Write short note: Socialization and personality. (1990)
Personality is the relatively stable organisation of an individual’s attitudes, motives, habits and ways of acting, which Gordon Allport (1937) called the “dynamic organisation” that shapes a person’s adjustment to the environment. Socialisation is the lifelong process by which a biological infant learns a society’s culture and becomes a social self. The sociological claim is that personality is not simply inborn: heredity supplies potential, and socialisation turns it into a person.
Evidence that personality is socially made
- Kingsley Davis studied children reared in extreme isolation, Anna (1940) and Isabelle (1947). Anna, deprived of human contact, barely developed speech or a sense of self. Isabelle, given intensive training after rescue, caught up within about two years. Without interaction, the human potential for personality stays unrealised.
How socialisation builds personality
- Sigmund Freud (The Ego and the Id, 1923): parental discipline is internalised as the superego, which checks the drives of the id. Early family relations leave a lasting imprint.
- Charles Horton Cooley (Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902): the looking-glass self. We imagine how others see us and judge us, and feel pride or shame as a result.
- George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self and Society, 1934): through the play and game stages the child takes the role of significant others and then of the generalized other. The self has two sides, the socialised “me” and the creative “I”.
- Erik Erikson (Childhood and Society, 1950): identity is shaped across eight stages from infancy to old age, so socialisation continues through life. Adult roles, marriage, occupation and resocialisation in “total institutions” (Erving Goffman, Asylums, 1961) keep reshaping the self.
Agencies and differences
- Family lays down basic trust, emotional style and gender identity. Peers teach equality and group loyalty. School teaches achievement and impersonal rules (Talcott Parsons). Media now supplies models of the self at every age.
- Because class, caste, gender and region give people different socialisation, personalities differ even within one culture. Alan Roland (In Search of Self in India and Japan, 1988) described a “familial self” among Indians, formed in extended families with many caretakers. Sudhir Kakar (The Inner World, 1978) traced how close early mother–child ties and joint-family life shape Indian identity.
- Digital socialisation is gendered. The ASER 2023 survey of rural youth aged 14–18 found that close to 90% had a smartphone at home, but 43.7% of boys owned one against 19.8% of girls. Unequal access to the newest agency breeds unequal confidence and autonomy.
Limits of the socialisation view
- Dennis Wrong (“The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology”, 1961) warned that people are not simply products of norms; drives, conflict and choice remain.
- Temperament and genetic endowment set limits on what socialisation can do.
- Socialisation can fail or be contradictory, producing deviant or innovative personalities. Mead’s “I” is the source of such novelty.
Conclusion
Personality is best seen as the meeting point of biology, culture and individual experience, with socialisation as the process that joins them. It explains why people become recognisably members of their society. The “I”, the unevenness of agencies and the capacity for resocialisation explain why they never become identical copies of it.