According to sociologist Charles Cooley, there are two types of socialisation: primary and secondary. Those factors that are involved in primary socialisation are usually small, involve face-to-face interaction and communication and allow the individual to express the whole self, both feelings and intellect. Usually, those factors are the family, peer groups, of close friends and closely-knit groups of neighbours. Within these groups, through personal experience, the individual learns ‘primary values’ such as love, loyalty, justice, sharing, and etc. Freud claimed that the first few years of a person’s life – those usually spent amongst primary groups – are the most important in forming the structure of the person’s character.
In contrast, secondary groups are usually large, more impersonal and formally organised, and exist for specific purposes. In the secondary stage, the individual learns by himself or herself more values and norms which are to be applied for the individual to fit in. This includes learning how to organise and conduct oneself in formal contexts (backgrounds) and how to behave towards people who have different degrees of status and authority. One of the crucial agents of secondary socialisation is school. Trade unions and professional associations, also secondary socialisation agents, can affect an individual’s behaviour when an individual agrees to conform to the beliefs, aims and regulations of the organisation. Therefore, indirectly, the individual accepts a socialising influence on his or her conduct.
In both primary and secondary groups, the mass media (e.g. radio, television, the cinema) also plays a vital part in socialising individuals. For example during primary socialisation, by watching certain cartoons, a child (although indirectly) can already be socialised of his or her gender roles, such as patriarchal ideology (e.g. where the cartoon might portray the girl as the weaker one, always being bullied and being the helpless, damsel in distress; while the boy will then be the hero). Later, during secondary socialisation, magazines (a form of mass media) can also reinforce gender roles such as saying that girls must learn to cook so that they could cook for their husbands later in marriage.
One way of studying the role of society in shaping human behaviour is to examine the development of individuals who were either completely or nearly excluded from any social interaction for a period of their lives. This includes cases of those who spent most of their childhood isolated from others in the wild (such as the ‘Wild boy of Aveyron’ and the two girls, ‘Wolf children of Bengal’) and those who were cut off from others through confinement (imprisonment), also during childhood (such as the cases of Anna and Isabelle). The case of the wolf children revealed that their behaviour was very similar to the wolves that had apparently raised them. They preferred raw meat, moved on all fours and lacked any form of speech. There is a more recent case described by O’Donnell where a 14 year old boy found in the Syrian desert had exceptional speed and had adopted some of the behavioural characteristics of the gazelles he was found with.
On the other hand, in the case of Anna, she was kept in an upstairs room since infant and received only enough care to keep her barely alive; she had no attention nor was given instructions. When finally found and removed from the room, Anna couldn’t talk, walk, or any signs that showed intelligence. She was unhealthy and apathetic. She was believed to be deaf and possibly blind. This was a human organism stripped of nearly six years of socialisation. Her condition shows how little her purely biological resources, when acting alone, could contribute to making her a complete person. Since the time she has been found and taken care by the individuals in charge of her, she had made considerable improvements. Her improvement showed that socialisation, even when started late at the age of six, could still do a great deal toward making her a person.
The effects of growing up in unsocial conditions in these and other analogous cases seem consistent. When the children emerged immediately in the society, the children were typically described by observers as ‘primitive’ and ‘hardly human’. None of the children developed social and communication skills beyond a basic level, in spite of attempts and efforts to resocialise them. Above all, their absence or limited ability to learn language prevented them from functioning fully in the adult society. These cases, also, collectively suggest that human development, especially of gaining basic social and communication skills, needs considerable contact with others. Only in social background that human self can develop.
Therefore, self and society balances each other and are complementary concepts rather than conflicts with each other as they sometimes appear to be. Without socialisation, an individual would bear little resemblance to any human being defined as normal by the standards of his or her society. You can’t have individuals without society or society without individuals.