Socialization Unit 3 Terms Personality Heredity Instinct Sociobiology

Socialization Unit 3

Terms • • • Personality Heredity Instinct Sociobiology Aptitude Feral children

Personality • …is the sum of total behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and values that are characteristic of an individual. • Determine how we adjust to our environment and how we react in specific situations. • Personality traits will continue to develop throughout your life.

Heredity • The transmission of genetic characteristics from parents to children.

Sociobiology • …is the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior. • Sociobiologists argue that varied cultural characteristics and behavioral traits as religion, cooperation, competition, slavery, territoriality, and envy are rooted in the genetic makeup of humans.

Aptitude • Is the capacity to learn a particular skill or acquire a particular body of knowledge. • example: natural talent for music or art (inherited capability) • Hunger drive – Does not tell you when to eat, what to eat, or how to eat – you learn such things through interaction with other human beings [Heredity provides you with certain biological needs, but culture determines how you meet those needs. ]

Feral Children • Children raised without the influence of a cultural environment. Examples: • “wild” or “untamed” children – were found living with animals. • They had acquired no reasoning ability, no manners, and no ability to control their bodily functions or move about like other human beings.

Nature vs Nurture • The debate by social scientists • What determines personality and social behavior? • Nature (Heredity) • Nurture (Environment/Social Learning)

Nature • Human behavior is instinctual in origin. • Instinctual drives are responsible for practically everything. – Laughing, motherhood, warfare, religion, capitalism, even the creation of society itself. • The emergence of sociobiology in the 1970 s emphasized the nature viewpoint.

Nurture • Ivan Pavlov – a person’s behavior and personality are the result of his or her social learning environment. • Conducted experiments with dogs to find the relationship between the nervous system and digestion. – Dogs salivate when fed because saliva aids in digestion. – Pavlov rang a bell every time he fed the dogs. – Eventually he rang the bell but did not feed the dogs. • They still salivated. They had to learned to salivate at the sound of the bell.