Socialization Sociology

Socialization is the process through which humans learn the values, behavioral norms, knowledge and skills of their societies. This process teaches humans to be humans in a culturally specific way while reproducing a society's culture. Socialization is necessary for human development because humans are not guided by instincts in the same way that other animals are. For example, instinct might tell a human that he or she is hungry and needs to get out of the cold, but no instinct tells humans exactly what to eat or how to catch and prepare it, and no instinct tells humans how to build shelter. Sociologists believe that socialization cannot occur in isolation; humans need to be socialized by other people to become fully functioning members of

Without socialization, there could be no societies. Sociologists believe that socialization is impossible without human contact. Studies of children who have been raised in isolation or confined to institutions suggest that contact with other people, especially contact that provides cognitive, physical and emotional stimulation, are crucial for human development. Studies of animals raised in isolation support these claims. While there is generally agreement that isolation stunts development, the manner in which contact with others influences development is debated by sociologists and other

This question has intrigued sociologists, biologists, anthropologists and psychologists, yet it of course remains unanswerable since there is no ethical way to conduct isolation experiments on human infants. There is evidence to suggest that humans raised in isolation would lack many of the features that we generally think of as "human." This evidence comes from studies of children who have been raised in extreme isolation, studies of institutionalized children, and studies of isolated animals.

While cases of socially isolated children are rare, a few exist that show the deleterious effects of lack of human contact. One of the earliest documented cases is the "Wild Boy of Aveyron," a boy called Victor found in 1798 when he was seven years old. He was supposedly raised by animals in a rural area of France, and was captured in January of 1800. Modern speculation suggests that he was probably an abandoned child, and might be the first documented case of autism. He died at the age of 40 at an annex of the Paris Institution des Sourds-Muets (Appelbaum & Chambliss,