The Process of Learning and Socialisation

Ascribed status is a social position that a person is born into or that is fixed and beyond their control, such as their sex, ethnicity or being born into a royal family.

Achieved status is a social position that a person earns through their own effort and actions, such as becoming a qualified doctor, a graduate or a team captain.

Reason 1 — feral and isolated children. Children raised with little or no human contact fail to develop 'normal' human behaviour, which suggests behaviour must be learned through socialisation rather than appearing naturally. For example, Genie, who was isolated for years, never fully developed language despite later teaching, and Oxana Malaya, raised among dogs, walked on all fours and barked. If language and social behaviour were natural, they would still have developed.

Reason 2 — cross-cultural variation. What counts as 'normal' behaviour differs between societies, which shows it is culturally learned, not biologically fixed. Margaret Mead's research in New Guinea found that 'masculine' and 'feminine' temperaments varied between three societies. If gender behaviour were natural, it would be the same everywhere, so the variation is evidence of socialisation.

Participant observation involves the researcher joining a group and taking part in its activities while observing, either overtly (the group knows) or covertly (the group does not).

Strengths. It produces highly valid, in-depth data because the researcher sees socialisation happening naturally in its real setting — for example watching how parents reward and correct young children. It is especially useful for studying young children who are too young to complete questionnaires or formal interviews. Interactionists favour it because it captures the meanings and interactions through which the self develops (verstehen).

Limitations. It is very time-consuming, so samples are small and unrepresentative, making generalisation difficult (a positivist criticism). The observer effect (Hawthorne effect) means people — even children's carers — may change their behaviour when watched, reducing validity. There are serious ethical issues in observing children, especially covertly, around consent and protection. Because the study is hard to replicate, it has low reliability.

Overall, participant observation offers strong validity and rich insight into the socialisation process but is weak on reliability and representativeness, so it is best combined with other methods through triangulation.

This view can be explained by the special position the family holds as the agency of primary socialisation — the first and most intense learning a person experiences.

First, the family comes first, when the child is at its most impressionable. It teaches the most basic and essential things — language, toilet training, manners and the earliest norms and values — that all later (secondary) socialisation builds upon. Without this foundation, the child could not function in education or wider society.

Second, the family transmits values deeply because learning is reinforced by strong emotional bonds. A child wants the approval of parents, so norms taught through love and informal sanctions are internalised powerfully. Talcott Parsons described the family as the 'personality factory' that produces socialised individuals and stabilises adult personalities, internalising the shared values of society.

Third, interactionists such as Cooley and Mead argue that the very sense of 'self' first develops through family interaction — the 'looking-glass self' and 'taking the role of the other' begin with parents as significant others. For all these reasons, supporters argue the family is the foundation on which every other agency depends, making it the most important.

Several arguments challenge the claim that the family is the most important agency.

First, other agencies may have a deeper influence at key stages. During adolescence the peer group can override family norms: teenage subcultures show young people adopting peer values, fashions and attitudes that directly conflict with their parents' wishes. The family's grip clearly weakens as children grow.

Second, Marxists prioritise education and the media, not the family. Althusser argued the most powerful 'ideological state apparatuses' are education and the media, which transmit ruling-class ideology to whole populations. The hidden curriculum (Bowles and Gintis) shapes values such as obedience and acceptance of hierarchy that the family alone could not impose.

Third, the media is increasingly pervasive. Children now spend enormous amounts of time exposed to global role models, advertising and social media, which shape identity, body image and aspirations — arguably more visibly than the family.

Finally, the claim is hard to sustain conceptually. There is no agreed way to measure which agency is 'most important', and influence varies by age, culture and individual. In societies where religion is central, religious institutions may matter more than the family. The view therefore oversimplifies a complex, shifting process.

Socialisation is the lifelong process through which people learn the culture — the norms and values — of their society. The view in the question suggests this process is essentially one of producing conformity. There is strong support for this from structural theories, but the word 'simply' is questionable once we recognise human agency. This essay argues that socialisation powerfully encourages conformity yet is not a one-way process of control.

The case that socialisation produces conformity. Functionalists make this argument most directly. Durkheim saw socialisation as creating a shared 'collective conscience', and Parsons argued that primary socialisation in the family internalises society's central values so deeply that conformity feels natural, producing value consensus and social order. Agencies of social control reinforce this through positive and negative sanctions. Strikingly, Marxists and feminists also see socialisation as producing conformity — but to the values of powerful groups. For Marxists such as Althusser, ideological state apparatuses transmit ruling-class ideology and create false consciousness, so workers accept inequality. For feminists such as Oakley, gender-role socialisation (manipulation, canalisation, verbal appellation, differential activities) makes individuals conform to patriarchal expectations. All three perspectives therefore support the idea that socialisation generates conformity.

The case against 'simply'. Interactionists reject the passive model implied by 'simply'. Cooley and Mead show that the self develops through active interpretation — individuals 'take the role of the other' and negotiate meanings rather than absorbing rules mechanically. People can and do resist: deviant subcultures, rebellion against parents, social movements and the existence of social change all demonstrate that socialisation does not guarantee conformity. If socialisation simply produced conformity, society could never change — yet attitudes to gender, race and authority have transformed across generations. Furthermore, agencies often send contradictory messages (family vs peer group vs media), forcing individuals to choose, which itself implies agency rather than automatic conformity.

Evaluation. The functionalist view is strong in explaining order and the persistence of shared values, but it underplays conflict and treats people as over-socialised 'puppets'. The Marxist and feminist views helpfully show that conformity can serve powerful interests, but they too can be deterministic. The interactionist view restores human agency but can underestimate just how constraining socialisation is for most people most of the time.

Conclusion. Socialisation does powerfully encourage conformity — to shared values, and often to the interests of dominant groups — so the view is partly correct. However, the word 'simply' is too strong. Because individuals interpret, negotiate and sometimes resist, and because societies change, socialisation is better understood as a two-way process that both integrates people into society and is itself shaped by them. It produces conformity, but not simply or completely.