Q 3
Our prior socialization helps explain a gigantic chunk of who we are at present -- what we think and feel, where we plan to go in life. But we are not limited by the things given to us by our prior social learning experiences; we can take all our remaining days and steer our future social learning in directions that we value. The more that we know about the socialization process, the more effective we can be in directing our future learning in the ways that will help us most.
Because we were not able to select our parents, we were not able to control much of the first 10 or 20 years of our socialization. However, most people learn to influence their own socialization as they gain experience in life. It takes special skills to steer and direct our own socialization, and many of us pick up some of those skills naturally as we go through life. Having a course on socialization can help us understand which skills are most effective in guiding our socialization toward the goals we most value.
It is important to know that we all come into life with a variety of psychology systems that foster self-actualization and favor the development of our human potential. These are the biosocial mechanisms that underlie natural socialization. We can see and study natural socialization by examining the socialization of primates and other mammals. Once we under the natural biosocial processes, we can try to build strategies of self-actualization that are compatible with the natural biosocial mechanisms we are born with to make self-development as easy and rewarding as possible.
Soc shows how the natural self-actualization systems operate in everyday life so we can create as many good social experiences as possible. The study of behavior principles in everyday life is crucial to this, and that is why John and Janice Baldwin wrote a book with that name. If we understand the ways to create positive socialization experiences, we can take our human potential and develop the happy and creative sides of that potential. If we had too much negative socialization in the past and have learned to be too sad or inhibited, knowledge about positive socialization can help minimize some of the pain and allow us to build toward a more positive and creative future.