Jenny Ly

Sociology 1
Professor Lookholder
January 31, 2016
Nature vs Nurture
Twin studies tell us that the enviornment around us affects our preferences and beliefs. When
we live in a certain areas we start liking and disliking the same things as the people around us.
This is due to our innate desire to fit in with the people around us. The twins that were studied in
the sociology book lived in two different areas, they generally had the same hobbies but they
liked and disliked different things. One twin liked to work while the other liked to lay around and
do nothing. I think the development of an individuals intellect differs with the enviornment that
they live in. Like the girl who lived in captivity for 13 years. When she did start learning how to
communicate at the age of 14, her speech resembled an 18 month olds speech capability.
The self is each of out individual personalities and how we are unique and different from each
other. The three phases of Charles Cooleys looking glass self theory is how a person thinks
other people sees them. They then try to imagine what other people think of them. Lastly they
pull the clues they have gathered together and they come to a conclusion of what theyare based
on what other believe about them. The difference between I and me is that I is how we act and
me is how things are planned. Significant others are people who are important in our lives. They
are the people who we interact with the most. Meads self development stages include the
preporatory stage, which is when children copy what people around them do because they do
not know how to act themselves yet. Then the play stage which is when children develop
communication skills and are more social. Children are likely to play pretend and be different
people such as doctors or firefighters. The last stage is the game stage which is when children
start to develop a sense of what role they play in life. They figuire out what they want to do and
what theyre meant to do in life.
The dramaturgical approach is the study of the interaction between people as if they were
reading THE SCRIPT OF LIFE. Everyone has to do their part because they are apart of the
society and society would fail if they didnt. Front-stage is where performances happen, where
the scripts are read and followed. Backstage is where things are prepared and ready for the
performance. Erving Goffmans idea of impression management and face work can be used to
understand social behavior because impression management is when we try to change our
behavior so that we are different from others and make each of us unique. Face-work is when
we prevent ourselves from embarassing ourselves. Social behavior between individuals are
always affected by these factors.
The agents of socialization are family, school, peer groups, mass media/technology, the
workplace, and religion/the state. The role of schools in gender role socialization is teaching
children social norms and cultural knowledge. Technology had influenced socialization because
it teaches people cultural differences in other countries and it changes how people can interact
with eachother be introducing new ways sych as email or texting. Social media is important in

how socialization has changed because it allows interaction between people from different
cultures.
Total institutions control everything in a persons life. There are different types such as boarding
schools and prisons. Goffman identifies total institutions as those where everything in one life is
controlled by a single authority, anything that happens to one person in the facility must happen
to the other individuals. The authority must create all the rules and control all the activities,
individuals in the facility have no say in what happens. The facility is open because they have a
purpose and must fulfill the purpose of it. Degredation ceremonies mortify ones sense of self
because they lose their sense of unique-ness. They become more and more like everybody else
in the facility. They lose their sense of self because they lose what makes them unique.
Societies have different ways with dealing with elderly populations. It differs between cultures
because some cultures see elderly as wise and other cultures see the elderly as difficult to deal
with. There are many views of the elderly. The disengagement theory differs from the acitivity
theory because the the disengagement theory suggests that whether or not the aging
individuals stays active or not, they will eventually lose their relationships with those around
them. While the activity theory states that when the elderly individual stays active, their life will
be better than those who do not. A solution to ageism is to prove to people that older people are
strong enough to go through with jobs and also prove that the elderly have as much stamina as
young people do. Ageism can also be prevented by proving that the elderly are wiser and able
to provide solutions to problems that the younger generation may face.