between cultures, nor the huge variations in what counts as aggressive in different situations, let alone the fact that many men are not aggressive by any definition, and that men and women both have “male” hormones like testosterone. More interesting for the sociologist in this example is that men who are not aggressive often get called “sissies.” This indicates that male aggression has to do more with a normative structure within male culture than with a genetic or hormonal structure that explains aggressive behaviour.

Sociology’s larger concern is the effect that society has on human behaviour, the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate. To what degree are processes of identification and “self-fulfilling prophecy” at work in the lives of the twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein? Despite growing up apart do they share common racial, class, or religious characteristics? Aside from the environmental or epigenetic factors that lead to the divergence of twins with regard to schizophrenia, what happens to the social standing and social relationships of a person when the condition develops? What happens to schizophrenics in different societies? How does the social role of the schizophrenic integrate him or her into a society (or not)? Whatever the role of genes or biology in our lives, genes are never expressed in a vacuum. Environmental influence always matters.

Making Connections: Careers in Sociology

The life of chris langan, the smartest man you’ve never heard of.

Bouncer. Firefighter. Factory worker. Cowboy. Chris Langan spent the majority of his adult life just getting by with jobs like these. He had no college degree, few resources, and a past filled with much disappointment. Chris Langan also had an IQ of over 195, nearly 100 points higher than the average person (Brabham 2001). So why didn’t Chris become a neurosurgeon, professor, or aeronautical engineer? According to Macolm Gladwell (2008) in his book Outliers: The Story of Success , Chris didn’t possess the set of social skills necessary to succeed on such a high level—skills that aren’t innate, but learned.

Gladwell looked to a recent study conducted by sociologist Annette Lareau in which she closely shadowed 12 families from various economic backgrounds and examined their parenting techniques. Parents from lower-income families followed a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth,” which is to say they let their children develop on their own with a large amount of independence; parents from higher-income families, however, “actively fostered and accessed a child’s talents, opinions, and skills” (Gladwell 2008). These parents were more likely to engage in analytical conversation, encourage active questioning of the establishment, and foster development of negotiation skills. The parents were also able to introduce their children to a wide range of activities, from sports to music to accelerated academic programs. When one middle class child was denied entry to a gifted and talented program, the mother petitioned the school and arranged additional testing until her daughter was admitted. Lower-income parents, however, were more likely to unquestioningly obey authorities such as school boards. Their children were not being socialized to comfortably confront the system and speak up (Gladwell 2008).

What does this have to do with Chris Langan, deemed by some as the smartest man in the world (Brabham 2001)? Chris was born in severe poverty, moving across the country with an abusive and alcoholic stepfather. Chris’s genius went greatly unnoticed. After accepting a full scholarship to Reed College, his funding was revoked after his mother failed to fill out necessary paperwork. Unable to successfully make his case to the administration, Chris, who had received straight A’s the previous semester, was given F’s on his transcript and forced to drop out. After enrolling in Montana State, an administrator’s refusal to rearrange his class schedule left him unable to find the means necessary to travel the 16 miles to attend classes. What Chris had in brilliance, he lacked practical intelligence, or what psychologist Robert Sternberg defines as “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect” (Sternberg et al. 2000). Such knowledge was never part of his socialization.

Chris gave up on school and began working an array of blue-collar jobs, pursuing his intellectual interests on the side. Though he’s recently garnered attention from work on his “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe,” he remains weary and resistant of the educational system.

As Gladwell concluded, “He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone” (2008).

Sociologists all recognize the importance of socialization for healthy individual and societal development. But how do scholars working in the three major theoretical paradigms approach this topic? Structural functionalists would say that socialization is essential to society, both because it trains members to operate successfully within it and because it perpetuates culture by transmitting it to new generations. Without socialization, a society’s culture would perish as members died off. A critical sociologist might argue that socialization reproduces inequality from generation to generation by conveying different expectations and norms to those with different social characteristics. For example, individuals are socialized differently by gender, social class, and race. As in the illustration of Chris Langan, this creates different (unequal) opportunities. An interactionist studying socialization is concerned with face-to-face exchanges and symbolic communication. For example, dressing baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink is one small way that messages are conveyed about differences in gender roles

Socialization helps people learn to function successfully in their social worlds. How does the process of socialization occur? How do we learn to use the objects of our society’s material culture? How do we come to adopt the beliefs, values, and norms that represent its nonmaterial culture? This learning takes place through interaction with various agents of socialization, like peer groups and families, plus both formal and informal social institutions.

Social Group Agents

Social groups often provide the first experiences of socialization. Families, and later peer groups, communicate expectations and reinforce norms. People first learn to use the tangible objects of material culture in these settings, as well as being introduced to the beliefs and values of society.

Family is the first agent of socialization. Mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents, plus members of an extended family, all teach a child what he or she needs to know. For example, they show the child how to use objects (such as clothes, computers, eating utensils, books, bikes); how to relate to others (some as “family,” others as “friends,” still others as “strangers” or “teachers” or “neighbours”); and how the world works (what is “real” and what is “imagined”). As you are aware, either from your own experience as a child or your role in helping to raise one, socialization involves teaching and learning about an unending array of objects and ideas.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that families do not socialize children in a vacuum. Many social factors impact how a family raises its children. For example, we can use sociological imagination to recognize that individual behaviours are affected by the historical period in which they take place. Sixty years ago, it would not have been considered especially strict for a father to hit his son with a wooden spoon or a belt if he misbehaved, but today that same action might be considered child abuse.

Sociologists recognize that race, social class, religion, and other societal factors play an important role in socialization. For example, poor families usually emphasize obedience and conformity when raising their children, while wealthy families emphasize judgment and creativity (National Opinion Research Center 2008). This may be because working-class parents have less education and more repetitive-task jobs for which the ability to follow rules and to conform helps. Wealthy parents tend to have better educations and often work in managerial positions or in careers that require creative problem solving, so they teach their children behaviours that would be beneficial in these positions. This means that children are effectively socialized and raised to take the types of jobs that their parents already have, thus reproducing the class system (Kohn 1977). Likewise, children are socialized to abide by gender norms, perceptions of race, and class-related behaviours.

In Sweden, for instance, stay-at-home fathers are an accepted part of the social landscape. A government policy provides subsidized time off work—68 weeks for families with newborns at 80 percent of regular earnings—with the option of 52 of those weeks of paid leave being shared between both mothers and fathers, and eight weeks each in addition allocated for the father and the mother. This encourages fathers to spend at least eight weeks at home with their newborns (Marshall 2008). As one stay-at-home dad says, being home to take care of his baby son “is a real fatherly thing to do. I think that’s very masculine” (Associated Press 2011). Overall 90 percent of men participate in the paid leave program. In Canada on the other hand, outside of Quebec, parents can share 35 weeks of paid parental leave at 55 percent of their regular earnings. Only 10 percent of men participate. In Quebec, however, where in addition to 32 weeks of shared parental leave, men also receive five weeks of paid leave, the participation rate of men is 48 percent. In Canada overall, the participation of men in paid parental leave increased from 3 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2006 because of the change in law in 2001 that extended the number of combined paid weeks parents could take. Researchers note that a father’s involvement in child raising has a positive effect on the parents’ relationship, the father’s personal growth, and the social, emotional, physical and cognitive development of children (Marshall 2008). How will this effect differ in Sweden and Canada as a result of the different nature of their paternal leave policies?

Peer Groups

A peer group is made up of people who are similar in age and social status and who share interests. Peer group socialization begins in the earliest years, such as when kids on a playground teach younger children the norms about taking turns or the rules of a game or how to shoot a basket. As children grow into teenagers, this process continues. Peer groups are important to adolescents in a new way, as they begin to develop an identity separate from their parents and exert independence. Additionally, peer groups provide their own opportunities for socialization since kids usually engage in different types of activities with their peers than they do with their families. Peer groups provide adolescents’ first major socialization experience outside the realm of their families. Interestingly, studies have shown that although friendships rank high in adolescents’ priorities, this is balanced by parental influence.

Institutional Agents

The social institutions of our culture also inform our socialization. Formal institutions—like schools, workplaces, and the government—teach people how to behave in and navigate these systems. Other institutions, like the media, contribute to socialization by inundating us with messages about norms and expectations.

Most Canadian children spend about seven hours a day, 180 days a year, in school, which makes it hard to deny the importance school has on their socialization. In elementary and junior high, compulsory education amounts to over 8,000 hours in the classroom (OECD 2013). Students are not only in school to study math, reading, science, and other subjects—the manifest function of this system. Schools also serve a latent function in society by socializing children into behaviours like teamwork, following a schedule, and using textbooks.

School and classroom rituals, led by teachers serving as role models and leaders, regularly reinforce what society expects from children. Sociologists describe this aspect of schools as the hidden curriculum , the informal teaching done by schools.

For example, in North America, schools have built a sense of competition into the way grades are awarded and the way teachers evaluate students. Students learn to evaluate themselves within a hierarchical system as “A,” “B,” “C,” etc. students (Bowles and Gintis 1976). However, different “lessons” can be taught by different instructional techniques. When children participate in a relay race or a math contest, they learn that there are winners and losers in society. When children are required to work together on a project, they practise teamwork with other people in cooperative situations. Bowles and Gintis argue that the hidden curriculum prepares children for a life of conformity in the adult world. Children learn how to deal with bureaucracy, rules, expectations, waiting their turn, and sitting still for hours during the day. The latent functions of competition, teamwork, classroom discipline, time awareness and dealing with bureaucracy are features of the hidden curriculum.

Schools also socialize children by teaching them overtly about citizenship and nationalism. In the United States, children are taught to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Most districts require classes about U.S. history and geography. In Canada, on the other hand, critics complain that students do not learn enough about national history, which undermines the development of a sense of shared national identity (Granatstein 1998). Textbooks in Canada are also continually scrutinized and revised to update attitudes toward the different cultures in Canada as well as perspectives on historical events; thus, children are socialized to a different national or world history than earlier textbooks may have done. For example, information about the mistreatment of First Nations more accurately reflects those events than in textbooks of the past. In this regard, schools educate students explicitly about aspects of citizenship important for being able to participate in a modern, heterogeneous culture.

Making Connections: the Big Pictures

Controversial textbooks.

On August 13, 2001, 20 South Korean men gathered in Seoul. Each chopped off one of his own fingers because of textbooks. These men took drastic measures to protest eight middle school textbooks approved by Tokyo for use in Japanese middle schools. According to the Korean government (and other East Asian nations), the textbooks glossed over negative events in Japan’s history at the expense of other Asian countries (The Telegraph  2001) .

In the early 1900s, Japan was one of Asia’s more aggressive nations. Korea was held as a colony by the Japanese between 1910 and 1945. Today, Koreans argue that the Japanese are whitewashing that colonial history through these textbooks. One major criticism is that they do not mention that, during World War II, the Japanese forced Korean women into sexual slavery. The textbooks describe the women as having been “drafted” to work, a euphemism that downplays the brutality of what actually occurred. Some Japanese textbooks dismiss an important Korean independence demonstration in 1919 as a “riot.” In reality, Japanese soldiers attacked peaceful demonstrators, leaving roughly 6,000 dead and 15,000 wounded (Crampton 2002).

Although it may seem extreme that people are so enraged about how events are described in a textbook that they would resort to dismemberment, the protest affirms that textbooks are a significant tool of socialization in state-run education systems.

The Workplace

Just as children spend much of their day at school, most Canadian adults at some point invest a significant amount of time at a place of employment. Although socialized into their culture since birth, workers require new socialization into a workplace, both in terms of material culture (such as how to operate the copy machine) and nonmaterial culture (such as whether it is okay to speak directly to the boss or how the refrigerator is shared).

Different jobs require different types of socialization. In the past, many people worked a single job until retirement. Today, the trend is to switch jobs at least once a decade. Between the ages of 18 and 44, the average baby boomer of the younger set held 11 different jobs (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010). This means that people must become socialized to, and socialized by, a variety of work environments.

While some religions may tend toward being an informal institution, this section focuses on practices related to formal institutions. Religion is an important avenue of socialization for many people. Canada is full of synagogues, temples, churches, mosques, and similar religious communities where people gather to worship and learn. Like other institutions, these places teach participants how to interact with the religion’s material culture (like a mezuzah, a prayer rug, or a communion wafer). For some people, important ceremonies related to family structure—like marriage and birth—are connected to religious celebrations. Many of these institutions uphold gender norms and contribute to their enforcement through socialization. From ceremonial rites of passage that reinforce the family unit, to power dynamics which reinforce gender roles, religion fosters a shared set of socialized values that are passed on through society.

 Government

Although we do not think about it, many of the rites of passage people go through today are based on age norms established by the government. To be defined as an “adult” usually means being 18 years old, the age at which a person becomes legally responsible for themselves. And 65 is the start of “old age” since most people become eligible for senior benefits at that point.

Each time we embark on one of these new categories—senior, adult, taxpayer—we must be socialized into this new role. Seniors, for example, must learn the ropes of obtaining pension benefits. This government program marks the points at which we require socialization into a new category.

Mass media refers to the distribution of impersonal information to a wide audience, via television, newspapers, radio, and the internet. With the average person spending over four hours a day in front of the TV (and children averaging even more screen time), media greatly influences social norms (Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout 2005). People learn about objects of material culture (like new technology and transportation options), as well as nonmaterial culture—what is true (beliefs), what is important (values), and what is expected (norms).

Girls and Movies

Pixar is one of the largest producers of children’s movies in the world and has released large box office draws, such as Toy Story , Cars , The Incredibles , and Up . What Pixar has never before produced is a movie with a female lead role. This changed with Pixar’s movie Brave  in 2012. Before Brave , women in Pixar served as supporting characters and love interests. In Up , for example, the only human female character dies within the first 10 minutes of the film. For the millions of girls watching Pixar films, there are few strong characters or roles for them to relate to. If they do not see possible versions of themselves, they may come to view women as secondary to the lives of men.

The animated films of Pixar’s parent company, Disney, have many female lead roles. Disney is well known for films with female leads, such as Snow White , Cinderella , The Little Mermaid , and Mulan . Many of Disney’s movies star a female, and she is nearly always a princess figure. If she is not a princess to begin with, she typically ends the movie by marrying a prince or, in the case of Mulan, a military general. Although not all “princesses” in Disney movies play a passive role in their lives, they typically find themselves needing to be rescued by a man, and the happy ending they all search for includes marriage.

Alongside this prevalence of princesses, many parents are expressing concern about the culture of princesses that Disney has created. Peggy Orenstein addresses this problem in her popular book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter . Orenstein wonders why every little girl is expected to be a “princess” and why pink has become an all-consuming obsession for many young girls. Another mother wondered what she did wrong when her three-year-old daughter refused to do “non-princessy” things, including running and jumping. The effects of this princess culture can have negative consequences for girls throughout life. An early emphasis on beauty and sexiness can lead to eating disorders, low self-esteem, and risky sexual behaviour among older girls.

What should we expect from Pixar’s Brave , the first starring a female character? Although Brave features a female lead, she is still a princess. Will this film offer any new type of role model for young girls? (Barnes 2010; O’Connor 2011; Rose 2011).

5.4. Socialization Across the Life Course

Socialization isn’t a one-time or even a short-term event. We are not “stamped” by some socialization machine as we move along a conveyor belt and thereby socialized once and for all. In fact, socialization is a lifelong process.

In Canada, socialization throughout the life course is determined greatly by age norms and “time-related rules and regulations” (Setterson 2002). As we grow older, we encounter age-related transition points that require socialization into a new role, such as becoming school age, entering the workforce, or retiring. For example, the Canadian government mandates that all children attend school. Child labour laws, enacted in the early 20th century, nationally declared that childhood be a time of learning, not of labour. In countries such as Niger and Sierra Leone, however, child labour remains common and socially acceptable, with little legislation to regulate such practices (UNICEF 2011).

Gap Year: How Different Societies Socialize Young Adults

Have you ever heard of gap year? It’s a common custom in British society. When teens finish their secondary schooling (i.e., high school), they often take a year “off” before entering college. Frequently, they might take a job, travel, or find other ways to experience another culture. Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, spent his gap year practising survival skills in Belize, teaching English in Chile, and working on a dairy farm in the United Kingdom (Prince of Wales 2012a). His brother, Prince Harry, advocated for AIDS orphans in Africa and worked as a jackeroo (a novice ranch hand) in Australia (Prince of Wales 2012b).

In Canada, this life transition point is socialized quite differently, and taking a year off is generally frowned on. Instead, Canadian youth are encouraged to pick career paths by their mid-teens, to select a university or college and a major by their late teens, and to have completed all university schooling or technical training for their career by their early 20s.

In other nations, this phase of the life course is tied into conscription, a term that describes compulsory military service. Egypt, Austria, Switzerland, Turkey, and Singapore all have this system in place. Youth in these nations (often only the males) are expected to undergo a number of months or years of military training and service.

How might your life be different if you lived in one of these other countries? Can you think of similar social norms—related to life age-transition points—that vary from country to country?

Many of life’s social expectations are made clear and enforced on a cultural level. Through interacting with others and watching others interact, the expectation to fulfill roles becomes clear. While in elementary or middle school, the prospect of having a boyfriend or girlfriend may have been considered undesirable. The socialization that takes place in high school changes the expectation. By observing the excitement and importance attached to dating and relationships within the high school social scene, it quickly becomes apparent that one is now expected not only to be a child and a student, but a significant other as well. Graduation from formal education—high school, vocational school, or college—involves socialization into a new set of expectations.

Educational expectations vary not only from culture to culture, but from class to class. While middle- or upper-class families may expect their daughter or son to attend a four-year university after graduating from high school, other families may expect their child to immediately begin working full-time, as many within their family have done before.

The Long Road to Adulthood for Millennials

Millennials, sometimes also called Gen Y, is a term that describes the generation born during the early 1980s to early 1990s. They are the generation that is currently between the ages of 18 and 33. While the recession was in full swing, many were in the process of entering, attending, or graduating from high school and college. With employment prospects at historical lows, large numbers of graduates were unable to find work, sometimes moving back in with their parents and struggling to pay back student loans.

According to the New York Times , this economic stall is causing the Millennials to postpone what most North Americans consider to be adulthood: “The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary … jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life” (Henig 2010).

• 30 percent of Millennials find it difficult to support themselves on their low wages
• 44 percent find it difficult to pay for their education
• 38 percent are strapped by loan payments
• 51 percent still live with their parents
• 90 percent feel overwhelmed and experience excessive stress (Tsintziras 2013)

The five milestones, Henig writes, that define adulthood, are “completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying, and having a child” (Henig 2010). These social milestones are taking longer for Millennials to attain, if they’re attained at all. Sociologists wonder what long-term impact this generation’s situation may have on society as a whole.

In the process of socialization, adulthood brings a new set of challenges and expectations, as well as new roles to fill. As the aging process moves forward, social roles continue to evolve. Pleasures of youth, such as wild nights out and serial dating, become less acceptable in the eyes of society. Responsibility and commitment are emphasized as pillars of adulthood, and men and women are expected to “settle down.” During this period, many people enter into marriage or a civil union, bring children into their families, and focus on a career path. They become partners or parents instead of students or significant others.

Just as young children pretend to be doctors or lawyers, play house, and dress up, adults also engage anticipatory socialization , the preparation for future life roles. Examples would include a couple who cohabitate before marriage, or soon-to-be parents who read infant care books and prepare their home for the new arrival. As part of anticipatory socialization, adults who are financially able begin planning for their retirement, saving money and looking into future health care options. The transition into any new life role, despite the social structure that supports it, can be difficult.

Socialization is ongoing throughout adulthood in another sense as well. The study of contemporary society reveals an increasing fluidity of roles, as opposed to previous eras when one could expect to be married only once, live in one location, or to have a single career. This experience is part of what Zygmunt Bauman has called liquid modernity . As opposed to previous eras when one could expect to have a career that spanned one’s entire working life, the expectation today is that the individual will experience an increasing fluidity of roles. It is more difficult to view socialization as a smooth and uninterrupted process. Rather, life is increasingly fragmented, “cut into a succession of ill-connected episodes” (Bauman 2004). As a result, social identities have become more flexible , more adaptable to unpredictable transitions, and more open to taking on new roles or picking and choosing from a globalized palette of cultural values and practices.

Resocialization

In the process of resocialization , old behaviours that were helpful in a previous role are removed because they are no longer of use. Resocialization is necessary when a person moves to a senior care centre, goes to boarding school, or serves time in jail. In the new environment, the old rules no longer apply. The process of resocialization is typically more stressful than normal socialization because people have to unlearn behaviours that have become customary to them.

The most common way resocialization occurs is in a total institution where people are isolated from society and are forced to follow someone else’s rules. A ship at sea is a total institution, as are religious convents, prisons, or some cult organizations. They are places cut off from a larger society. The 15,000 Canadians who lived in federal prisons or penitentiaries at the end of 2012 are also members of this type of institution (Sapers 2013). As another example, every branch of the military is a total institution.

Many individuals are resocialized into an institution through a two-part process. First, members entering an institution must leave behind their old identity through what is known as a degradation ceremony. In a degradation ceremony , new members lose the aspects of their old identity and are given new identities. The process is sometimes gentle. To enter a senior care home, an elderly person often must leave a family home and give up many belongings which were part of his or her long-standing identity. Though caretakers guide the elderly compassionately, the process can still be one of loss. In many cults, this process is also gentle and happens in an environment of support and caring.

In other situations, the degradation ceremony can be more extreme. Goffman refered to the process of being stripped of ones external identity as a “mortification of the self” (Goffman 1961). New prisoners lose freedom, rights (including the right to privacy), and personal belongings. When entering the army, soldiers have their hair cut short. Their old clothes are removed and they wear matching uniforms. These individuals must give up any markers of their former identity in order to be resocialized into an identity as a “soldier.”

After new members of an institution are stripped of their old identity, they build a new one that matches the new society. In the military, soldiers go through basic training together, where they learn new rules and bond with one another. They follow structured schedules set by their leaders. Soldiers must keep their areas clean for inspection, learn to march in correct formations, and salute when in the presence of superiors.

Learning to deal with life after having lived in a total institution requires yet another process of resocialization. In the Canadian military, soldiers learn discipline and a capacity for hard work. They set aside personal goals to achieve a mission, and they take pride in the accomplishments of their units. Many soldiers who leave the military transition these skills into excellent careers. Others find themselves lost upon leaving, uncertain about the outside world, and what to do next. The process of resocialization to civilian life is not a simple one.

anticipatory socialization when we prepare for future life roles

degradation ceremony the process by which new members of a total institution lose aspects of their old identity and are given new ones

game stage   the stage in child development in which children begin to recognize and interact on the basis of fixed norms and roles

generalized other the common behavioural expectations of general society

hidden curriculum the informal teaching done in schools that socializes children to societal norms

I and me the two components or phases of the self-reflective self

liquid modernity the fluid and transitory nature of modern life, which is increasingly fragmented and cut into a succession of ill-connected episodes

looking glass self the self or self-image that arises as the reaction to the judgment of others

mass media the distribution of impersonal information to a wide audience via television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet

moral development the way people learn what is “good” and “bad” in society

nature  the influence of our genetic makeup on self development

nurture the role that our social environment plays in self development

peer group a group made up of people who are similar in age and social status and who share interests

play stage a time when children begin to imitate and take on roles that another person might have

preparatory stage a time when children are only capable of imitation and have no ability to imagine how others see things

resocialization the process by which old behaviours are removed and new behaviours are learned in their place

self a person’s distinct sense of identity as developed through social interaction

socialization the process wherein people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values

stages of child socialization the four stages of child development (preparatory, play, game, and generalized other) in which the child develops the capacity to assume social roles

total institution an institution in which members are required to live in isolation from the rest of society

Section Summary

5.1. Theories of Self Development Psychological theories of self development have been broadened by sociologists who explicitly study the role of society and social interaction in self development. Charles Cooley and George Mead both contributed significantly to the sociological understanding of the development of self. Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan developed their ideas further, researching how our sense of morality develops. Gilligan added the dimension of gender differences to Kohlberg’s theory.

5.2. Why Socialization Matters Socialization is important because it helps uphold societies and cultures; it is also a key part of individual development. Research demonstrates that who we are is affected by both nature (our genetic and hormonal makeup) and nurture (the social environment in which we are raised). Sociology is most concerned with the way that society’s influence affects our behaviour patterns, made clear by the way behaviour varies across class and gender.

5.3. Agents of Socialization Our direct interactions with social groups, like families and peers, teach us how others expect us to behave. Likewise, a society’s formal and informal institutions socialize its population. Schools, workplaces, and the media communicate and reinforce cultural norms and values.

5.4. Socialization across the Life Course Socialization is a lifelong process recurring as we enter new phases of life, such as adulthood or senior age. Resocialization is a process that removes the socialization we have developed over time and replaces it with newly learned rules and roles. Because it involves removing old habits that have been built up, resocialization can be a stressful and difficult process.

Section Quiz

5.1. Theories of Self Development 1. Socialization, as a sociological term, describes:

• how people interact during social situations
• how people learn societal norms, beliefs, and values
• a person’s internal mental state when in a group setting
• the difference between introverts and extroverts

2. The Harlows’ study on rhesus monkeys showed that:

• rhesus monkeys raised by other primate species are poorly socialized
• monkeys can be adequately socialized by imitating humans
• food is more important than social comfort
• social comfort is more important than food

3. What occurs in Lawrence Kohlberg’s conventional level?

• Children develop the ability to have abstract thoughts.
• Morality is developed by pain and pleasure.
• Children begin to consider what society considers moral and immoral.
• Parental beliefs have no influence on children’s morality.

4. What did Carol Gilligan believe earlier researchers into morality had overlooked?

• The justice perspective
• Sympathetic reactions to moral situations
• The perspective of females
• How social environment affects how morality develops

5. What is one way to distinguish between psychology and sociology?

• Psychology focuses on the mind, while sociology focuses on society.
• Psychologists are interested in mental health, while sociologists are interested in societal functions.
• Psychologists look inward to understand behaviour while sociologists look outward.
• All of the above.

6. How did nearly complete isolation as a child affect Danielle’s verbal abilities?

• She could not communicate at all.
• She never learned words, but she did learn signs.
• She could not understand much, but she could use gestures.
• She could understand and use basic language like “yes” and “no.”

5.2. Why Socialization Matters 7. Why do sociologists need to be careful when drawing conclusions from twin studies?

• The results do not apply to singletons.
• The twins were often raised in different ways.
• The twins may turn out to actually be fraternal.
• The sample sizes are often small.

8. From a sociological perspective, which factor does not greatly influence a person’s socialization?

9. Chris Langan’s story illustrates that:

• children raised in one-parent households tend to have higher IQs
• intelligence is more important than socialization
• socialization can be more important than intelligence
• neither socialization nor intelligence affects college admissions

5.3. Agents of Socialization 10. Why are wealthy parents more likely than poor parents to socialize their children toward creativity and problem solving?

• Wealthy parents are socializing their children toward the skills of white-collar employment.
• Wealthy parents are not concerned about their children rebelling against their rules.
• Wealthy parents never engage in repetitive tasks.
• Wealthy parents are more concerned with money than with a good education.

11. How do schools prepare children to one day enter the workforce?

• with a standardized curriculum
• through the hidden curriculum
• by socializing them in teamwork
• all of the above

12. Which one of the following is not a way people are socialized by religion?

• People learn the material culture of their religion.
• Life stages and roles are connected to religious celebration.
• An individual’s personal internal experience of a divine being leads to their faith.
• Places of worship provide a space for shared group experiences.

13. Which of the following is a manifest function of schools?

• understanding when to speak up and when to be silent
• learning to read and write
• following a schedule
• knowing locker room etiquette

14. Which of the following is typically the earliest agent of socialization?

5.4. Socialization across the Life Course 15. Which of the following is not an age-related transition point when Canadians must be socialized to new roles?

• Senior citizen

16. Which of the following is true regarding Canadian socialization of recent high school graduates?

• They are expected to take a year “off” before college.
• They are required to serve in the military for one year.
• They are expected to enter college, trade school, or the workforce shortly after graduation.
• They are required to move away from their parents.

Short Answer

• Think of a current issue or pattern that a sociologist might study. What types of questions would the sociologist ask, and what research methods might he or she employ? Now consider the questions and methods a psychologist might use to study the same issue. Comment on their different approaches.
• Explain why it’s important to conduct research using both male and female participants. What sociological topics might show gender differences? Provide some examples to illustrate your ideas.
• Why are twin studies an important way to learn about the relative effects of genetics and socialization on children? What questions about human development do you believe twin studies are best for answering? For what types of questions would twin studies not be as helpful?
• Why do you think that people like Chris Langan continue to have difficulty even after they are helped through societal systems? What is it they’ve missed that prevents them from functioning successfully in the social world?
• Do you think it is important that parents discuss gender roles with their young children, or is gender a topic better left for later? How do parents consider gender norms when buying their children books, movies, and toys? How do you believe they should consider it?
• Based on your observations, when are adolescents more likely to listen to their parents or to their peer groups when making decisions? What types of dilemmas lend themselves toward one social agent over another?
• Consider a person who is moving into residence, or attending university or boarding school, or even a child beginning kindergarten. How is the process the student goes through a form of socialization? What new cultural behaviours must the student adapt to?
• Do you think resocialization requires a total institution? Why or why not? Can you think of any other ways someone could be resocialized?

Further Research

5.1. Theories of Self Development Lawrence Kohlberg was most famous for his research using moral dilemmas. He presented dilemmas to boys and asked them how they would judge the situations. Visit http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Dilemma to read about Kohlberg’s most famous moral dilemma, known as the Heinz dilemma.

5.2. Why Socialization Matters Learn more about five other sets of twins who grew up apart and discovered each other later in life at http://openstaxcollege.org/l/twins

5.3. Agents of Socialization Most societies expect parents to socialize children into gender norms. See the controversy surrounding one Canadian couple’s refusal to do so at http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Baby-Storm

5.4. Socialization across the Life Course Homelessness is an endemic problem among veterans. Many soldiers leave the military or return from war and have difficulty resocializing into civilian life. Learn more about this problem at http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Veteran-Homelessness or http://openstaxcollege.org/l/NCHV

5. Introduction to Socialization DeGregory, Lane. 2008. “The Girl in the Window.” St. Petersburg Times , July 31. Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece ).

Harlow, Harry F. 1971. Learning to Love . New York: Ballantine.

Harlow, Harry F. and Margaret Kuenne Harlow. 1962. “Social Deprivation in Monkeys.” Scientific American November:137–46.

5.1. Theories of Self Development Bloom, Lisa. 2011. “How to Talk to Little Girls.” Huffington Post , June 22. Retrieved January 12, 2012 ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html ).

Cooley, Charles Horton. 1902. “The Looking Glass Self.” Pp. 179–185 in Human Nature and Social Order . New York: Scribner’s.

Durkheim, Émile. 2011 [1897]. Suicide . London: Routledge.

Erikson, Erik. 1963. Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Freud, Sigmund. 2000 [1905]. Three Essays on Theories of Sexuality . New York: Basic Books.

Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gilligan, Carol. 1990. Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Haney, Phil. 2011. “Genderless Preschool in Sweden.” Baby & Kids , June 28. Retrieved January 12, 2012 ( http://www.neatorama.com/2011/06/28/genderless-preschool-in-sweden ).

Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages . New York: Harper and Row.

Lasch, Christopher. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. Norton and Co.

Mead, George H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society , edited by C. W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Piaget, Jean. 1954. The Construction of Reality in the Child . New York: Basic Books.

5.2. Why Socialization Matters Brabham, Denis. 2001. “The Smart Guy.” Newsday , August 21. Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Press/TheSmartGuy.pdf ).

Brym, Robert, Lance W. Roberts, John Lie, and Steven Rytina. 2013. Sociology: Your Compass for a New World, 4th ed. Toronto: Nelson.

Carey, Nessa. 2012. The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance. New York: Columbia University Press.

Flam, Faye. 2007. “Separated Twins Shed Light on Identity Issues.” The Philadelphia Inquirer , December 9. Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Press/TheSmartGuy.pdf ).

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2008. “The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 2.” Outliers: The Story of Success . New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Spratling, Cassandra. 2007. “Nature and Nurture.” Detroit Free Press . November 25. Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://articles.southbendtribune.com/2007-11-25/news/26786902_1_twins-adoption-identical-strangers ).

Sternberg, R.J., G.B. Forsythe, J. Hedlund, J. Horvath, S. Snook, W.M. Williams, R.K. Wagner, and E.L. Grigorenko. 2000. Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life . New York: Cambridge University Press.

5.3. Agents of Socialization Associated Press. 2011. “Swedish Dads Swap Work for Child Care.” The Gainesville Sun, October 23. Retrieved January 12, 2012 ( http://www.gainesville.com/article/20111023/wire/111029834?template=printpicart ).

Barnes, Brooks. 2010. “Pixar Removes Its First Female Director.” The New York Times , December 20. Retrieved August 2, 2011 ( http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/first-woman-to-direct-a-pixar-film-is-instead-first-to-be-replaced/?ref=arts ).

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1976. Schooling in Capitalistic America: Educational Reforms and the Contradictions of Economic Life . New York: Basic Books.

Crampton, Thomas. 2002. “The Ongoing Battle over Japan’s Textbooks.” New York Times, February 12. Retrieved August 2, 2011 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/12/news/12iht-rtexts_ed3_.html ).

Granatstein, J.L. 1998. Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: HarperCollins.

Kohn, Melvin L. 1977. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values . Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.

Marshall, Katherine. 2008. “Fathers’ use of paid parental leave.” Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 75-001-X. Retrieved February 23, 2014 ( http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2008106/pdf/10639-eng.pdf ).

National Opinion Research Center. 2008. General Social Surveys, 1972–2006: Cumulative Codebook . Chicago: National Opinion Research Center.

O’Connor, Lydia. 2011. “The Princess Effect: Are Girls Too ‘Tangled’ in Disney’s Fantasy?” Annenberg Digital News , January 26. Retrieved August 2, 2011 ( http://www.neontommy.com/news/2011/01/princess-effect-are-girls-too-tangled-disneys-fantasy ).

OECD. 2013. Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators . OECD Publishing. Retrieved February 23, 2014 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2013-en ).

Roberts, Donald F., Ulla G. Foehr, and Victoria Rideout. 2005. “Parents, Children, and Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey.” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Retrieved February 14, 2012 ( http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7638.pdf ).

Rose, Steve. 2011. “Studio Ghibli: Leave the Boys Behind.” The Guardian , July 14. Retrieved August 2, 2011 ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/14/studio-ghibli-arrietty-heroines ).

The Telegraph . 2001. “South Koreans Sever Fingers in Anti-Japan Protest.”  Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1337272/South-Koreans-sever-fingers-in-anti-Japan-protest.html ).

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2010. “Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth Among the Youngest Baby Boomers.” September 10. Retrieved January 31, 2012 ( http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf ).

5.4. Socialization across the Life Course Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Goffman, Irving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books.

Henig, Robin Marantz. 2010. “What Is It About Twenty-Somethings?” New York Times , August 18. Retrieved December 28, 2011 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1325202682-VVzEPjqlYdkfmWonoE3Spg ).

Prince of Wales. 2012a. “Duke of Cambridge, Gap Year.” Retrieved January 26, 2012 ( http://www.dukeandduchessofcambridge.org/the-duke-of-cambridge/biography ).

Prince of Wales. 2012b. “Prince Harry, Gap Year.” Retrieved January 26, 2012 ( http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/personalprofiles/princeharry/biography/gapyear/index.html ).

Sapers, Howard. 2013. Annual Report of the Correctional Investigator: 2012-2013. The Correctional Investigator Canada. Retrieved February 23, 2014 ( http://www.oci-bec.gc.ca/cnt/rpt/pdf/annrpt/annrpt20122013-eng.pdf ).

Setterson, Richard A., Jr. 2002. “Socialization in the Life Course: New Frontiers in Theory and Research.” New Frontiers in Socialization, Vol. 7 . Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tsintziras, Aya. 2013. “Millennials and Anxiety: Is Generation Y Anxious?” Huffington Post. July 26. Retrieved February 23, 2014 ( http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/26/millenials-and-anxiety_n_3652976.html ).

UNICEF. 2011. “Percentage of Children Aged 5–14 Engaged in Child Labour.” Retrieved December 28, 2011 ( http://www.childinfo.org/labour_countrydata.php ).

Solutions to Section Quiz

1. B | 2. D | 3. C | 4. C | 5. D | 6. A | 7. D | 8. C | 9. C | 10. A | 11. D | 12. C | 13. B | 14. B | 15. A | 16. C

Image Attributions

Figure 5.8. Prince William by Alexandre Goulet (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2007_WSJ_Prince_William.jpg) used Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

Introduction to Sociology - 1st Canadian Edition Copyright © 2014 by William Little and Ron McGivern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Module 4: Socialization

The importance of socialization, learning outcomes.

• Explain the importance of socialization both for individuals and society
• Distinguish nature from nurture in socialization

Socialization  is the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values.  Socialization  is not the same as  socializing  (interacting with others, like family and friends); to be precise, it is a sociological process that occurs through socializing.

While Noel’s story from the beginning of the module is about a relatively advanced stage of life, socialization is crucial for early childhood. Even the most basic of human activities are learned. Learning to crawl and then walk are major milestones, but as any parent, guardian, or family member of a toddler knows, other minor accomplishments can be life-altering for the child: climbing stairs, safely getting out of bed, sitting in a regular chair, and drinking from a regular cup. Likewise, family behaviors and values must be learned, sometimes through observation and sometimes through active instruction. Thus, sociologists have also long been fascinated by circumstances in which a child receives sufficient human support to survive, but virtually no social interaction—because they highlight how much we depend on social interaction to provide the information and skills we need to be part of society or even to develop a “self.”

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live.  As individuals, social interaction provides us the means by which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we learn who we are and how we fit into the larger world. In addition, to function successfully in society, we have to learn the basics of both material and nonmaterial culture, everything from how to dress ourselves to what’s suitable attire for a specific occasion; from when we sleep to what we sleep on; and from what’s considered appropriate to eat for dinner and even how to use the stove to prepare it. Most importantly, we have to learn language—whether it’s the dominant language or one common in a subculture, whether it’s verbal or through signs—in order to communicate and to think. Without socialization we have no commonly recognizable sense of self.

For society to function, the socialization of individuals is necessary. Although how this occurs and what is transmitted in terms of cultural norms and values differs, every society relies upon socialization to ensure its survival. A core value in the United States is democracy, so children in the U.S. might hear about voting or go to vote with their families before they even begin school. Once in school, they will learn about American history, civics, and citizenship. Students also learn the ways that the U.S. has not upheld democratic ideals and has disenfranchised various groups of people. Thus, in addition to voting and learning how to use material objects such as voting machines, children also learn about various social movements and leaders who resisted the existing social norms in order to facilitate change. Learning about how society has failed to live up to its ideals (and continues to struggle in certain areas) helps citizens not only to understand values and norms on a personal level, but also to see the importance of values and norms in society, as well as how these can change over time. Remember that socialization is a lifelong process, so in our example, people will continue to examine whether or not the U.S. is living up to its democratic ideals over many years.

Watch this video to learn more about what it means to be socialized, and what things contribute to socialization. The video provides an effective overview of several concepts related to socialization that will be covered in this module.

Figure 1. Socialization teaches us our society’s expectations for dining out. The manners and customs of different cultures (When can you use your hands to eat? How should you compliment the cook? Who is the “head” of the table?) are learned through socialization. (Photo courtesy of Niyam Bhushan/flickr)

Nature versus Nurture

Some experts argue that who we are is based entirely on genetics or our biological makeup. According to this belief, our temper a ments, interests, and talents are set before birth. From this perspective, who we are depends on nature . Others, including most sociologists, assert that who we are is a result of nurture —the relationships and environments that surround us.

Figure 2. Identical twins may look alike, but their differences can give us clues to the effects of socialization. (Photo courtesy of D. Flam/flickr)

One way researchers attempt to measure the impact of nature is by studying twins. Some studies have followed identical twins who were raised separately. The pairs shared the same genetic inheritance, but in some cases were socialized in different ways. Instances of this situation are rare, but studying the degree to which identical twins raised apart are the same or different can give researchers insight into the way our temperaments, preferences, and abilities are shaped by our genetic makeup versus our social environment.

For example, in 1968 twin girls born to a mentally ill mother were put up for adoption, separated from each other, and raised in different households. The adoptive parents, and certainly the adoptees themselves, did not know the girls were one of five pairs of twins who were made subjects of a scientific study (Flam 2007).

In 2003, the two women, then age thirty-five, were reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein sat together in awe, feeling like they were looking into a mirror. Not only did they look alike but they also behaved alike, using the same hand gestures and facial expressions (Spratling 2007). Studies like these point to the genetic roots of our temperament and behavior.

Learn about the famous twins, Oskar and Jack, who were separated as infants and led strikingly different lives . You can visit the article  “Separated at Birth” to read about five other sets of twins who grew up apart and discovered each other later in life.

Though genetics and hormones play an important role in human behavior, sociology’s larger concern is the effect society has on human behavior–the “nurture” side of the nature-versus-nurture debate. What race were the twins? From what social class were their parents? What about gender? Religion? All these factors affected the lives of the twins as much as their genetic makeup, and are critical to consider as we look at life through the sociological lens.

The Life of Chris Langan, the Smartest Man You’ve Never Heard Of

Bouncer. Firefighter. Factory worker. Cowboy. Chris Langan spent the majority of his adult life just getting by with jobs like these. He had no college degree, few resources, and a past filled with much disappointment. Chris Langan also had an IQ of over 195, nearly 100 points higher than the average person (Brabham 2001). So why didn’t Chris become a neurosurgeon, professor, or aeronautical engineer? According to Macolm Gladwell (2008) in his book Outliers: The Story of Success , Chris didn’t possess the set of social skills necessary to succeed on such a high level—skills that aren’t innate but learned.

Gladwell looked to a recent study conducted by sociologist Annette Lareau in which she closely shadowed 12 families from various economic backgrounds and examined their parenting techniques. Parents from lower income families followed a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth,” which is to say they let their children develop on their own with a large amount of independence; parents from higher-income families, however, “actively fostered and accessed a child’s talents, opinions, and skills” (Gladwell 2008). These parents were more likely to engage in analytical conversation, encourage active questioning of the establishment, and foster development of negotiation skills. The parents were also able to introduce their children to a wide range of activities, from sports to music to accelerated academic programs. When one middle-class child was denied entry to a gifted and talented program, the mother petitioned the school and arranged additional testing until her daughter was admitted. Lower-income parents, however, were more likely to unquestioningly obey authorities such as school boards. Their children were not being socialized to comfortably confront the system and speak up (Gladwell 2008).

What does this have to do with Chris Langan, deemed by some the smartest man in the world (Brabham 2001)? Chris was born in severe poverty, moving across the country with an abusive and alcoholic stepfather. His genius went largely unnoticed. After accepting a full scholarship to Reed College, he lost his funding after his mother failed to fill out necessary paperwork. Unable to successfully make his case to the administration, Chris, who had received straight A’s the previous semester, was given F’s on his transcript and forced to drop out. After he enrolled in Montana State, an administrator’s refusal to rearrange his class schedule left him unable to find the means necessary to travel the 16 miles to attend classes. What Chris had in brilliance, he lacked in practical intelligence, or what psychologist Robert Sternberg defines as “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect” (Sternberg et al. 2000). Such knowledge was never part of his socialization.

Chris gave up on school and began working an array of blue-collar jobs, pursuing his intellectual interests on the side. Though he’s recently garnered attention for his “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe,” he remains weary of and resistant to the educational system.

As Gladwell concluded, “He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone” (2008).

Chris is a white male who was born in the United States, though he also faced considerable economic and domestic challenges. How would the story change if our example was a female immigrant, with dark skin? Social class and what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital” are important in directing one’s life chances, but perhaps equally important are race/ethnicity, gender, economic class, and whether one is perceived as an immigrant or a native-born citizen.

Sociologists all recognize the importance of socialization for healthy individual and societal development. But how do scholars working in the three major theoretical paradigms approach this topic?

Structural functionalists would say that socialization is essential to society, both because it trains members to operate successfully within it and because it perpetuates culture by transmitting it to new generations. Without socialization, a society’s culture would destabilize and ultimately perish as members died off.

A conflict theorist might argue that socialization reproduces inequality from generation to generation by conveying different expectations and norms to those with different social characteristics. For example, individuals are socialized differently by gender, social class, and race. As in Chris Langan’s case, this creates different (unequal) opportunities.

An interactionist studying socialization is concerned with face-to-face exchanges and symbolic communication. For example, dressing baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink is one small way we convey messages about differences in gender roles.

Think It Over

• Why are twin studies an important way to learn about the relative effects of genetics and socialization on children? What questions about human development do you believe twin studies are best for answering? For what types of questions would twin studies not be as helpful?
• Why do you think that people like Chris Langan continue to have difficulty even after they are helped through societal systems?  How does this story help you understand the role of nature and the role of nurture? 

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Understanding Socialization in Sociology

Overview and Discussion of a Key Sociological Concept

• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Recommended Reading
• Archaeology
• Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• M.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• B.A., Sociology, Pomona College

Socialization is a process that introduces people to social norms and customs. This process helps individuals function well in society, and, in turn, helps society run smoothly. Family members, teachers, religious leaders, and peers all play roles in a person's socialization.

This process typically occurs in two stages: Primary socialization takes place from birth through adolescence, and secondary socialization continues throughout one's life. Adult socialization may occur whenever people find themselves in new circumstances, especially those in which they interact with individuals whose norms or customs differ from theirs.

The Purpose of Socialization

During socialization, a person learns to become a member of a group, community, or society. This process not only accustoms people to social groups but also results in such groups sustaining themselves. For example, a new sorority member gets an insider's look at the customs and traditions of a Greek organization. As the years pass, the member can apply the information she's learned about the sorority when newcomers join, allowing the group to carry on its traditions.

On a macro level, socialization ensures that we have a process through which the norms and customs of society are transmitted. Socialization teaches people what is expected of them in a particular group or situation; it is a form of social control .

Socialization has numerous goals for youth and adults alike. It teaches children to control their biological impulses, such as using a toilet instead of wetting their pants or bed. The socialization process also helps individuals develop a conscience aligned with social norms and prepares them to perform various roles.

The Socialization Process in Three Parts

Socialization involves both social structure and interpersonal relations. It contains three key parts: context, content and process, and results. Context, perhaps, defines socialization the most, as it refers to culture, language, social structures and one’s rank within them. It also includes history and the roles people and institutions played in the past. One's life context will significantly affect the socialization process. For example, a family's economic class may have a huge impact on how parents socialize their children.

Research has found that parents emphasize the values and behaviors most likely to help children succeed given their station in life. Parents who expect their children to work blue-collar jobs are more likely to emphasize conformity and respect for authority, while those who expect their children to pursue artistic, managerial, or entrepreneurial professions are more likely to emphasize creativity and independence.

Gender stereotypes also exert a strong influence on socialization processes. Cultural expectations for gender roles and gendered behavior are imparted to children through color-coded clothes and types of play. Girls usually receive toys that emphasize physical appearance and domesticity such as dolls or dollhouses, while boys receive playthings that involve thinking skills or call to mind traditionally male professions such as Legos, toy soldiers, or race cars. Additionally, research has shown that girls with brothers are socialized to understand that household labor is expected of them but not of their male siblings. Driving the message home is that girls tend not to receive pay for doing chores, while their brothers do .

Race also plays a factor in socialization. Since White people don't disproportionately experience police violence, they can encourage their children to know their rights and defend them when the authorities try to violate them. In contrast, parents of color must have what's known as "the talk" with their children, instructing them to remain calm, compliant, and safe in the presence of law enforcement.

While context sets the stage for socialization, the content and process constitute the work of this undertaking. How parents assign chores or tell their kids to interact with police are examples of content and process, which are also defined by the duration of socialization, those involved, the methods used, and the type of experience .

School is an important source of socialization for students of all ages. In class, young people receive guidelines related to behavior, authority, schedules, tasks, and deadlines. Teaching this content requires social interaction between educators and students. Typically, rules and expectations are both written and spoken, and student conduct is either rewarded or penalized. As this occurs, students learn behavioral norms suitable for school.

In the classroom, students also learn what sociologists describe as "hidden curricula." In her book "Dude, You're a Fag," sociologist C.J. Pasco revealed the hidden curriculum of gender and sexuality in U.S. high schools. Through in-depth research at a large California school, Pascoe revealed how faculty members and events like pep rallies and dances reinforce rigid gender roles and heterosexism. In particular, the school sent the message that aggressive and hypersexual behaviors are generally acceptable in White boys but threatening in Black ones. Though not an "official" part of the schooling experience, this hidden curriculum tells students what society expects of them based on their gender, race, or class background.

Results are the outcome of socialization and refer to the way a person thinks and behaves after undergoing this process. For example, with small children, socialization tends to focus on control of biological and emotional impulses, such as drinking from a cup rather than from a bottle or asking permission before picking something up. As children mature, the results of socialization include knowing how to wait their turn, obey rules, or organize their days around a school or work schedule. We can see the results of socialization in just about everything, from men shaving their faces to women shaving their legs and armpits.

Stages and Forms of Socialization

Sociologists recognize two stages of socialization: primary and secondary. Primary socialization occurs from birth through adolescence. Caregivers, teachers, coaches, religious figures, and peers guide this process.

Secondary socialization occurs throughout our lives as we encounter groups and situations that were not part of our primary socialization experience. This might include a college experience, where many people interact with members of different populations and learn new norms, values, and behaviors. Secondary socialization also takes place in the workplace or while traveling somewhere new. As we learn about unfamiliar places and adapt to them, we experience secondary socialization.

Meanwhile , group socialization occurs throughout all stages of life. For example, peer groups influence how one speaks and dresses. During childhood and adolescence, this tends to break down along gender lines. It is common to see groups of children of either gender wearing the same hair and clothing styles.

Organizational socialization occurs within an institution or organization to familiarize a person with its norms, values, and practices. This process often unfolds in nonprofits and companies. New employees in a workplace have to learn how to collaborate, meet management's goals, and take breaks in a manner suitable for the company. At a nonprofit, individuals may learn how to speak about social causes in a way that reflects the organization's mission.

Many people also experience anticipatory socialization at some point. This form of socialization is largely self-directed and refers to the steps one takes to prepare for a new role, position, or occupation. This may involve seeking guidance from people who've previously served in the role, observing others currently in these roles, or training for the new position during an apprenticeship. In short, anticipatory socialization transitions people into new roles so they know what to expect when they officially step into them.

Finally, forced socialization takes place in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, military units, and some boarding schools. In these settings, coercion is used to re-socialize people into individuals who behave in a manner fitting of the norms, values, and customs of the institution. In prisons and psychiatric hospitals, this process may be framed as rehabilitation. In the military, however, forced socialization aims to create an entirely new identity for the individual.

Criticism of Socialization

While socialization is a necessary part of society, it also has drawbacks. Since dominant cultural norms, values, assumptions, and beliefs guide the process, it is not a neutral endeavor. This means that socialization may reproduce the prejudices that lead to forms of social injustice and inequality.

Representations of racial minorities in film, television, and advertising tend to be rooted in harmful stereotypes. These portrayals socialize viewers to perceive racial minorities in certain ways and expect particular behaviors and attitudes from them. Race and racism influence socialization processes in other ways too. Research has shown that racial prejudices affect treatment and discipline of students . Tainted by racism, the behavior of teachers socializes all students to have low expectations for youth of color. This kind of socialization results in an over-representation of minority students in remedial classes and an under-representation of them in gifted class. It may also result in these students being punished more harshly for the same kinds of offenses that White students commit, such as talking back to teachers or coming to class unprepared.

While socialization is necessary, it's important to recognize the values, norms, and behaviors this process reproduces. As society's ideas about race, class, and gender evolve, so will the forms of socialization that involve these identity markers.

• What is a Norm? Why Does it Matter?
• The Importance Customs in Society
• What Is Cultural Capital? Do I Have It?
• Introduction to Sociology
• What Is Social Stratification, and Why Does It Matter?
• The Concept of Collective Consciousness
• What Is the Meaning of Globalization in Sociology?
• How to Tell If You've Been Unintentionally Racist
• Sociology of Work and Industry
• Overview of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Sociology
• The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
• Understanding Resocialization in Sociology
• Understanding Diffusion in Sociology
• What Is Gender Socialization? Definition and Examples
• How Gender Differs From Sex
• What Is a Reference Group?

5.2 Why Socialization Matters

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Describe the importance of socialization both for individuals and society
• Explain the nature versus nurture debate

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live. It illustrates how completely intertwined human beings and their social worlds are. First, it is through teaching culture to new members that a society perpetuates itself. If new generations of a society don’t learn its way of life, it ceases to exist. Whatever is distinctive about a culture must be transmitted to those who join it in order for a society to survive. For U.S. culture to continue, for example, children in the United States must learn about cultural values related to democracy: they have to learn the norms of voting, as well as how to use material objects such as voting machines. They may learn these through watching their parents or guardians vote, or, in some schools, by using real machines in student government elections. Of course, some would argue that it’s just as important in U.S. culture for the younger generation to learn the etiquette of eating in a restaurant or the rituals of tailgate parties at football games. In fact, there are many ideas and objects that people in the United States teach children about in hopes of keeping the society’s way of life going through another generation.

Socialization is just as essential to us as individuals. Social interaction provides the means via which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we learn who we are and how we fit into the world around us. In addition, to function successfully in society, we have to learn the basics of both material and nonmaterial culture, everything from how to dress ourselves to what’s suitable attire for a specific occasion; from when we sleep to what we sleep on; and from what’s considered appropriate to eat for dinner to how to use the stove to prepare it. Most importantly, we have to learn language—whether it’s the dominant language or one common in a subculture, whether it’s verbal or through signs—in order to communicate and to think. Without socialization we literally have no self.

Nature versus Nurture

Some experts assert that who we are is a result of nurture —the relationships and caring that surround us. Others argue that who we are is based entirely in genetics. According to this belief, our temperaments, interests, and talents are set before birth. From this perspective, then, who we are depends on nature .

One way researchers attempt to measure the impact of nature is by studying twins. Some studies have followed identical twins who were raised separately. The pairs shared the same genetics but in some cases were socialized in different ways. Instances of this type of situation are rare, but studying the degree to which identical twins raised apart are the same and different can give researchers insight into the way our temperaments, preferences, and abilities are shaped by our genetic makeup versus our social environment.

For example, in 1968, twin girls were put up for adoption, separated from each other, and raised in different households. The adoptive parents, and certainly the babies, did not realize the girls were one of five pairs of twins who were made subjects of a scientific study (Flam 2007).

In 2003, the two women, then age thirty-five, were reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein sat together in awe, feeling like they were looking into a mirror. Not only did they look alike but they also behaved alike, using the same hand gestures and facial expressions (Spratling 2007). Studies like these point to the genetic roots of our temperament and behavior.

Though genetics and hormones play an important role in human behavior, sociology’s larger concern is the effect society has on human behavior, the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate. What race were the twins? From what social class were their parents? What about gender? Religion? All these factors affected the lives of the twins as much as their genetic makeup and are critical to consider as we look at life through the sociological lens.

Big Picture

The life of chris langan, the smartest man you’ve never heard of.

Bouncer. Firefighter. Factory worker. Cowboy. Chris Langan spent the majority of his adult life just getting by with jobs like these. He had no college degree, few resources, and a past filled with much disappointment. Chris Langan also had an IQ of over 195, nearly 100 points higher than the average person (Brabham 2001). So why didn’t Chris become a neurosurgeon, professor, or aeronautical engineer? According to Macolm Gladwell (2008) in his book Outliers: The Story of Success , Chris didn’t possess the set of social skills necessary to succeed on such a high level—skills that aren’t innate but learned.

Gladwell looked to a recent study conducted by sociologist Annette Lareau in which she closely shadowed 12 families from various economic backgrounds and examined their parenting techniques. Parents from lower income families followed a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth,” which is to say they let their children develop on their own with a large amount of independence; parents from higher-income families, however, “actively fostered and accessed a child’s talents, opinions, and skills” (Gladwell 2008). These parents were more likely to engage in analytical conversation, encourage active questioning of the establishment, and foster development of negotiation skills. The parents were also able to introduce their children to a wide range of activities, from sports to music to accelerated academic programs. When one middle-class child was denied entry to a gifted and talented program, the mother petitioned the school and arranged additional testing until her daughter was admitted. Lower-income parents, however, were more likely to unquestioningly obey authorities such as school boards. Their children were not being socialized to comfortably confront the system and speak up (Gladwell 2008).

What does this have to do with Chris Langan, deemed by some the smartest man in the world (Brabham 2001)? Chris was born in severe poverty, moving across the country with an abusive and alcoholic stepfather. His genius went largely unnoticed. After accepting a full scholarship to Reed College, he lost his funding after his mother failed to fill out necessary paperwork. Unable to successfully make his case to the administration, Chris, who had received straight A’s the previous semester, was given F’s on his transcript and forced to drop out. After he enrolled in Montana State, an administrator’s refusal to rearrange his class schedule left him unable to find the means necessary to travel the 16 miles to attend classes. What Chris had in brilliance, he lacked in practical intelligence, or what psychologist Robert Sternberg defines as “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect” (Sternberg et al. 2000). Such knowledge was never part of his socialization.

Chris gave up on school and began working an array of blue-collar jobs, pursuing his intellectual interests on the side. Though he’s recently garnered attention for his “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe,” he remains weary of and resistant to the educational system.

As Gladwell concluded, “He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone” (2008).

Sociologists all recognize the importance of socialization for healthy individual and societal development. But how do scholars working in the three major theoretical paradigms approach this topic? Structural functionalists would say that socialization is essential to society, both because it trains members to operate successfully within it and because it perpetuates culture by transmitting it to new generations. Without socialization, a society’s culture would perish as members died off. A conflict theorist might argue that socialization reproduces inequality from generation to generation by conveying different expectations and norms to those with different social characteristics. For example, individuals are socialized differently by gender, social class, and race. As in Chris Langan's case, this creates different (unequal) opportunities. An interactionist studying socialization is concerned with face-to-face exchanges and symbolic communication. For example, dressing baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink is one small way we convey messages about differences in gender roles.

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The Importance of Socialization

Learning objective.

• Describe why socialization is important for being fully human.
• Explain how extreme isolation and twin studies demonstrate the role of nature versus nurture in human development.
• Identify the different questions functionalists, conflict theorists, and interactionists might ask about the role of socialization in human development.

Why Socialization Matters

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live. It illustrates how completely intertwined human beings and their social worlds are. First, it is through teaching culture to new members that a society perpetuates itself. If new generations of a society don’t learn its way of life, it ceases to exist. Whatever is distinctive about a culture must be transmitted to those who join it in order for a society to survive. For U.S. culture to continue, for example, children in the United States must learn about cultural values related to democracy: they have to learn the norms of voting, as well as how to use material objects such as voting machines. Of course, some would argue that it’s just as important in U.S. culture for the younger generation to learn the etiquette of eating in a restaurant or the rituals of tailgate parties at football games. In fact, there are many ideas and objects that people in the United States teach children about in hopes of keeping the society’s way of life going through another generation.

Socialization is just as essential to us as individuals. Social interaction provides the means via which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we learn who we are and how we fit into the world around us. In addition, to function successfully in society, we have to learn the basics of both material and nonmaterial culture, everything from how to dress ourselves to what’s suitable attire for a specific occasion; from when we sleep to what we sleep on; and from what’s considered appropriate to eat for dinner to how to use the stove to prepare it. Most importantly, we have to learn language—whether it’s the dominant language or one common in a subculture, whether it’s verbal or through signs—in order to communicate and to think. As we saw with Danielle, without socialization we literally have no self.

Nature versus Nurture

Some experts assert that who we are is a result of nurture —the relationships and caring that surround us. Others argue that who we are is based entirely in genetics. According to this belief, our temperaments, interests, and talents are set before birth. From this perspective, then, who we are depends on nature .

One way researchers attempt to measure the impact of nature is by studying twins. Some studies have followed identical twins who were raised separately. The pairs shared the same genetics but in some cases were socialized in different ways. Instances of this type of situation are rare, but studying the degree to which identical twins raised apart are the same and different can give researchers insight into the way our temperaments, preferences, and abilities are shaped by our genetic makeup versus our social environment.

For example, in 1968, twin girls born to a mentally ill mother were put up for adoption, separated from each other, and raised in different households. The adoptive parents, and certainly the babies, did not realize the girls were one of five pairs of twins who were made subjects of a scientific study (Flam 2007).

In 2003, the two women, then age thirty-five, were reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein sat together in awe, feeling like they were looking into a mirror. Not only did they look alike but they also behaved alike, using the same hand gestures and facial expressions (Spratling 2007). Studies like these point to the genetic roots of our temperament and behavior.

Though genetics and hormones play an important role in human behavior, sociology’s larger concern is the effect society has on human behavior, the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate. What race were the twins? From what social class were their parents? What about gender? Religion? All these factors affected the lives of the twins as much as their genetic makeup and are critical to consider as we look at life through the sociological lens.

Extreme Isolation

We have just noted that socialization is how culture is learned, but socialization is also important for another important reason. To illustrate this importance, let’s pretend we find a 6-year-old child who has had almost no human contact since birth. After the child was born, her mother changed her diapers and fed her a minimal diet but otherwise did not interact with her. The child was left alone all day and night for years and never went outside. We now find her at the age of 6. How will her behavior and actions differ from those of the average 6-year-old? Take a moment and write down all the differences you would find.

In no particular order, here is the list you probably wrote. First, the child would not be able to speak; at most, she could utter a few grunts and other sounds. Second, the child would be afraid of us and probably cower in a corner. Third, the child would not know how to play games and interact with us. If we gave her some food and utensils, she would eat with her hands and not know how to use the utensils. Fourth, the child would be unable to express a full range of emotions. For example, she might be able to cry but would not know how to laugh. Fifth, the child would be unfamiliar with, and probably afraid of, our culture’s material objects, including cell phones and televisions. In these and many other respects, this child would differ dramatically from the average 6-year-old youngster in the United States. She would look human, but she would not act human. In fact, in many ways she would act more like a frightened animal than like a young human being, and she would be less able than a typical dog to follow orders and obey commands.

As this example indicates, socialization makes it possible for us to fully function as human beings. Without socialization, we could not have our society and culture. And without social interaction, we could not have socialization. Our example of a socially isolated child was hypothetical, but real-life examples of such children, often called feral children, have unfortunately occurred and provide poignant proof of the importance of social interaction for socialization and of socialization for our ability to function as humans.

One of the most famous feral children was Victor of Aveyron, who was found wandering in the woods in southern France in 1797. He then escaped custody but emerged from the woods in 1800. Victor was thought to be about age 12 and to have been abandoned some years earlier by his parents; he was unable to speak and acted much more like a wild animal than a human child. Victor first lived in an institution and then in a private home. He never learned to speak, and his cognitive and social development eventually was no better than a toddler’s when he finally died at about age 40 (Lane, 1976).

In rare cases, children have grown up in extreme isolation and end up lacking several qualities that make them fully human. This is a photo of Victor of Aveyron, who emerged from the woods in southern France in 1800 after apparently being abandoned by his parents some years earlier. He could not speak, and his cognitive and social skills never advanced beyond those of a small child before he died at the age of 40.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Another such child, found more than about a half-century ago, was called Anna, who “had been deprived of normal contact and had received a minimum of human care for almost the whole of her first six years of life” (Davis, 1940, p. 554). After being shuttled from one residence to another for her first 5 months, Anna ended up living with her mother in her grandfather’s house and was kept in a small, airless room on the second floor because the grandfather was so dismayed by her birth out of wedlock that he hated seeing her. Because her mother worked all day and would go out at night, Anna was alone almost all the time and lived in filth, often barely alive. Her only food in all those years was milk.

When Anna was found at the age of 6, she could not talk or walk or “do anything that showed intelligence” (Davis, 1940, p. 554). She was also extremely undernourished and emaciated. Two years later, she had learned to walk, understand simple commands, feed herself, and remember faces, but she could not talk and in these respects resembled a 1-year-old infant more than the 7-year-old child she really was. By the time she died of jaundice at about age 9, she had acquired the speech of a 2-year-old.

Shortly after Anna was discovered, another girl, called Isabelle, was found in similar circumstances at age 6. She was also born out of wedlock and lived alone with her mother in a dark room isolated from the rest of the mother’s family. Because her mother was mute, Isabelle did not learn to speak, although she did communicate with her mother via some simple gestures. When she was finally found, she acted like a wild animal around strangers, and in other respects she behaved more like a child of 6 months than one of more than 6 years. When first shown a ball, she stared at it, held it in her hand, and then rubbed an adult’s face with it. Intense training afterward helped Isabelle recover, and 2 years later she had reached a normal speaking level for a child her age (Davis, 1940).

These cases of feral children show that extreme isolation—or, to put it another way, lack of socialization—deprives children of the obvious and not-so-obvious qualities that make them human and in other respects retards their social, cognitive, and emotional development. A series of famous experiments by psychologists Harry and Margaret Harlow (1962) reinforced the latter point by showing it to be true of monkeys as well. The Harlows studied rhesus monkeys that had been removed from their mothers at birth; some were raised in complete isolation, while others were given fake mothers made of cloth and wire with which to cuddle. Neither group developed normally, although the monkeys cuddling with the fake mothers fared somewhat better than those that were totally isolated. In general, the monkeys were not able to interact later with other monkeys, and female infants abused their young when they became mothers. The longer their isolation, the more the monkeys’ development suffered. By showing the dire effects of social isolation, the Harlows’ experiment reinforced the significance of social interaction for normal development. Combined with the tragic examples of feral children, their experiments remind us of the critical importance of socialization and social interaction for human society.

Sociologists all recognize the importance of socialization for healthy individual and societal development. But how do scholars working in the three major theoretical paradigms approach this topic? Structural functionalists would say that socialization is essential to society, both because it trains members to operate successfully within it and because it perpetuates culture by transmitting it to new generations. Without socialization, a society’s culture would perish as members died off. A conflict theorist might argue that socialization reproduces inequality from generation to generation by conveying different expectations and norms to those with different social characteristics. For example, individuals are socialized differently by gender, social class, and race. An interactionist studying socialization is concerned with face-to-face exchanges and symbolic communication. For example, dressing baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink is one small way we convey messages about differences in gender roles.

Key Takeaways

• Socialization is the process through which individuals learn their culture and become fully human.
• Unfortunate examples of extreme human isolation illustrate the importance of socialization for children’s social and cognitive development.

Davis, K. (1940). Extreme social isolation of a child. American Journal of Sociology, 45, 554–565.

Harlow, H. F., & Harlow, M. K. (1962). Social deprivation in monkeys. Scientific American, 207, 137–146.

Lane, H. L. (1976). The wild boy of Aveyron . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The process of an individual or group learning the expected norms and customs of a group or society through social interaction.

Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Sociology 101

Socialization ¶

In this lesson, you will learn how the self is connected to social phenomena, such as gender, race, and the media, and how interactions construct them all. You will be acquiring some new analytic tools, including the concepts of socialization and impression management. This lesson presents concepts of self from Freud, Mead, and Cooley; impression management and presentation of the self from Goffman; socialization; statuses and roles; and the social construction of emotions. You will be introduced to a new way of looking at the self—indeed, a new way of looking at your self—that emphasizes the role of the social in creating the individual. And you will be reminded of the reverse: as your society makes you who you are, you have a role (in fact, many roles) to play in shaping your society. The Case Study for this week allows you a chance to analzye how behaviors travel through social networks.

Learning Objectives ¶

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Identify processes of socialization and theories of the self.

Compare socialization agents.

Analyze media content.

Deadlines ¶

Be sure to hand these in before the deadline

InQuizitive Chapter 4 (Thursday at 9:30am)

Bechdel Test Application (Sunday at 10:00pm)

‘ Socialization ’, Chapter 4 in Real World

Class Lecture recording . [Slides](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qsv057p6dcdf85a/05%20Socialization.pptx?dl=1ociological Perspectives)

Social Development

Socialization

Social Interaction & Performance

Questions ¶

If you have any questions at all about what you are supposed to do this week, please remember I am here to help. Reach out any time so we can support your success.

Post it in the Slack #questions channel!

Signup for virtual office hours !

Email me or your TA.

Lesson Keywords ¶

Looking-glass self

Mead’s theory of the self

Generalized other

Thomas theorem

Definition of the situation

Impression management

Frontstage/backstage

Social construction

cooling the mark out

agents of socialization

hidden curriculum

total institutions

resocialization

ascribed status

embodied status

achieved status

master status

role conflict

role strain

emotional work/labor

saturated self

civil inattention

The least you need to know ¶

Theoretical perspectives of the self

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4.1 The Importance of Socialization

Learning objective.

• Describe why socialization is important for being fully human.

We have just noted that socialization is how culture is learned, but socialization is also important for another important reason. To illustrate this importance, let’s pretend we find a 6-year-old child who has had almost no human contact since birth. After the child was born, her mother changed her diapers and fed her a minimal diet but otherwise did not interact with her. The child was left alone all day and night for years and never went outside. We now find her at the age of 6. How will her behavior and actions differ from those of the average 6-year-old? Take a moment and write down all the differences you would find.

In no particular order, here is the list you probably wrote. First, the child would not be able to speak; at most, she could utter a few grunts and other sounds. Second, the child would be afraid of us and probably cower in a corner. Third, the child would not know how to play games and interact with us. If we gave her some food and utensils, she would eat with her hands and not know how to use the utensils. Fourth, the child would be unable to express a full range of emotions. For example, she might be able to cry but would not know how to laugh. Fifth, the child would be unfamiliar with, and probably afraid of, our culture’s material objects, including cell phones and televisions. In these and many other respects, this child would differ dramatically from the average 6-year-old youngster in the United States. She would look human, but she would not act human. In fact, in many ways she would act more like a frightened animal than like a young human being, and she would be less able than a typical dog to follow orders and obey commands.

As this example indicates, socialization makes it possible for us to fully function as human beings. Without socialization, we could not have our society and culture. And without social interaction, we could not have socialization. Our example of a socially isolated child was hypothetical, but real-life examples of such children, often called feral children, have unfortunately occurred and provide poignant proof of the importance of social interaction for socialization and of socialization for our ability to function as humans.

One of the most famous feral children was Victor of Aveyron, who was found wandering in the woods in southern France in 1797. He then escaped custody but emerged from the woods in 1800. Victor was thought to be about age 12 and to have been abandoned some years earlier by his parents; he was unable to speak and acted much more like a wild animal than a human child. Victor first lived in an institution and then in a private home. He never learned to speak, and his cognitive and social development eventually was no better than a toddler’s when he finally died at about age 40 (Lane, 1976).

In rare cases, children have grown up in extreme isolation and end up lacking several qualities that make them fully human. This is a photo of Victor of Aveyron, who emerged from the woods in southern France in 1800 after apparently being abandoned by his parents some years earlier. He could not speak, and his cognitive and social skills never advanced beyond those of a small child before he died at the age of 40.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Another such child, found more than about a half-century ago, was called Anna, who “had been deprived of normal contact and had received a minimum of human care for almost the whole of her first six years of life” (Davis, 1940, p. 554). After being shuttled from one residence to another for her first 5 months, Anna ended up living with her mother in her grandfather’s house and was kept in a small, airless room on the second floor because the grandfather was so dismayed by her birth out of wedlock that he hated seeing her. Because her mother worked all day and would go out at night, Anna was alone almost all the time and lived in filth, often barely alive. Her only food in all those years was milk.

When Anna was found at the age of 6, she could not talk or walk or “do anything that showed intelligence” (Davis, 1940, p. 554). She was also extremely undernourished and emaciated. Two years later, she had learned to walk, understand simple commands, feed herself, and remember faces, but she could not talk and in these respects resembled a 1-year-old infant more than the 7-year-old child she really was. By the time she died of jaundice at about age 9, she had acquired the speech of a 2-year-old.

Shortly after Anna was discovered, another girl, called Isabelle, was found in similar circumstances at age 6. She was also born out of wedlock and lived alone with her mother in a dark room isolated from the rest of the mother’s family. Because her mother was mute, Isabelle did not learn to speak, although she did communicate with her mother via some simple gestures. When she was finally found, she acted like a wild animal around strangers, and in other respects she behaved more like a child of 6 months than one of more than 6 years. When first shown a ball, she stared at it, held it in her hand, and then rubbed an adult’s face with it. Intense training afterward helped Isabelle recover, and 2 years later she had reached a normal speaking level for a child her age (Davis, 1940).

These cases of feral children show that extreme isolation—or, to put it another way, lack of socialization—deprives children of the obvious and not-so-obvious qualities that make them human and in other respects retards their social, cognitive, and emotional development. A series of famous experiments by psychologists Harry and Margaret Harlow (1962) reinforced the latter point by showing it to be true of monkeys as well. The Harlows studied rhesus monkeys that had been removed from their mothers at birth; some were raised in complete isolation, while others were given fake mothers made of cloth and wire with which to cuddle. Neither group developed normally, although the monkeys cuddling with the fake mothers fared somewhat better than those that were totally isolated. In general, the monkeys were not able to interact later with other monkeys, and female infants abused their young when they became mothers. The longer their isolation, the more the monkeys’ development suffered. By showing the dire effects of social isolation, the Harlows’ experiment reinforced the significance of social interaction for normal development. Combined with the tragic examples of feral children, their experiments remind us of the critical importance of socialization and social interaction for human society.

Key Takeaways

• Socialization is the process through which individuals learn their culture and become fully human.
• Unfortunate examples of extreme human isolation illustrate the importance of socialization for children’s social and cognitive development.

For Your Review

• Do you agree that effective socialization is necessary for an individual to be fully human? Could this assumption imply that children with severe developmental disabilities, who cannot undergo effective socialization, are not fully human?
• Do you know anyone with negative views in regard to race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious preference? If so, how do you think this person acquired these views?

Davis, K. (1940). Extreme social isolation of a child. American Journal of Sociology, 45, 554–565.

Harlow, H. F., & Harlow, M. K. (1962). Social deprivation in monkeys. Scientific American, 207, 137–146.

Lane, H. L. (1976). The wild boy of Aveyron . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3: Socialization and Social Interactions

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This chapter examines several aspects of socialization and social interaction. In so doing it continues developing the sociological perspective addressed by the previous two chapters, as we will again see the ways in which our social environment shapes our thoughts, actions, and life chances.

• 3.1: Prelude to Socialization and Social Interactions Socialization is the term sociologists use to describe the process by which people learn their culture. Socialization occurs in societies big and small, simple and complex, preindustrial and industrial. It happens in the United States, in Brazil, in Saudi Arabia, and in Indonesia. Without socialization we would not learn our culture, and, as the previous chapter indicated, without culture we could not have a society. Socialization, then, is an essential process for any society to be possible.
• 3.2: The Importance of Socialization Socialization is the process through which individuals learn their culture and become fully human. Unfortunate examples of extreme human isolation illustrate the importance of socialization for children’s social and cognitive development.
• 3.3: Agents of Socialization Several institutional and other sources of socialization exist and are called agents of socialization. The first of these, the family, is certainly the most important agent of socialization for infants and young children.
• 3.4: Explaining Socialization Cooley and Mead explained how one’s self-concept and self-image develop. Freud focused on the need to develop a proper balance among the id, ego, and superego. Piaget wrote that cognitive development among children and adolescents occurs from four stages of social interaction. Kohlberg wrote about stages of moral development and emphasized the importance of formal rules, while Gilligan emphasized that girls’ moral development takes into account personal relationships. Erikson’s theory of identit
• 3.5: Resocialization and Total Institutions Some people live in settings where their lives are so controlled that their values and beliefs change drastically. This change is so drastic, in fact, that these people are in effect resocialized. Such resocialization occurs in what Erving Goffman called total institutions. As their name implies, these institutions have total control over the lives of the people who live in them.
• 3.6: Social Interaction If socialization results from our social interaction with others, it is also true that we learn how to interact from our socialization. We have seen many examples of this process in this and previous chapters. Among other things, we learn how far apart to stand when talking to someone else, we learn to enjoy kissing, we learn how to stand and behave in an elevator, and we learn to shake hands when greeting someone.
• 3.S: Socialization and Social Interactions (Summary)

Agents of Socialization: Definition & Examples

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Agents of socialization are the people, groups, and social institutions that affect one’s self-concept, attitudes, and behaviors. For example, parents, teachers, priests, television personalities, rock stars, etc.

Agents of socialization teach people what society expects of them. They tell them what is right and wrong, and they give them the skills they need to function as members of their culture.

• Primary agents of socialization include people with whom we have a close intimate relationship, such as parents, and usually occur when people are very young.
• The family is usually considered the primary agent of socialization , and schools, peer groups, and the mass media are considered secondary socialization agencies.
• Secondary agents of socialization are groups or institutions that influence an individual’s socialization process after or alongside primary agents like family.
• They include secondary relationships (not close, personal, or intimate) and function to “Liberate the individual from a dependence upon the primary attachments and relationships formed within the family group” (Parsons, 1951).
• Unlike primary agents of socialization (such as family and peers), secondary agents are typically less influential in shaping an individual’s fundamental beliefs and values.

What is Socialization?

Socialization is the process of learning the norms and customs of a society. Through socialization, people learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to their culture.

Socialization also helps to ensure that members of a society know and understand the rules that they are expected to follow so that they can function effectively in society or within a particular group (Ochs, 1999).

The process of socialization can happen throughout one’s life, but it is most intense during childhood and adolescence when people are learning about their roles and how to interact with others.

Adult socialization may occur when people find themselves in new circumstances, especially in a culture with norms and customs that differ from theirs.

Several agents of socialization play a role in shaping a person’s identity, including family, media, religion, schools, and peer groups (Ochs, 1999).

The Purpose of Socialization

The purpose of socialization is to teach people the norms and customs of their culture so that they can function within it.

Norms are the rules that dictate how people are expected to behave in a given situation. Customs, meanwhile, are the traditional practices of a culture, such as its values, beliefs, and rituals (Ochs, 1999).

Socialization also helps to instill a sense of social control within members of a society so that they conform to its rules and regulations.

Social control is the process by which a society tries to ensure that its members behave acceptably. It can be done through punishments, rewards, or simply by teaching people what is expected of them. In some cases, social control is necessary to maintain order and prevent chaos.

In other cases, it may be used to protect the interests of those in power or to promote a certain ideology (Ochs, 1999).

Example Agents of Socialization

We normally refer to the people responsible for our socialization as agents of socialization and, by extension, we can also talk about agencies of socialization (such as our family, the education system, the media, and so forth).

Family members can include parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The family is the first and most important agent of socialization for children.

It is through families that people learn about culture and how to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. Families also teach people about language and communication, how to relate to others, and how the world works.

For example, families teach their children the difference between strangers and friends and what is real and imagined (Kinsbury & Scanzoni, 2009).

Race, social class, religion, and other societal factors influence the experiences of families and, as a result, the socialization of children.

Families from some cultures may socialize for obedience and conformity, while those from others may do so for creativity and individualism. Families from different social classes may have different lifestyles and provide their children with different opportunities for learning.

Gender norms, perceptions of race, and class-related behaviors also influence family socialization. For example, countries that provide paternity leave and accept stay-at-home fathers in the social landscape are more likely to socialize male children to be more willing to care for children when they are adults (Kinsbury & Scanzoni, 2009).

Schools are an important secondary agent of socialization. Most students spend most of the day at school, immersing themselves in both academic subjects and behaviors like teamwork, following a schedule, and using textbooks (Durkheim, 1898).

These school rituals reinforce what society expects from children. As Bowles and Gintis (1976) discuss, schools in much of the US and Western Europe instill a sense of competition into the way grades are awarded, and the way teachers evaluate students.

By participating in a race or math contest, children learn that in order to succeed, they must be better than others. This is an important value in capitalist societies , where people are expected to strive for personal gain.

In contrast, schools may also place more emphasis on working together and cooperating with others, as this is seen as a way to achieve the collective good.

Alternatively, in countries like Japan, children are expected to conform to group norms and not question teachers.

The type of school a child attends also shapes their socialization. For example, children who attend private schools are more likely to have parents who are wealthy and well-educated.

As a result, these children learn different values and beliefs than those who attend public school. Nonetheless, schools everywhere teach children the essential features of their societies and how to cope with bureaucracy, rules, expectations, waiting their turn, and sitting still for hours during the day (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).

3. Community / Neighborhood

Communities or neighborhoods consist of a group of people living in the same geographic area under common laws or groups of people sharing fellowship, a friendly association, and common interests.

The community is a socializing agent because it is where children learn the role expectations for adults as well as themselves. The community provides a sense of identity to individuals and helps to define what is right or wrong.

Children can acquire this socialization by modeling adults, having rules enforced on them, or experiencing consequences for their behavior (Putnam, 2000).

It also teaches children how to interact with people who are different from them in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, and religion. For example, children learn that it is polite to speak quietly in the library, but they can be loud when they are playing with friends at the park.

The community also offers opportunities for children to explore their interests and talents. For example, some communities have youth clubs, sports teams, and scouting groups. These activities allow children to try new things, make friends, and develop a sense of responsibility (Putnam, 2000).

People learn from their peers (the people of their own age and similar social status) how to dress, talk, and behave. People also learn about what is important to one’s peer group and what is not.

During adolescence, peers become even more important as agents of socialization. This is because adolescents are exploring their identities and trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in the world.

Peers provide support and guidance during this time and help people learn about the norms and values of their culture — as well as what to wear, eat, watch, and where to spend time.

On the downside, adolescent peer influences have been seen as responsible for underage drinking, drug use, delinquency, and hate crimes (Agnew, 2015).

During peoples’ 20s and 30s, peer groups tend to diminish in importance. This is because people are more likely to be working and have less free time. In addition, people are more likely to be married or in a committed relationship.

As a result, they are less likely to spend time with friends and more likely to socialize within their families.

However, parents with young children may broaden their peer groups further and accept more influence as they reach out to their surrounding communities to care for their children (Vandall, 2000).

5. Mass Media

The media works by providing information to a wide audience via television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet. This broad dissemination of information greatly influences social norms (Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout 2005).

The media teaches people about material objects, current events, and fashion but also enforces nonmaterial culture: beliefs, values, and norms. It also teaches people how to think about and react to political events, such as elections.

In addition, it provides information about what is happening in other parts of the world, how people in other cultures live, and how people from a particular society should perceive the way that others live.

6. Religion

Religions can be both formal and informal institutions and are an important avenue of socialization for many people.

Synagogues, temples, churches, mosques, and similar religious communities teach participants how to interact with their religion’s material culture — for example, the mezuzah, a prayer rug, or a communion wafer.

The ceremonies upheld by religion can often relate to family structure — like marriage and birth rituals, and religious institutions can reinforce gender norms through socialization. This reinforces the family unit’s power dynamics and fosters a shared set of values transmitted through the rest of society (Pearson-Merkowitz & Gimpel, 2009).

Historically, religious institutions have played a significant role in social change. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States was led by religious leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Similarly, the women’s suffrage movement was also partly motivated by religious beliefs.

Today, religion continues to shape people”s socialization experiences. For instance, some religions encourage members to protest wars and volunteer to help the poor. In all of these cases, religious institutions socialize people to behave in a way that favors once-vulnerable groups (Pearson-Merkowitz & Gimpel, 2009).

7. Government

The government is another agent of socialization. It enacts laws that uphold social norms and values, and it also provides institutions and services that support citizens.

Government is notable in that it can fund a number of institutions that encourage socialization. For example, the government funds public schools, which play a key role in children”s socialization.

The government also funds other programs that provide opportunities for social interaction, such as after-school programs, parks, and recreation centers (Oberfield, 2014).

The military is another example of how the government can influence people”s socialization experiences.

For instance, the military teaches people how to work together in a hierarchy, follow orders, and use violence to achieve objectives. People who serve in the military often come from different backgrounds and have different values.

As a result, the military can be an agent for socializing people to collaborate with those from disparate races and classes against a common opponent (Oberfield, 2014).

The government can also create roles through legislation. For example, governments usually define an “adult” as being at least eighteen years old, the age at which a person becomes legally responsible for themselves.

Meanwhile, 65 brings the onset of “old age” as seniors become eligible for benefits. These roles motivate people to be socialized into a different category, learning to conform to both the government”s and broader society”s expectations of age (Oberfield, 2014).

Other Agents of Socialization (Ethnicity and class)

Ethnic socialization is the process by which people learn about their ethnic group’s culture and history. It is a type of socialization that occurs within ethnic groups.

Ethnic socialization helps prepare children for the challenges and opportunities they will face as members of an ethnic group. It also helps them develop a positive sense of self and a strong sense of identity.

It can also lead to the acquisition of patterns of speech, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes of an ethnic group by an individual who comes to see themselves come to see themselves and others as members of that group.

Both parents and peers are primary ethnic socialization agents, but agents as large as the media and the wider community also play a role (Conger & Dogan, 2007).

Class socialization is the process by which people learn about their social class and how to behave in a way that is appropriate for their class. It is a type of socialization that occurs within social classes.

Like ethnic socialization, class socialization helps prepare children for the challenges and opportunities they will face as members of a social class.

Children who undergo class socialization learn to discern other members of their social class as well as develop attitudes of trust and mistrust toward those from other social groups (Conger & Dogan, 2007).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between socialization and enculturation.

Enculturation is a process by which people learn the customs and traditions of their culture. Socialization, on the other hand, is the process by which people learn the norms and values of their society.

While socialization is the process of learning socially acceptable behavior in every culture, enculturation is the process of socialization in a particular culture. That is to say, enculturation is a product of socialization (Cromdal, 2006).

What is the difference between culture and socialization?

Culture is the unique set of beliefs, values, customs, and knowledge of a group of people. Socialization is the process by which people learn the norms and values of their culture. Culture is passed down from generation to generation through socialization (Cromdal, 2006).

One way to think about the difference between culture and socialization is that culture is what people believe, and socialization is how those beliefs are transmitted.

For example, American culture is often classified as highly individualistic. Individualism is the idea that each person is responsible for themselves. This belief is passed down through socialization experiences, such as parents teaching their children to be independent.

What are the most important agents of socialization?

Agents of socialization are the individuals, groups, or institutions that influence our self-concepts, attitudes, behaviors, and orientations toward life. They play a crucial role in shaping us into socially adept individuals.

The most important agents of socialization typically include:

Family: The family is usually the first and most impactful agent of socialization. From infancy, family members impart values, norms, and biases, influencing a child’s personality, emotional development, and behavior.

Schools: After the family, schools play a significant role in socialization. They expose children to new cultural values, expectations, and peer groups, and help them develop a sense of independence.

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Socialization in Psychological Perspectives

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The chapter presents an understanding of socialization in the dominant psychoanalytic theories, ranging from Freud to Lacan, and in cognitive psychology, rooted in Piaget and Kohlberg, as well as relating socialization to learning theory and to the framework of Vygodsky. Social cognitive development represents an axis in psychological theorising, with the family and peers the dominant agents of socialization.

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Frønes, I. (2016). Socialization in Psychological Perspectives. In: The Autonomous Child. SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25100-4_4

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• Twitter - X

Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber

The head of threads and mastodon competitor bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-twitter internet..

By Nilay Patel , editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.

Share this story

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Twitter, er, X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey , who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.

It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder : the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.

Listen to Decoder , a show hosted by The Verge ’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe  here !

Bluesky’s approach to this is something called the AT Protocol , which powers Bluesky’s own platform but which is also a technology that anyone can use right now to host their own servers and, eventually, interoperate with a bunch of other networks. You’ll hear Jay explain how building Bluesky the product alongside AT Protocol the protocol has created a cooperate-compete dynamic that runs throughout the entire company and that also informs how it’s building products and features — not only for its own service but also for developers to build on top of. 

Jay and I also talked about the growth of the Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, and how so many of the company’s early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that’s taken hold there. Content moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges any platform faces, and Bluesky, in particular, has had its fair share of controversies. But the idea behind AT Protocol and Bluesky is devolving control, so Bluesky users can pick their own moderation systems and recommendation algorithms — a grand experiment that I wanted to know much more about.

Finally, Jay and I had the opportunity to get technical and go deeper on standards and protocols, which are the beating heart of the decentralization movement. Bluesky’s AT Protocol is far from the only protocol in the mix — there’s also ActivityPub, which is what powers Mastodon and, soon, Meta’s Threads. There’s been some real animosity between these camps , and I asked Jay about the differences between the two, the benefits of Bluesky’s approach, and how she sees the two coexisting in the future. 

Okay, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jay Graber, you’re the CEO of Bluesky Social. Welcome to Decoder .

Thanks for having me.

I am really excited to talk to you. Bluesky is one of the most exciting new social media apps on the scene. There are exciting ideas inside of it around federation and decentralization, both of which I’m obsessed with. So get ready, but let’s start at the very beginning. What is Bluesky Social?

Bluesky is an open social network. It’s open-source. It’s built on an open protocol, but it looks and works very much like Twitter. And so it’s a project that was actually originally founded by Twitter back in 2019. Jack [Dorsey] tweeted that he was going to fund the development of a protocol that Twitter would someday run on. And so I came into the project as someone outside of Twitter that had never worked at Twitter but had experience with decentralized social protocols. So I built out a protocol, and then, through a series of changes of what happened to formerly Twitter, now we’ve ended up building an app that looks a lot like Twitter.

I can’t imagine anybody didn’t figure this out. But Jack is Jack Dorsey.

Yes, Jack Dorsey.

The former CEO of Twitter.

Former CEO of Twitter.

The once former and then CEO and then now former CEO once again of Twitter. That piece where he thought Twitter should have an underlying decentralized protocol , and I don’t want to talk about Twitter too much, but that was a big deal, right? The idea that Twitter was too important, it was too centralized. I think Jack was uncomfortable with his moderation power . 

Obviously, we went through a big moment around content moderation, but that core idea that one company should not have so much power led to a lot of things, including the creation of Bluesky. What was the pitch there? Did he come and say, “Hey, come run a program inside this company to devolve the power of the company”? 

I actually pitched Twitter a lot on how I thought Bluesky should work.

So the way that this worked is that Jack tweeted that, and they created a Bluesky Twitter account at the end of 2019. I got really excited. I was currently working on a social app of my own that was an alternative to Facebook Events called Happening, and I’d been building on decentralized social protocols, playing around with them, doing a lot of research, published a lot of research on it. 

So then I was one of the experts that they pulled into this small chat room with a group of people who seemed to know what they were talking about. And then, they asked the group, “What is the best way to build this protocol? You guys know about protocols.” And then, in 2020, the pandemic hit, and so this whole project got derailed by the pandemic as Twitter was clearly occupied with other things.

And then mid-2021, Twitter circled back around and started interviewing people, both people within Twitter and experts without, interviewing somebody who could lead the Bluesky project. And so, mid-2021, they interviewed me along with some other folks and then chose me to lead Bluesky based on this vision that I pitched for how we were going to build Bluesky, which is essentially how we’ve built it. And so that’s how I got involved. 

Once I took lead, there were different options as to how we were going to structure Bluesky. As a category, a project within Twitter, it was very much like Birdwatch, which was what built Community Notes, sort of a skunkworks project that was going to go off on its own and do this experimental way of doing things in a more open, crowdsourced way. But I didn’t want to be within Twitter because Twitter had moved very slowly to nominate me as lead in the first place.

And there was just going to be a lot of challenges. 

One of the things that I was hyperaware of was just the risks of centralization because one thing I always like to say is the captain can always sink the ship. Jack was the captain of Twitter at that time, but if the captain changes or if that support left, then I would lose institutional support for Bluesky, and I really wanted this project to exist. So I insisted we spin out as a separate company, and then that took about six months to figure out, but then we got set up as a separate company, and then, actually shortly thereafter, the captain did change. And so then we ended up in this position — we were able to keep going. In a lot of other circumstances, if we were within Twitter, I don’t think the project would be alive anymore.

That part is really interesting, right? The idea that the leadership might change, but the project should remain or the protocol should remain. Right now, Bluesky is a company. The audience heard me introduce you as the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is the company. It’s also the app — it’s not the protocol. Explain how that all works. What is Bluesky Social, specifically?

So Bluesky was originally just the name of this project within Twitter to build this decentralized protocol. Then, the protocol we actually built was called the AT Protocol, or AT Proto for short. And this sort of symbolizes the fact that you can find people at their @ handle username. And so we wanted this to someday be the last social identity you’ll ever have to create because you can move it in between apps and services. You can take your identity and your relationships and your data with you. And so that’s the underlying protocol layer. 

The goal is to make social apps work more like the web itself. And then Bluesky is the app that we’ve built on top of the AT Protocol, both to show how it works and to develop the protocol actually through product-driven protocol development. You run into a lot more things once you’re actually building on a thing that you intended to have developers build on.

So Bluesky, the product on top of AT Protocol. I always call it “A.T.” Protocol. Are you good with “A.T.” or “at”?

We’ve been calling it the [at] Protocol because, yeah, it’s easier and sometimes just “AT Proto” for short.

It stands for something, right? 

Authenticated transfer protocol.

Very good. Was that a bacronym? Did you back into that or did you come at it front ways?

I think we actually came at that front ways because, earlier on, we were calling this — there were a lot of posts I wrote early on that are way more technical than the audience we’re usually talking to these days, but stuff about self-certifying data structure and authenticated transport, and these are all the design philosophy that we pulled into Bluesky, which borrowed from peer-to-peer networks but did this hybrid federated approach. So that’s the wonky parts under the hood that most people don’t think about anymore.

I love that. So you’ve got this protocol. You’re going to build a product on top of it called Bluesky. Bluesky is now open to the public. It’s growing. I think the last number I saw was 5 million users. There’s obviously a moment to capture market share from Twitter. I recently saw a report saying 30 percent of Twitter users have stopped using it in the last year. Is your focus on growing Bluesky the product? Is it on the AT Protocol? How do you shift that attention? They seem like they’re competing a little bit.

Yeah, they both cooperate and compete because part of our philosophy was that developers, we want to get developers to build on the AT Protocol, but devs want there to be users to build it for. And so if you get users into the ecosystem, anyone building on either the interfaces for custom feeds or custom clients on Bluesky can come in and now build for 5 million users. But also, AT Protocol will be able to support other kinds of apps, and then users will be able to move between them with the same identity and relationships, and then that will just make it a lot easier for other people to build. And so that was part of our idea was just build an app, and then we get this positive feedback loop going of developers and users coming into the ecosystem.

So that “cooperate and compete” framework is really interesting. Most standards that have a big product on top of the standards have that kind of relationship, but they’re usually managed by giant companies or at least a handful of companies that are competing themselves. There might be a standards board involved. Right now, for Bluesky and AT Protocol, it’s just Bluesky. How is Bluesky structured, and how do you contend with that cooperate-compete dynamic inside the structure?

Yeah, so we are structured as a public benefit corporation, so that means we have a mission. It’s to “develop and drive adoption of large-scale adoption of technologies for the open and public decentralized conversation.” I think I might’ve mangled that a little bit, but the gist of it is for open public conversations on an open protocol, and that’s the mission that all of our stakeholders know — our investors, our board members — and we’re able to pursue that and put any sort of profits back into that mission rather than having to put fiduciary duty first. But that doesn’t mean we’re prohibited from making a profit. So we are a company.

And the company is responsible for the protocol right now. Inside the company, how is that structured?

Yes, it’s within the company. So basically, we’re all working on it together. Everyone’s very mission-aligned that we’ve hired, and it’s something that, right now, we’re just trying to show the benefits of this kind of an open ecosystem that people can build on and get users in the ecosystem, and then we’re moving toward standardizing pieces of the protocol. So pieces that have become really stable, it’s working well. There hasn’t been any need for big changes recently. That’s something that we’re trying to move toward a standardization process because once something gets standardized, then it’s going to move a bit slower, but then that gives it more resilience.

How big is Bluesky today? How many employees are there?

We’re about 18 across engineering and ops, and then we have about that number on support and moderation.

The moderation side is the part that scales the fastest, right? If I look at Bluesky and AT Protocol and what it’s meant to enable, it’s a way to rethink moderation, probably most of all, right? If it’s as simple as “you don’t like the moderators, and you can take your account and leave” — that’s one idea. You have this idea about composable moderation, where people could write their own moderation stacks or different kinds of filters or different kinds of algorithms. Right now, though, moderation just sort of scales with the user base — you just have to spend more time and money moderating. How are you managing that against Bluesky’s growth?

We just hired Aaron Rodericks , former trust and safety co-lead at Twitter and head of election integrity. He’s come on to bring a lot more experienced leadership to this team and make sure that we’re building a strong foundation for moderation on Bluesky. But what you mentioned there — you definitely read about our approach — it’s a hybrid approach between us running a foundation within the app, making sure that we have this really good service within the app, and having decentralized moderation. The closest analogy here — it actually works a lot like custom feeds — is the custom feeds we build. So we provide some default algorithms, and we develop an in-house algorithm, but we also allow anyone to build an algorithm. 

So there’s about 40,000 custom algorithms out there and custom feeds, and some of them are very simple, some of them are very complex, and users can install them and switch between them. So moderation services are like this, but because Bluesky is also a digital space that we’ve created, you can’t opt out of [our moderation service] and our client, and then that’s what we’re providing all this moderation, in-house moderation, for. And then, actually, by the time that this podcast airs, you’ll be able to go into the Bluesky app and see the composable moderation because that’s coming out this week.

I’m really excited about that. I want to come back to that and talk about it in detail. I want to stick on the Decoder question just for a couple more minutes here. You started this thing inside of Twitter. You fought to leave it. That’s a big decision to make. The entire world of social networks, I think, has flipped over since you spun up Bluesky and began work in earnest on this project. It’s an election year. You have big ideas about moderation, you have a team, you’ve got to raise money. That is an awful lot of decisions to make. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

I think I have a very collaborative approach, but as with a lot of things I do, I take a hybrid approach between centralization and decentralization.

Perfectly on theme. Very good.

It is. I really do. I spent a long time working on decentralized technologies, and I saw their limitations as well, but I also think that there’s a lot of limitations to centralized systems. It just is a system property. It’s true of human systems and technological systems. So, first of all, I think I make decisions trying to base it around our long-term mission. So, as a public benefit corporation, we really take the mission seriously, and we try to make sure that we are making decisions that are going to build something that’s actually a better social ecosystem for people. And then I believe in collaboration, so I try to get input from as many people on the team as possible — people who have the most relevant experience in the decision-making — and a lot of things start out as proposals that we talk through and then write down and then get feedback on.

And we operate roughly with a consensus with qualifications model. So I get input, and then if there’s a clear consensus, we go with that. And if there isn’t, I’m the tiebreaker and make the final call as CEO. And then we try to expand when we have the capacity outside of our internal team and talk to experts in the field. Even before we brought on Aaron, we talked to a lot of trust and safety experts, and then we’ve consulted with users, community members, people who are using the app, people who aren’t using the app. 

The app itself is sort of a fire hose of feedback, so we have tried to find ways to sample from that and as well as reach out and have deeper conversations with people, talk to people who aren’t on the app, and then this is how we’re trying to make decisions that are technically sound but also user-centric, talking to other people in the decentralized social space, too.

A lot of us come from backgrounds where we’ve worked on other projects and so we reach out to people that we know to talk about “what about this protocol decision or this design decision.” And then people have a lot of autonomy on the team, so we try to move pretty fast. A lot of what we do is about experimenting and learning, so we try to make the best decision we can at the time that leaves us room to adapt down the road. And so that’s actually why a lot of things we built are composable because we aren’t assuming that we’re going to get everything right on the first pass.

We have this big vision for how all these pieces can come together to produce a good social experience, but if we get it wrong, we want the pieces individually to be standalone so that someone else can take these ideas, recombine them in a different way, and then maybe arrive at a solution that, in the next iteration, is the right way for social to work in this open, composable way.

Can I ask a really dumb question? I’ve now said composable. You’ve said composable twice. Can you explain to the audience what you mean by composable?

Sure. So, basically, have something that comes apart into lots of pieces, like building blocks, like Lego, and then you can put those together and you have a lot of, maybe you only have 10 little different types of Lego pieces. You have a lot of them, and then you can put them together into all sorts of different shapes. And so that means that you can build very different-looking houses out of the same set of Lego blocks.

A few more questions on the structure and how that works. You said you’re 18 people on engineering, 18 on the other side of the company — 30 to 40 people, I’m guessing. The way you’re describing decisions works really well for that size team. I know that because I’ve long run a team about that size, and I feel like I can have an idea, I can communicate it effectively.

You jump up to the next size — 100 people or 500 people — you have to build a different kind of culture. Are you thinking about that now, or are you hopeful that you can just get to the next size? I’ve met founders and CEOs sort of who take both approaches — that “I would love to have that problem. I’ll deal with it when I get there.” But it seems like you’re thinking a little down the road and especially that having decentralization in your brain, you might be thinking about that now. How do you plan to scale the culture there?

I’m thinking a bit about that now. As you mentioned, we already have a lot of things we’re working on and building toward, so I can’t devote a ton of time to it, but trying to talk to people who’ve been there because I haven’t before and learn from people who’ve worked at different scales of organizations and figure out what works and what doesn’t work. So whenever I get the chance and I run into somebody who’s running a different size of org, I’m very curious at this point, asking them about how they do things, how it works. I found it super helpful to just talk to people who are running orgs at similar stages and at slightly bigger stages and find [out]: how do they run meetings, what is their writing culture, how’s their decision-making work?

And right now, I think, just because we haven’t got there yet, I’m still in a learning phase of figuring out what’s probably going to work best when we get there, but I would like to keep some of the same principles of having collaboration. I mean, the end goal is: how do we get to the best answer and best harness collective intelligence? Like collective intelligence in terms of building an open protocol anyone can build on and collective intelligence within the company of, “Everyone here, we hired them because they’re a smart person. What piece of the problem do they see, and how can we put together their insights into something that gets us to the best decision?”

One person who famously experienced a number of trials and tribulations through that scaling process is Jack Dorsey, who started the project with you. He’s still on your board, I believe. Is he involved? Is he someone that you’re bouncing off of, or is he being Jack Dorsey on a cloud somewhere?

[ Laughs ] I would say the latter, being Jack Dorsey. And yeah, Jack is, I think, a visionary who really wanted social to be on an open protocol, and he has been interested in lots of different decentralized protocols, and he has sort of a big-picture vision of how he wants this to work. And then the specifics of how we built Bluesky was very much the vision that I pitched and that the team has designed. So, the early team I hired, we were people with different experience in different decentralized social projects that came together and learned from the mistakes we’ve made in the past and built something that synthesized those insights.

Do you get any feedback from Jack at all? Does he send one-word emails or anything at all, or is it just kind of silence?

Some feedback occasionally.

Give me an example.

Well, early on, we had a sort of discussion around downvotes and upvotes and downvotes or the like button. And early on, we actually put in downvotes, and then we got so much user pushback that we were like, “Okay.” Also, one of the critical problems we realized with the way that we put in downvotes was it’s all public. So because we have all these composable services, everything has to be public for every service to see it and operate off it. So that meant downvotes were public. People really didn’t like that, and we recognize that, you know, it feels bad to see, “Oh, everyone can see all these people downvoted my thing.”

So I think that that was actually an important insight in the sense that social networks, part of the toxicity, I think, comes from there only being positive feedback cycles. And so that means things only really get amplified, and when you really want to say this is a terrible post, you reply to it or repost it or something, and then that actually spreads it further. Whereas systems where you have downvotes mean there’s this downregulation of things, and you can express your disapproval of this by downvoting it, and then if enough people downvote it, maybe it just disappears. And so that’s actually, I think, an important piece, but it’s important that also, when you downvote it, it’s not this big public statement. So that’s something that we would still like to bring back at some point — this downregulation — but maybe not in that exact form. So, we learned from our users.

That sits right at the intersection of “What does a protocol enable?” and “What does the product expose to users??” Maybe the protocol supports downvotes, but Bluesky, the social network that people are on, never shows it to anybody or doesn’t support that feature of the protocol itself. When you think about, “Okay, we should put this in the protocol. This is something we’d like, but our users on Bluesky don’t like it,” does that impact the protocol more, or are you saying, “Well, we’ll get to it in the protocol someday, but maybe Bluesky won’t have it”?

For different things, there’s a bit of both. That kind of depends per design decision. One example here is that we don’t show a likes tab in the Bluesky app, and that was something where it was an intentional decision early on, and actually now, we show it to you. So, since we don’t have bookmarks, you can kind of use your own likes as a bookmark, but we don’t show it to everybody. So, if I go look at your profile, I don’t see your likes. On the other hand, that is public information, so there’s other sites that do show it, but this was just a little bit of friction that we added to say that even though the protocol supports anyone seeing your likes, we think that there’s some downsides to just having everyone’s likes on the profile. So, we didn’t show it by default. 

Another example is we give you an opt-out of the public web interface in the Bluesky app. So all the data is public on Bluesky, all your posts are public, your likes are public, and anyone can build an app that shows all of that, and anyone can look at the fire hose. But if you don’t want a lot of people to click through and see your post, and let’s say one Bluesky post gets embedded in a news article or something, you can opt out of having it be clicked through if someone’s not signed in. And that’s just some extra friction that we’ve added, and we’ve really learned, through building and running a social app, how much these kinds of little frictions and defaults matter in terms of shaping people’s experience and giving a good experience, even if the protocol really enables something that can be done in a different way.

I think this means I should probably split this up into two parts. I want to ask about the app and where you are with the app, and then I promise you the nerdy questions about the protocol are coming. I warn you. If you’re listening to this, just be warned: they’re coming. I would’ve spent a whole hour doing nerdy protocol questions, but I think we should talk about the app first because the app’s on a roll, right?

It’s growing. You have 5 million users. I’m assuming some of the funding you raised is around the success of the app or at least driven by the success of the app. And then, as you mentioned, developers are attracted to the protocol because there are users there. I would say — and I hope you agree — Bluesky has a very distinct culture from the other kinds of social networks that have sprung up in the sort of wake of the Twitter-to-X situation. I’m not going to get myself into trouble by describing the cultures of Threads or Mastodon, but I will say Bluesky is funnier. It’s a little more chaotic. It’s a little weirder. Why do you think that is?

Early on, we had several waves of users come over that were all really big posters. And most social networks, you have this dynamic where you have 1 percent of people posting and then a smaller percentage of people liking and then a lot of people lurking and just looking at stuff. And early on, we had this crazy ratio of 90 percent posters, and so it was extremely active and tons of people firing off shitposts essentially — really fast, funny takes on things and memes and a lot of stuff. And then, since we’ve grown, I think the majority of people tend to use social in a more consumption mode, and so it has shifted a bit more toward lurkers. But still, relative to other apps, I think there’s a lot of posters — people who like posting and engaging that way — and then that results in a pretty chaotic and playful culture, I think.

Do you think that culture comes from moderation? Is it luck? Is it something that you are trying to preserve? Where do you think it comes from, and how do you keep it going?

This, I think, might actually just be a community element, and partially early on, a lot of the team, we all were posters, we all were social media users, and we engaged a lot. We still post and talk to people and stuff. And not just me — quite a few people on the team. The devs talk to dev users. We have people who’ve worked in journalism, and so we have this culture of just active discussion and using the app. 

And then there’s been lots of interfaces for creativity, both intentional and unintentional. So, intentional ones are the ability for anyone to build a custom feed. We created this nice interface in the app. Anyone can build a feed. And so now there’s really niche feeds. I really like the moss feed that just shows you nice woodland pictures of moss, and then you can find a post from some user with five followers, but they posted a moss picture, and now it shows up in the moss feed.

So this is a way where engagement gets spread out beyond one central algorithm into all these little niche communities. I guess another intentional way that’s creative is there’s all sorts of different clients and experiences you can build. So people have built these different experiences that show you things a different way, show you who’s in your social network and all these little visualizations that people have played around with. 

And then the unintentional ones are for a while, we had actually a bug in the app that caused this very long thread to break, and it became actually one long thread called “HellThread” that people were posting very aggressively into. And that bug has since been fixed, but for an era, there was this crazy culture that formed around this bug that almost became a feature. So that was an example of things just being this kind of playful, chaotic energy taking place through both the intentional interfaces for experimentation, creativity, and the unintentional ones, like the bugs that became features.

That second part — the unintentional bugs became a feature — those emergent properties of social networks or communities, it always feels like the most special thing: that the people who run the platforms don’t really know what’s going to happen. The users decide what’s going to happen in ways that are completely chaotic, and the best platforms sort of reinforce that and build upon it. And that is a really healthy feedback loop. 

I would actually put up Twitter as the best example of this feedback loop ever, right? So many core Twitter features were invented by the users. Is that on your mind? That you need to watch your user base and take the ideas into the platform directly and build upon them? Because I don’t see a lot of other platforms really leaning into that anymore.

Totally. Yeah, we do. There’s things that we’ve had on the road map and longer things that we try to stay focused on, like this vision of algorithmic choice and composable moderation. Those are things we prioritize because, from the start, we were going to do that. And then other things, like hashtags. At first, we thought, “Well, I think the custom feeds will allow you to do hashtags within feeds.” People did do that for a while, but people still wanted standalone hashtags, and we got enough takes from users saying, “Just bring us hashtags,” that eventually, we added them.

Same with mute words, like actually, composable moderation is going to let you do something that is much more granular and higher-powered than just mute words. But people want the simple interfaces, too. That’s something we’ve learned. So we added mute words, and we have mute lists and block lists, and these are simpler building blocks. And now you’re going to have bigger, more complex building blocks — the full dashboard of power tools under the hood.

Do you think you’re going to end up in a place where you have what I will just call the Microsoft Excel problem, where so many people have asked for so many familiar features that it’s actually hard to bring them into a new paradigm, like composable moderation or adjustable filters? Every big software product has this problem where there’s an obviously better way of doing a thing, but then people are familiar with the way they’ve been doing it, and so you end up with both or you never have the social capital to do the better way. Do you think about that problem: if the future is feeds in the protocol but everybody wants the brute force moderation of the past, you’re going to end up in that tension? 

Yeah, we actually do think about that a bit, and this is where having some amount of ecosystem guidance from a team that’s really thought about it might help. But also then, if we get it wrong, the goal of the whole app is open-source, and so people can fork off it and sort things out, add things, take things a different direction. And so maybe if our app gets really bloated or if it’s just not working right anymore, somebody who has a strong idea for how to do it differently or do it better can fork it off and say, “Alright, we’re going to clean it up. This is the way we’re going to do it now.” 

So, a lot of the ways that we try to design things is so that we can provide good leadership in the ecosystem. And centralization has its benefits when someone has a plan and they know where they’re going and it’s a good place and people want to follow. But then, if that leadership fails or gets things wrong or changes, then there’s other options and people can vote with their feet and go over to the better option, and new entrants can come in and provide another example of doing something differently, doing it better.

So I feel this in my soul. This is something that we have long wanted across a number of products. We’ve talked about it at The Verge for a long time. I talked to the CEOs of other companies that are in these kinds of relationships with protocols or standards or open source, and at the end of the day, they often come back to “...but we also have to make money, and the best user experience is often the one that we control. So sometimes the protocol slides by the wayside. Sometimes the commitment to open source gets diminished because we have to make some money here. And if we control the user experience, the user experience gets ahead of the protocol, so be it — we’ve got to eat, we’ve got to pay the team.”

In particular, I’ll give an example of this. I think Twitter had a huge ecosystem of third-party clients. It was a playground for developers. So many cool things happened and were built. So many tools were built that had nothing to do with posting or reading tweets at the end of the day. And [then] they had to monetize, and they realized they couldn’t put the ads in all those clients, and they shut down all those clients. Do you see that problem coming? Is that, “Oh boy, we’re going to have to monetize this thing somehow, and we’re going to have to reclaim some control to do that?” Or do you have another idea for how you’ll manage that tension?

Yeah, we do want to make money, and we are trying to do our best. Part of this is sort of tying yourself to the masts, like Sisyphus-style, of “this is the ways that we’ve committed to openness.” We’ve already open-sourced the app, and we’ve open-sourced everything you need to run your own version of Bluesky on the app protocol. And we have built into the protocol ways for users to move all their identity and relationships and data around. And so the idea is that each user has all their data as this package. We actually call it a repository. If you’re familiar with Git and GitHub, it’s like your data repository is like your GitHub repository. And then a lot of people use GitHub, and that’s a centralized site, but then they can take their Git repository and move it to GitLab or some other site.

And so, that’s the built-in “vote with your feet” piece, and you can take your stuff and move it. And then federation is an important piece that we just started for self-hosting federation a few weeks ago, and that means that you can run your own server, host your own data, and then if we try to close things down or whatever, you can just say, “Well, now I’m just going to use a different service because I control my own data and it’s on my own server. I control my identity, my data, and where it’s hosted.” And then that means if a lot of people are federating and self-hosting, that ecosystem can just shift around piece by piece to the services that haven’t shut down their APIs and that haven’t let users feel betrayed.

Those are the things that keep you from making money in the bad ways. What’s the plan to make money?

We’ve been building marketplaces within the app, essentially. So, we’ve got information marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we’re going to lean into. We’re also providing a service, and we’re already making a small amount of money through one step we’ve made into custom domains. So, the idea here is you can use your website that you own, like jaygraber.com, as your user handle, but you have to be technical to set that up. You have to go buy your domain. You have to change the TXT record of your DNS settings, and a lot of people don’t want to do that or don’t know how. And so, then we sell you a domain through us. We’ve partnered with Namecheap to do that, and then that makes us a little bit of money, and then that’s an example of the kinds of services we’re going to expand into overtime.

Do you think that that is infinitely scalable? I have a quote here that one of our community people at Vox Media gave me. Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook being a “community of over a billion people,” and my colleague said, “That just makes me cringe. There’s no such thing as a community of over a billion people.” Is that something you think about: “We should have these smaller communities, or we can preserve the vibe and the funniness of Bluesky now even as we scale because it will splinter naturally with federation and decentralization”?

Yeah, there’s lots of joints on which it can splinter. There’s already feeds, and there’s going to be the moderation services. These will all create different experiences just within even the Bluesky app and are already creating different little corners. Then there will be different servers. There will be different apps running different entire pieces of the network. So, that will, I think, cause a lot more variety in the ecosystem. Part of the idea of having an underlying protocol is that, actually, social networks systems tend to go through periods of consolidation and then fragmentation, and a protocol that connects them all lets this happen naturally.

So, the example is the web itself is a protocol. Websites come and go. Some of them consolidate a lot of users, and then over time, they get worse and worse, or they shut down and then users go somewhere else. And that consolidation and fragmentation happens on the web. So this is trying to do that for social, so sites like Bluesky can come and go and grow, and then if we someday aren’t doing the best anymore, something else can come along, and users can fragment out and then maybe re-cohere around someone else who’s doing things really well.

You mentioned the plan for monetization is around the marketplaces for algorithms and feeds. I assume that will take place inside the Bluesky app, the one that you control, right? That makes the most sense. “Here’s all these users. You can buy an algorithm from us and see what you want. Maybe it’s about moss. Maybe it’s something else.” Is the plan to make money inside the app, or is the plan to make money with the protocol?

There’s ways to explore both. Right now, we have a lot going on in the app that we’re really focusing on, but also, I think one insight is we’re trying to make social more like the web. And early on, people didn’t know how the web was going to monetize, but it definitely did. Services definitely monetized on the web — tons of services that made lots of money built on open protocols and nothing that’s gotten to massive scale on the internet has ever just totally failed to monetize.

So, that’s something that we just think we need to show people, first of all, that this vision is something that can work, that is fun, useful, good, better than the alternatives, and also good for society, creating healthier social media ecosystems. And then we really believe that money follows value. If we can demonstrate this value and people really want this, then it’s something where we’ll be able to make money offering services in this ecosystem.

Services on top of the protocol, though, not the protocol itself?

The protocol itself is not a blockchain, not something with any built-in monetization mechanism. It’s like SMTP for email or HTTP for the web. It’s just a way for computers to talk.

That’s a great preview of my next question. Well done. Those protocols — HTTP [and] SMTP — they’re maintained by standards bodies. Some big companies volunteer some people. They don’t make money themselves — they’re maintained by a bunch of people who are invested in those protocols existing and growing so they can put services on top. That’s more or less what you’re describing. Would you ever turn over AT Protocol to a standards body?

Yeah, and we’ve already begun talking to some standardization bodies — like starting the very early stages of that work, socializing the idea, taking on the pieces that are relatively more solid, as I mentioned earlier. The AT Protocol is actually made up of several pieces that the way identity works, the way data works, and these pieces, we aim to get standardized and then stewarded by governance bodies.

Alright, get ready. It’s time for some extremely deep standards drama around protocols. I told everyone it was going to happen, and now it’s here. So, you’ve got a protocol: AT Protocol. There’s a competitor protocol called ActivityPub . Mastodon runs on ActivityPub. Threads is going to federate using ActivityPub. What, in your mind, are the pros and cons? What are the differences?

So, ActivityPub was around when we got started. I did an ecosystem review of all the centralized protocols that existed in 2019, including ActivityPub. And we looked at it and decided that we needed to build something different because there were some critical pieces that we thought were missing. So, one of them was around the composability and the interfaces for composability we’ve designed. Like the way that we do custom feeds and all these moderation labelers, that’s really not possible with the way that things are very server-centric in ActivityPub right now. Your server is very much your community where all of this happens, and we have split things up into these microservices on the backend, mirroring a bit more of how a large-scale social network works with the global feed. 

The other thing was the global feed, like having global search and discovery be a first-class thing that we were building for. And also, having all of our users at the start know that this is public data and it will be remixed in all sorts of ways by global feeds is something that, both technically and culturally, we had to design for. Because ActivityPub has clustered more around servers that they federate and they talk to each other, but there isn’t a service that scrapes all of it and gives you this big fire hose, and even if it’s technically possible to build, there’s been community resistance to people doing that. Even someone in the community who was building a bridge between AT Protocol and ActivityPub recently got a lot of pushback from the ActivityPub community on not wanting that bridge. So, that’s just sort of both cultural and technical. 

Then another thing was we really wanted to get account portability. So, this ability to leave with your identity and your data and have fallbacks with the way that we’ve designed your repo, you can even back up all your posts on your phone or back it up on your server that you control, and then you don’t have to have any sort of friction when you want to move. So, you can move between services in ActivityPub. But if… for example, Queer.af recently, their .af domain was seized by Afghanistan , and then people were stuck because there was no warning, and then they have to rely on their old server to help forward their stuff over to a new place. So, we wanted to get around that problem and make sure people always had the ability to move. 

Then, we wanted to have good UX. There were just a lot of complaints with users around the UX of Mastodon, and we wanted to provide something that was more just tailored for the mainstream user who was used to Twitter, who could come on and not have to worry about, “Oh, what server do I pick when I sign up? What does it mean? Is this going to shape my experience forever?” On Mastodon, you have to know that right when you sign up because it’s going to shape your experience. Here, you can sign up on our server, which is the default lobby or gateway into the ecosystem, and then you can move to another server and shift to your own. So, when we opened up federation, several of our team members moved their main accounts off onto their own server, and it was pretty seamless. Nobody notices that people are running on their own servers, and it’s still just all one experience in the app.

Let me be very reductive here and see if I got this right. It feels like the first order bit for Mastodon [and] ActivityPub is the server, and you’re saying your first order bit is the user, right? You have a user account; it can kind of live anywhere, and that’s the thing you’re in control of. On Mastodon, there are servers, and the server administrators are more in control. Is that too reductive? Is that accurate? Is that a good way to think about it?

That’s actually a pretty good way to think about it. And this is where, earlier on, since we’re getting technical now, I said we were borrowing from peer-to-peer systems. Peer-to-peer systems really try to do everything at entirely the user level with no servers. And that actually creates a complicated user experience, but that means that every user’s fully in control of all their data all the time. We have the ability for users to do that, but we have servers to make your life easier, so you don’t have to have your phone be trying to directly communicate with 5 million other phones or a computer trying to do that. But then you can always move off of our server and move off of these services.

So, the property that we really tried to get out of this piece of decentralization is the right to leave. And so, you can use a service and can use even a big service, but you always have the right to leave built in because we’ve designed around the user. And the other way we’ve designed around the user is not just at the technical level but at the UX level. So, try to design for: what do users really want? How do we get that sort of convenience and ease of use for the user? And thinking from a UX as a first-class thing that we’re designing for.

There’s some tradeoffs there. Some are really obvious, right? Mastodon server administrators often find that they’re running a server and they have software costs and overhead, and they have to maintain a server for a bunch of users. At the same time, they’re in charge, for better or worse. If something goes wrong, they can shut it down or they can delete stuff. They are in control of the content. They can set different kinds of content moderation policies. There’s a decentralization of authority in that way. It feels like AT Protocol is much more individualistic in that way.

ActivityPub points you toward groups of collectives that may wish to interact with each other. And AT Protocol and Bluesky are much more like, “You’re on your own. If you like it, you can leave, and there’ll be a larger market of individuals.” How do you think about, “Okay, if someone doesn’t like the server they’re on, they’re going to leave”? They might not actually be sending any signal at all that the server administrator was doing a bad job because you can’t tell. Whereas on, I think, Mastodon, it’s like, “Oh, somebody just left this account behind.”

I think, actually, collectives are going to emerge, and they already have in some ways. Collectives aren’t formed at the server infrastructure level. So, one of the ideas that we had was, on Mastodon, your moderation is very much tied to who runs your server, but often, the type of person who wants to do DevOps essentially and manage a service online is different from the type of person who’s a community builder and wants to organize a group of people together to set a different set of community norms and moderate. You can get those people together to run a Mastodon instance, but it has to be tied around the instance, so we separated those pieces. So, now you can get a group of people together and run a moderation service. We give you software to manage reports and stuff like admin tooling, and you can do this with the whole team, and then you can get a bunch of people to use it, and then you can get a whole community based around a moderation culture that you’ve created.

Then, you can do that with the feed as well. And then all these things, as I mentioned in being composable, can be bundled and unbundled in different ways, so you could recreate the Mastodon “everything is tied to your server” experience by setting defaults on your server: this is the moderation regimes we’re going to be using, here’s the labelers we’re using, here’s the feeds we’re using, etc. And a server operator still has power at the end of the day because they control where your stuff is literally hosted. But then there’s all these other interfaces beyond that where control and agency can happen. So, any service in the network has the ability to set rules, and then users have these interfaces where even if they’re non-technical, they can go in and create rule sets.

You mentioned the controversy around the bridge software . It was called Bridgy Fed. This was some of the most intense GitHub comments I’ve ever seen in my entire life — truly out of control for basically a piece of middleware. Why do you think that happened? That the idea of bridging AT Protocol onto ActivityPub led to one of the most intense recent developer flame wars that I can think of? Is it the cultures of the protocols, the culture of Mastodon versus Bluesky? What, in your mind, led to that conflagration?

I think it’s a big part of the culture of Mastodon. This was, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that we didn’t try to get ActivityPub to change toward the direction of what we wanted to build because not just the technical primitives being different, there’s also this culture of resistance to global feeds and global algorithms. And that means that people who had tried to do a search engine for all of Mastodon in the past or things like this had gotten shut down even before Bridgy Fed in the past. I had seen that even back in 2020, 2021.

I think it’s just a continuation of that culture. And the key thing is even if you have a protocol that lets servers talk to each other and federate, part of it is human governance, and if people who run that server don’t want to talk to you, then even if the computers can talk, they don’t have to talk. And so that’s essentially people in Mastodon expressing their preferences of the kind of communities they want, which is, they don’t want to talk to Bluesky users, so they can just not federate. And then there was a lot of discussion that was around opt-in versus opt-out. So, it’s discussions around what kind of governance norms do we want to set as protocol communities.

Part of the argument in favor of the Mastodon culture that I’ve heard over and over again is it allows safer spaces to form for certain kinds of groups — that the servers can be closed. It is mostly opt-in that people defederate all the time in the Mastodon community. The number of servers that have defederated from Threads or have sworn a blood oath to never federate with Threads, it’s very high. Do you think about Bluesky as providing the same kinds of tools that make people feel like the spaces are safer?

That has been our goal: to give users the tools to build spaces that are as safe as they want. And I think one thing that people have said the protocol is missing right now is private accounts. That’s something we’d like to get there, but so far, in our mission statement, we’re focused on public data and the open Twitter model, and there’s other protocols out there for private communication. Like there’s Matrix, Signal, and other protocols that do private communication. So, we focused on the hard problem of global public conversations and algorithmic choice. But even within that, we want people to have the ability to feel that in Bluesky right now, they’re participating in public data, public posting, but you want to not interact with people who are going to harass you. You want to not see stuff that’s going to be damaging. 

So, you want to be able to partition off your little piece of the network. And so, we’ve tried to give people all the tools to do that, not just at the architectural level of here’s servers that you can run and here’s services you can host but also at more user-friendly levels, like the user lists and block lists and the ability to run your own labeling service where someone non-technical can do that through software that we built for you to go in and just say, “Alright, I want to start setting rules and filtering out this kind of content for me and my community.”

We’ve mentioned Threads several times now. Obviously, Meta is starting Threads. When you think about onboarding the non-technical user onto decentralized social media, Threads seems like it’s way ahead of the curve. It has 100 million users . It’s going to use ActivityPub, right? Meta has already started testing it. I think Adam Mosseri’s account can be followed on Mastodon through ActivityPub. Does that represent a competitive threat to you? Is that something that you’re watching, or are you trying to build something else?

I think it’s really interesting that the ecosystem is moving this direction overall. I also, at the end of the day, want everything to be on an open protocol, and I think that our protocol is the most resilient long-term and is going to give the most flexibility and guarantees of this being a healthy ecosystem where people can move around. But also, I’m just excited to see things starting to move this direction. Mike Masnick, who wrote “ Protocols, Not Platforms ” as a paper, said that he shopped this around to all the big tech companies at the time, and this is one of the things that convinced Jack to do Bluesky. So, Twitter listened, but Meta was like, “No, this is never going to happen.” But since then, they seemed to have moved on from that position, and maybe we were one of the things that have started moving things.

I think that overall, it’s a healthier direction to go toward open protocols. One of my concerns about ActivityPub and the Threads model is, because it’s so server-based, if you have one massive server come on, like the Threads server, things really centralize around that. And so, it might functionally not be very open because people are tied to the server and it’s hard to move, and it’s going to be really up to Threads whether they ever become fully protocol-compliant and let people move off Threads easily. Then, is there going to be that composability there? Are users really going to have that much control? Those are open questions, and we’ll see where Threads takes things. 

But I think that we’ve built that in from the start, this openness and composability. We’re also open-source, and so that’s the other guarantee. Our code is open-source, all these interfaces we’ve built. That’s not the case at Threads. It’s going to be something that, if it becomes fully protocol-compliant, I think there will still be risks to users.

One of the reasons you can see why Threads might prefer ActivityPub, just based on this conversation, is it’s very server-based. I’m guessing Meta loves the idea of running the big server. There’s some benefits to that, too. Meta has a giant compliance department and a huge content moderation team. There are parts of the Bluesky approach that seem like it’ll be very challenging to run at scale. Just really dumb — the data is everywhere. It seems undeletable because it’s so public. If there’s a copyright claim, can you actually pull something down? Can you get rid of it?

Ultimately, data has a place where it’s being hosted, so whatever server that you’re running, the server runs in the jurisdiction where you posted it, and whoever’s running that server is going to have to be responsive to their legal jurisdiction. So, there ultimately is a host for data. It just moves around more.

Are you thinking about that stuff, like, “Boy, we’re going to run in a bunch of jurisdictions, and the Indian government wants Bluesky to have an actual person in India that it can arrest if they don’t get the moderation rules they want”? Those seem like very thorny issues for a company that’s very early, especially one that has to explain, “Hey, maybe we don’t have all the controls that you’re used to from a TikTok or a YouTube.”

This is one of those things where I’m really glad we just hired Aaron because he has experience–

[ Laughs ] Fair enough.

... with platforms at scale and government requests, and our goal right now is to grow and get to that kinds of scale where these will be a good set of problems to have, but bringing in the expertise early so that we can be prepared to deal with it and someone who really understands our whole architecture and can help us navigate those questions is where we are right now, in terms of preparing for that.

One of the things you talked about rolling out soon is some of the composable moderation. I read your blog post about it . Again, just to be reductive — and tell me if I’m wrong — it seems like the core idea here is more people should be able to label more things in more ways. We’re going to allow the users to say, “Here are the labels, and we’ll get the labels out there.” It’s an election year. I feel like the election-year experiments with labels or the covid-year experiments with labels have taught us all a lot. What are you pulling from all of those previous experiences with big platforms doing labels to say, “Okay, our big idea is labels, but decentralized”?

I think Birdwatch was this project that we thought was really cool on Twitter, and seeing Community Notes come out of it was a success in terms of them pioneering an algorithm that could usefully augment and annotate information out there. And, basically, the interface we built is for a thousand algorithms like this to be experimented with, and for some of them to be complex algorithms that were very specialized algorithms like the Birdwatch algorithm, Community Notes algorithm. 

Or some of them to be very manual, like people are like, “I’m an expert in this thing. I’m just going to label for this thing.” And so then that allows all these things to come together to an experience that, again, it’s about harnessing collective intelligence, letting experts, people with local context, move faster on these things than the company whose interests might not be entirely aligned in solving this niche problem or this jurisdiction or that’s just too slow because it’s a big company or it’s a small team or whatever.

So, our goal is to let that whole ecosystem just iterate and experiment, and then we try to have some amount of leadership in terms of what we’re encouraging people to build, how we’re creating and surfacing the best stuff that gets built and bringing it to user’s attention and helping them install it. I think that it is going to produce a better system, and there’s some ideas right now in the academic world of this concept of moderation middleware that they’ve been designing and thinking around doing this within the centralized platform paradigm of offering, “Hey, instead of the only way to make change at these companies is to have nonprofits, interest groups, governments lobbying the company for change, maybe you could create a middleware interface where people could directly add some of their input into things.” Composable labeling is like middleware but as a first-class thing built in where anyone can build something like this, and because it’s fundamentally open, it’s taking that from the fundamental premise rather than trying to add that as an intervention into a centralized system not designed for it.

Can I ask you a question that I always ask the AR companies but, I think, plays in the world where we have different kinds of labeling systems? I can imagine a world where someone posts a picture of the US Capitol, and for an AR company, this is very difficult, right? You’re looking at the United States Capitol, and your Apple Vision Pro has to tell you what happened there, and you can either put January 6th or you can put the passage of Obamacare — two things that would enrage different people in very different ways.

If you have composable moderation, you have different kinds of algorithms, appending different kinds of labels. You still might break that shared reality. Someone might post a picture of the US Capitol, and one person might tell you, “This is where Donald Trump did a coup,” and someone else might say, “This is where the election was stolen from Donald Trump.” Are you worried about that sort of breaking of reality, or do you think the market will actually converge on the truth?

Both. I think that basically — to go very meta with this for one moment — I think that every new form of technology that comes along causes a lot of disruption, particularly information technology. So, when the printing press happened, people said, “This is going [out] in the world. We’re going to have heresies like revolutions.” All those things did happen, and there was a lot of chaos for a while because the shared truth of the old order broke down. But then eventually, we developed new institutions that built around the printing press, and we developed new ways of understanding the written word and arriving at truth. We developed encyclopedias. We developed the academic citation system. We developed a legal system that’s very text-based and builds off previous texts, and so we developed all these systems that helped us create a society that works.

I think the information era has once again totally fragmented shared reality that the printing press had established and the written word and then broadcast media, and so now everyone can broadcast on social media. And how do we develop new kinds of systems where we can come to shared truth again? We’ll have to develop systems that [have] new algorithms like community notes, that kind of approximate shared truth from all these people broadcasting into the web.

And how do we do that? Is it going to be a centralized effort where one company just funds and develops that and gets the right answer? Or are we going to open it up to experimentation and then maybe lots of people going at the problem start to arrive at the right answer? And our approach is the latter, which is opening up the system, having lots of people experiment on building new ways of curating, like arriving at approximating truth, pulling lenses apart to look at this shared information and then combining them again will approximate at some point. People will start to converge around new ways of doing things. 

So, we also, as a company in the ecosystem, will be trying to approximate: what is a good way to do this? What are the best labels out there? How do we bring those in? Maybe if we’ve talked to a reputable fact-checking org and they’re running a really good fact-checking service, we’ll promote this in the app, but then someone else could build a different app, and then how is the ecosystem going to evolve? Well, it’s an open system, and eventually, at some point, we’ll probably reach a point where we know what the good sorts of ways of arriving at truth are and the good institutions, like providing objective stuff or stuff that gets things right most of the time, and we’ll converge around that.

That’s a very high-minded idea. You have to fund it. It sounds like your plan to fund it and be sustainable is to operate those marketplaces to take a cut. So, I buy an algorithm from you, and you’ll take a piece of that transaction.

Yeah. As a company, but then also because this is an open ecosystem, it’s not just limited to our funding model. We are in the early stages of building out this vision, and so we need to keep going, prove out the vision, show this, make money as a company, create a marketplace, but then also somebody running one of these services on its own, already people building clients like other services in the ecosystem are… some of them are charging, some of them are taking donations. I think some things will end up nonprofit-funded. If you look at things like email, you have big companies that run email services. You also have nonprofits that run their own email servers, and you have institutions like your university might give you an email, or your company might provide you an email.

And so, this is something where if we show value, once again, money follows value; we show enough value in this ecosystem. Some of these might become institutions funded by nonprofits who are interested in a better information ecosystem. They might fund moderation services, might fund feeds, things like this. Institutions might run them. Communities might get together and self-fund. Some of them might be paid services that payments happen outside of us. Others might be paid services where the payments happen through us.

Do you think any of them will be businesses unto themselves? I’m reminded of this Bill Gates quote about Windows as a platform, where he is like, “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that made the platform.” So, all the people who built companies on Windows, you add them all up, they exceed the value of Microsoft. You’re kind of talking like that, right? You’re going to build a platform. You’re going to let people buy and sell on it and build products on top of it. Do you see someone saying, “Okay, there’s an opportunity to build a great content moderation company that runs on top of AT Protocol that Bluesky users can buy”?

We’ve already seen some people start to move in that direction. I think that is something that’s going to happen.

How long until that happens?

I wish I could see the future, but I don’t actually have that ability.

You’re probably better at seeing it than I am. I’m very curious. This feels like there’s some inkling of “this is how it should work,” but you’ve got to train a whole bunch of people to think differently, and they’re right up next to Elon Musk being like, “I’ll just do it for you. Just show up and tweet.” That seems like the hard part, right?

Right now, a lot of what we’re doing is trying to communicate the vision, like talking to you. Earlier on, before we built stuff out, yeah, like last year, I was turning down a lot of media because we had to build this out, and we really want to show, not tell. Now we have examples that we can point to, and it makes it a lot more real rather than me just sitting here expounding on the printing press. It’s very high-minded and not concrete. But now we actually have examples of many different feeds and many different services that have been built in this ecosystem, and so one of the things we’re starting to do is to fund the developer ecosystem.

We’ve started a grant system, and we’re going to start giving money to some projects just to help boost this ecosystem, but I think over time, these funding models are going to shift and change, and we’re going to experiment with a lot of them because a whole ecosystem that’s like the web means a whole variety of experiments like the web itself kicked off, and I find that really exciting because social has been in a period of stagnation because it’s consolidated in a few companies, and early on, people built all sorts of Twitter clients and experiments on social, and even Facebook was more open back in the day, and then that whole ecosystem got closed down when these companies shut down their APIs.

But if we open that up again, I think social will be [in] another period of experimentation. There will be lots of companies and hobbyists, just people trying things and playing around again. It’ll be like a playground era of social but in a mixed iteration where we’re aware of a lot of the problems that happen through platforms and mass broadcast at scale. And we have a lot of new tooling, like machine learning has moved on a lot since the last time we had a lot of growth in social, so I think a lot of interesting things are going to come out of this era of building.

Let me end by bringing us all the way down on the ground. You have a lot of big ideas about protocols and platforms. (I’m obviously obsessed with them.) But you run a social network that’s growing in an election year. You’ve had to deal with some very real content moderation controversies on Bluesky already. There’s been some real problems with racism. There’s been problems with death threats, and you’ve just had to do some direct moderation, just take some direct moderation decisions. 

It’s an election year. It’s going to be weird. There’s going to be a bunch of AI deepfakes of both candidates coming. Do you think your new tools are going to let you address that stuff in a new way, or are you going to have to go back to the old ways and just take some direct moderation decisions as you’ve had to in the past?

I think the new tools will help a lot, and we’re also not relying entirely on them. As with everything we’ve done, we’re doing a hybrid approach where we are running our own moderation team with experienced leadership and we are going to do our best, and then we also have all these open interfaces where other people who are more experts or people who think we’re not doing it well come in and do it themselves, and then we’ll stitch a hole together out of both all the open experimentation and the decisions that we’re directly making and what we decide to carve out as, like, this is stuff we’re doing really well and that we think the foundation we need to set for this to be a good experience.

Are you worried about the flood of AI-generated garbage on every platform? Is that coming for Bluesky right now?

Not quite yet. I mean, we’ve been dealing with spam and all the other problems that networks run into, but we’ve also been building our own automated tooling, and it’s a constant cat-and-mouse game, but we’re trying to stay cutting edge in terms of how we address these things using a combination of human moderation and automated tooling to catch stuff. And then also, part of the open interface is we’ve already seen some cool experimentation going on. We had a hackathon a few weeks ago at [Y Combinator], and there were some groups that made deepfake detectors using state-of-the-art models that do deepfake detection, and so it’s this cat-and-mouse game of AI is being built to create deepfakes. Also, there’s deepfake detectors now, and so those things can come together into things that, if we don’t pull them in directly, they can run as independent services in this composable moderation thing, and if they’re running really well and super critical to the ecosystem, then we’ll find ways to integrate them more into the app experience.

Are you seeing that already taking place on Bluesky, or are you just watching this sort of Taylor Swift deepfake problem on X and hoping it doesn’t hit you before that stuff is ready?

We haven’t seen a lot of it yet, but we’re preparing to deal with it through both our policies and training, making sure everyone is aware and then also making sure that we’ve gotten this moderation tooling built out, which you’ll be able to see in action soon, that’s going to let people start to make these interventions.

Alright, last question. It feels like the people who run the more centralized platforms have lately become utterly beholden to their own posters. Like, Elon Musk seems very responsive to the posters on Twitter. Adam Mosseri, in the middle of the night, is like, “I’ll look into it.” You see that reaction, like, “I’ll be the face of the thing.” To some extent, you’re the face of Bluesky. You’re here doing this interview, but you have an out. It’s come up several times in this conversation: “We’ll see what the marketplace does. We’ll see what the community does.” Do you feel that pressure to be the face and to be responsive, or do you think that that out will actually take hold?

Yeah, I do, and I’ve accepted it to some extent, and I’ve also told people I am sort of the steward of this ecosystem right now and the creator of… let’s think of it as a city-state in an ecosystem we’re trying to build. My bio on Bluesky is, “Let’s build a federated republic starting with this server.” And so, there’ll be lots of other federations out there. I encourage you to start one, and I will do my best on this one. 

Something we joke about on the app is that “posters madness” is a real thing that people can get on social media. We try to do some internal awareness on becoming audience captured by our own audience and stay aware of that. And then also, I try to do my best to — I’m a poster — engage with the community but not be the main character all the time. There was a joke at Bluesky I found very funny, which is, “The one thing I love most about this app is I don’t know who the CEO is.” Just like, great. If it’s a thriving enough community where it doesn’t even need me as a main character, that’s great.

Well, Jay, that is an incredible place to end it. You’re a great main character, by the way. Thank you so much for being here.

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