An idea that illustrates a cultural approach to understanding patterns of human behaviour is that people choose to do things in a wide variety of ways because of our individuality. When we look at human social behaviour we find a huge cultural diversity, just as we also find a range of similarities. Examples of cultural diversity are not difficult to find. For instance, in our society it is considered normal for a man and woman to fall in love, get married and not to have any other sexual partners (monogamy) but other societies consider it normal for a man to marry a number of women at the same time and to have sexual relations with all of them (polygamy). These differences show that we are all born into a society that has certain rules and we learn these rules through a process of socialisation. People are not born knowing how to behave and in effect we must learn to “be human”.
A sense of belonging to the same culture can be broken down into smaller groups where members share a particular way of life. We call these groups subcultures. Examples of these are:
- Football supporters
- Travellers
- University students
- Church goers
Being a member of a subculture group means that you have chosen a certain “way of life”. For instance, a student is expected to attend classes and learn. However, being part of one subculture does not exclude you from being part of another group or the culture of society as a whole. Each individual can have many roles in society and each role has a number of associated characteristics. By playing different roles we introduce two things into our life:
- A sense of order
- A sense of predictability
In this respect, role play helps us to regulate our behaviour and that of others. The adoption of roles is a way of controlling people’s behaviour, because the norms associated with each role give us bench marks against which to judge acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. The wide number and variety of these roles can cause frustrations within society especially where they lead to conflict in our daily lives. Frustrations in society exist every where and the ways in which we respond to them vary due to differing situations and reactions. For example, we may choose to internalise our frustration if we have a conflict with our employer as we do not want to lose our employment. This internalisation can lead to problems with health as our body responds to the stress placed on it. On the other hand, we may deal with our frustration by aggressive measures such as hitting out both verbally and physically.
Because people create rules of behaviour that are the basis of social organisation and since we have the choice whether or not to obey these rules, they have to be supported by social sanctions. These sanctions are a necessary part of making people conform to our expectations and can be one of two types:
- Positive sanctions
- Negative sanctions
Social controls are attempts – sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful – to ensure that the values and norms that operate within society and its subcultures are obeyed by all members.
In the final analysis we can therefore see that all of the different kinds of influences that shape human behaviour are necessary to ensure a society that functions. Each individual member of society plays a particular role which reflects the values and beliefs of the society’s culture and the ways in which we learn and adapt these roles and how we apply them is called socialisation.
