socialization and phychology

The assignments for today all dealt with topics such as signs, symbols, socialization, and the dialectic interaction between society and the individual. I found the discussion on the social process by which people construct their conception of reality in Berger and Luckman’s article especially interesting. Through the process of “human externalization,” individuals influence the social order, and through the process of institutionalization, these modes of behavior become “typified”, habitualized, and rigified into acceptance. As children grow older and inevitably come to interact with their society, they generally perceive the norms and expectations of the social order to be rigid, pre-existent, or simply “the way things are.” In other words, they often view their social world as an objective reality.

In his article, Vygotsky explained how this perception of the world becomes internalized into the individual. By emphasizing the historical development of an individual’s psychological functions, he placed a greater emphasis on the development of such functions within a certain cultural context. In other worlds, while some of his contemporary psychologists were concerned with isolated stimulus-response experiments on behavior or mental functions, Vygotsky studied the way that culture becomes engrained in an individual’s phyche over a period of time.

The process of socialization intrigues me. I would like explore it more in the future.