The Power of Cultural Norms: Navigating Society through Socialization

Abstract

People live in a world where they are guided by beliefs and values they believe in or have come up with over time. Laws have been implemented and eventually became cultures, not forgetting about the beliefs in the superiority and origin of the earth. Culture could be defined along a wide range of perspectives depending on beliefs from different settings. What could be considered as culture in one region could not be so in a different setting depending on the food, music, clothes, religion, or even language. However, in the broader picture, culture could be termed as the way of life of a particular group of people. The way of life could be regarding behaviors, the accepted symbols in that particular community, beliefs they entrust in, and symbols and values acquired by a group of people through generations. There are a couple of ways through which societies put values, norms, and beliefs in a society. One such is through sanctions. Values are what dictate how people should live but not what they live. To this reaction, therefore, rewards and punishments are applied to make people do good and shun what is not considered to be morally right. Upholding the norms of a given society, they are rewarded, and failure to sue and punishment follows. In such cases, the sanctions act as social control, which aids in encouraging people in a given community to conform to certain cultural norms. A good example is when young people are expected to respect their elders by standing up for them in filled-up buses. The elderly, on the other hand, may reward them with good gestures and intentions. On the other hand, breaking norms in society may make one sanctioned, which may lead to one picking negative labels like being branded as rude, lazy, or other forms of sanctions concerning the law, which may include fines, traffic tickets, or even imprisonment. Socialization is the process that describes how people understand the norms set in a particular society and have a deeper understanding of the expectations of that particular society. It could be described as the process through which people are taught to be proficient members of a particular society. In other words, it is the process of learning how to blend well with other members of society and be in a position to behave in a manner that is acceptable in that particular community. The looking-glass self by Charles Cooley comprises three steps which are the bases of development or socialization in people. In a recap, the theory describes how a person’s social identity or self depends on how they are concerning others (Nickerson, 2021). Social interaction acts like a mirror in that people use others' judgment to measure their worth; how others react to how one behaves one a rough idea about oneself. With this argument, therefore, a person cannot know about themselves in solitary because there would be no feedback from others. Therefore, socialization is the leading way to self-definition. Mead argued that interaction with others offered the chance for self-realization (Willis Hepp, Hrapczynski, and Fortner‐Wood, 2019). He argued that people make imaginations of how they appear to other people. On the same, depending on how people present themselves in the presence of others, they tend to imagine how they are and also depending on their appearances. Finally, Mead argued that to other people, people tend to imagine their feelings based on the judgment they make about others (Hinkle, 2020). However, Functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and Functionalism are the three fundamental theories within sociology that define how society influences people. However, each of them influences independently, whereby symbolic interactionism employs symbols like, for instance, face-to-face interactions. On this, people tend to attach meanings to symbols. On the other hand, Functionalism defines the relationship between different parts of society and is embraced. For instance, when children go to school, parents pay fees, and with time, the education culture is shared between the government and society. Finally, the...