Socialization Theory Quotes

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

I focused on how these people became how they were.

If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.

Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'

The primary problem in the psychology of becoming is to account for the transformation by which the unsocialized infant becomes an adult with structured loves, hates, loyalties, and interests, capable of taking his place in a complexly ordered society.