OpenStax, Chapter 3

Project 1 asked you to find culture in everyday social life. Culture is a total way of life. It is created and learned. Sociology, to this extent, does not see culture as biological, although it is predicated on biological make-up. For example, human beings do not speak a language without social intervention. Language is created through social interaction, and in order to facilitate social interaction. That is to say, it is not innate. This topic focuses not on the creation of culture but its transmission – on socialization. Socialization refers to the process of cultural learning. This ensures that what has been created will not be unlearned. Consider the pattern of ethnic assimilation whereby immigrant languages erode and even disappear among American-born generations.

Socialization is the process of learning culture in order to fit into society. It describes the ways that people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values. Socialization is not the same as socializing (interacting with others, like family, friends, and coworkers); to be precise, it is a sociological process that occurs through socializing. As the story of Danielle in Openstax Chapter 3 illustrates, even the most basic of human activities are learned. Even physical tasks like sitting, standing, and walking had not automatically developed for Danielle as she grew. And without socialization, Danielle hadn’t learned about the material culture of her society (the tangible objects a culture uses): for example, she couldn’t hold a spoon, bounce a ball, or use a chair for sitting. She also hadn’t learned its nonmaterial culture, such as its beliefs, values, and norms. She had no understanding of the concept of “family,” didn’t know cultural expectations for using a bathroom for elimination, and had no sense of modesty. Most importantly, she hadn’t learned to use the symbols that make up language—through which we learn about who we are, how we fit with other people, and the natural and social worlds in which we live.

Sociologists have long been fascinated by circumstances in which a child receives sufficient human support to survive, but virtually no social interaction—because they highlight how much we depend on social interaction to provide the information and skills that we need to be part of society or even to develop a “self.” We will return to the latter below for the second option in this section.

Socialization is critical both to individuals and to the societies in which they live. It illustrates how completely intertwined human beings and their social worlds are. First, it is through teaching culture to new members that a society perpetuates itself. If new generations of a society don’t learn its way of life, it ceases to exist. Whatever is distinctive about a culture must be transmitted to those who join it in order for a society to survive. For U.S. culture to continue, for example, children in the United States must learn about cultural values related to democracy: they have to learn the norms of voting, as well as how to use material objects such as voting machines. Of course, some would argue that it’s just as important in U.S. culture for the younger generation to learn the etiquette of eating in a restaurant or the rituals of tailgate parties at football games. In fact, there are many ideas and objects that people in the United States teach children about in hopes of keeping the society’s way of life going through another generation.

From this perspective, we have not been effectively “socialized” for this moment in history defined by a global pandemic. Indeed, we have to create or invent new ways to continue our culture and be our collective and individual selves. We are struggling to do this. A lot of Americans are unwilling to comply with scientific directives to wear masks and socially distance; political leadership has been seriously flawed in this regard. Without a vaccine, what American life will look like going forward is up in the air. Remote college classes like this one is an example of how we have to adapt under new circumstances. Adaption will also mark other institutions – the economy, politics and government, health care, entertainment, the family. Socialization is anticipatory. In the midst of the pandemic, we are anxious about what the future looks like.

You have 2 options for Project 2: 1) Agents of Socialization, or; 2) The Social Self. As with Project 1, the research projects are based on case studies that comprise your everyday life in society.

1 Agents of Socialization

• What is socialization? When does it matter most in the life-course? Why is it important for 1) the individual and 2) the society?
• What is an agent of socialization? What are the dominant agents of socialization in American society?
• Interview an adult, someone who has been socialized or “positioned” for adulthood (e.g., married, parenting, gainfully employed).
• Following the model developed in this class, how have “agents of socialization” influenced your subject’s social placement (e.g., more educated parents in Lareau’s study are more likely to socialize children for academic success).
• Assess the relative importance of these socialization influences. Distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” influences. How were they complimentary and how did they conflict?
• Were there occasions when your subject rebelled against any of these influences? To what extent was this a function of socialization conflict (i.e., learned)?

• The Social Self
  • Sociology maintains that the “self” is a social product. Evaluate this position by considering how you have learned to “see yourself” by internalizing a shared culture, what G.H. Mead regards as the “point of view” of “significant others” (e.g., family, teachers, age peers, media others).
  • Use actual experiences to evaluate Goffman’s point that the individual can shape what others “see” via the “management of impressions” and “expressions”.
  • What self do you “present” to others? How does this vary from one situation to another?
  • How is the “self” constructed in relation to the “personal fronts” which we “wear like masks”?
  • Have you ever acted in ways that contradict the “self” that you present?
  • Has the “self” you present ever been challenged as “inauthentic” (by others or even by you)? How have you defended your “self” against these claims?

______________________

1 Agents of Socialization

Every society assigns the role of socializing new generations to specific institutions. These “agents of socialization” mediate or transmit culture between society, on the one hand, and the individual, on the other: Society à individual

Modern societies are characterized by distinctive “agents of socialization” listed below. The first project asks you to consider the relationship between and among these social institutions. There are multiple agents of socialization in modern societies that may complement and conflict.

Family

The family is the primary agent of socialization. Individuals are born into families which represent the first contact with the culture; it is a place where individuals learn language, acquire food preferences, and are more generally taught who they are (i.e., acquire social identity).  

Mothers and fathers, siblings and grandparents, perhaps other members of an extended family, are the child’s first contact with the culture. For example, they show the child how to use objects (such as clothes, computers, eating utensils, books, bikes); how to relate to others (some as “family,” others as “friends,” still others as “strangers” or “teachers” or “neighbors”); and how the world works – how to adapt to major social institutions including education, religion, sports and race relations (what is “real”). As you are aware, either from your own experience as a child or from your role in helping to raise one, socialization includes teaching and learning about an vast array of material and nonmaterial objects (i.e., culture).

Families do not socialize children in a vacuum. Many social factors affect the way a family raises its children. For example, we can use sociological imagination to recognize that socialization is affected by the historical period. Sixty years ago, it would not have been considered excessive for a father to hit his son with a wooden spoon or a belt if he misbehaved, but today that same action might be considered child abuse. Children are socialized by families to meet social expectations down the road. This can explain gender differences in the way males and females were raised in regard to independence or autonomy and achievement orientation..

This project frames socialization in terms of the relationship between social structure and cultural learning. In other words, cultural learning is a function of social positioning. Your place in society determines or shapes the content of what has to be learned. This is because 1) you have to learn certain things in order to fit into your place in society; socialization, then, is anticipatory. For example, women whose “place is in the home” (i.e., expected to be housewives) have to learn how to cook and clean. And, 2) social positioning constrains cultural learning in the sense that you have to be there in order to acquire a way of life. Are you more likely to speak Italian fluently her in New York or in Rome? A place is in the home is not a place to learn about the outside world including tolerance for racial diversity.

Following Annette Lareau, children with college-educated middle class parents are more likely to grow up with the cultural capital that will position them in the middle class, e.g., go to college and become professionals. More broadly, Lareau offers a perspective on socialization as a function of the family’s social class. Lareau specifically uses the concept of cultural capital which refers to the knowledge and values that define a position in the class system. Forms of capital are resources that can be invested in the attainment of social status. Thus, college educated professionals possess the cultural capital (know-how, awareness of its relative importance, etc.) to invest this resource on behalf of their own children. This is comparatively lacking in working class parents whose experience did not privilege educational attainment, although they are able to transmit knowledge and values that promote adaptation within that class culture; their children are more likely to grow up working class. See this excerpt that looks at Lareau’s work on cultural capital and socialization:

Jonah, did you ask your French teacher about why you got that B on that assignment? At 5:00 p.m. today, you have an orthodontist appointment. We’ll pick up Thai food on the way home and then you’ll finish your English homework. Don’t forget to put a book cover on your essay. A book cover always bumps a grade up half a point. Your dad can check your math when he gets home. Do you want tofu in your green curry or chicken? Ian, do you want noodles?

Every once in a while, you step back from yourself as a parent and say, “Dude! Did I actually just say that? I used to be cool. Did some alien take over my brain and turn me into this Mom Machine?”

No crab-faced alien can be blamed for transforming me from a slacker in a black dress into what I am today. According to sociologist Annette Lareau, I’m a product of my social class.

During the 1990s, Lareau and a team of grad students studied 88 families from various backgrounds – black, white, middle class, working class, poor – and then conducted in-depth observations of 12 families. In her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods, she explains that middle-class families raised their children in a different way than working-class and poor families, and that these differences cut across racial lines. Lareau’s research is finding a new audience thanks to the resurgence of interest in social class and economic outcomes.

Lareau writes that the working class and the middle class have very different methods of raising their children. Poor and working-class parents practice what Lareau calls accomplishment of natural growth parenting. Their children have long periods of unstructured time where they shoot the breeze with neighbors and cousins, roam around the neighborhood, and watch TV with their large, extended families. Parents give orders to the children, rather than soliciting their opinions. Parents believe that they should care for their children, but kids reach adulthood naturally without too much interference from adults.

In contrast, middle-class kids are driven to soccer practice and band recitals, are involved in family debates at dinner time, and are told that to ask their teacher why they received a B on a French exam. They talk, talk, talk to their kids all the time. Even discipline becomes a matter of negotiation and bargaining between the child and the adult. Lareau calls this style of parenting concerted cultivation.

Parenting styles have a huge impact on future outcomes, says Lareau. She speculates that concerted cultivation creates adults who know how to challenge authority, navigate bureaucracy, and manage their time – all the skills needed to remain in the middle class. The working-class kids lack that training.

Yes, the middle-class kids gain advantages later in life, but are they really happier than the working-class and poor kids? Wearing an objective academic hat, Lareau refuses to weigh in on what is the best form of parenting. However, she does point out that the middle-class kids and parents in her study were exhausted from their schedule-driven days. Unlike the middle-class kids, the working-class kids knew how to entertain themselves, had boundless energy, and enjoyed close ties with extended family.

Perhaps it is not surprising that there is a spike in anxiety-related disorders in children.

A fellow blogger alerted me to Lareau’s research several years ago. So, I know about the traps of concerted cultivation, but still find myself giving lectures about the benefits of plastic covers on English papers and arranging our after-school activities on color-coded calendars. It’s hard to step back and relax when everyone around you is speeding up. My kids can’t go out for a spontaneous game of tag when every other kid on the block is at a band concert or at soccer practice.

I suppose, though, that our over-scheduled lives are far less important than the fact that different parenting styles may be reinforcing class divisions in our country. The remedies for this problem are far more difficult and expensive than providing plastic report covers to all children.

“Explaining Annette Lareau, or Why Parenting Style Ensures Inequality”, Laura McKenna, The Atlantic (2.20.12). https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/explaining-annette-lareau-or-why-parenting-style-ensures-inequality/253156/

______________

For contemporary parenting styles in the U.S., see “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting”, Claire Cain Miller, NYT (12.25.18). Keep in mind Annette Lareau, whose work is cited. See these parenting styles as a function of social class – as more than an “American phenomenon”. I have copied and pasted below:

Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s.

Renée Sentilles enrolled her son Isaac in lessons beginning when he was an infant. Even now that he’s 12, she rarely has him out of sight when he is home.

“I read all the child-care books,” said Ms. Sentilles, a professor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.

There are signs of a backlash, led by so-called free-range parents, but social scientists say the relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety. For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies families and inequality. “The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

But it also stokes economic anxiety, because even as more parents say they want to raise children this way, it’s the richest ones who are most able to do so.

“Intensive parenting is a way for especially affluent white mothers to make sure their children are maintaining their advantaged position in society,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University and author of “Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.”

Stacey Jones raised her two sons, now in their 20s, as a single mother in a working-class, mostly black neighborhood in Stone Mountain, Ga. She said she and other parents tried hard to give their children opportunities by finding affordable options: municipal sports leagues instead of traveling club teams and school band instead of private music lessons.

“I think most people have this craving for their children to do better and know more than they do,” said Ms. Jones, who works in university communications. “But a lot of these opportunities were closed off because they do cost money.”

‘Child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing’

“Parent” as a verb gained widespread use in the 1970s, which is also when parenting books exploded. The 1980s brought helicopter parenting, a movement to keep children safe from physical harm, spurred by high-profile child assaults and abductions (despite the fact that they were, and are, exceedingly rare). Intensive parenting was first described in the 1990s and 2000s by social scientists including Sharon Hays and Annette Lareau. It grew from a major shift in how people saw children. They began to be considered vulnerable and moldable — shaped by their early childhood experiences — an idea bolstered by advances in child development research.

The result was a parenting style that was “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive,” Ms. Hays wrote in her 1998 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.” And mothers were the ones expected to be doing the constant cultivation.

The time parents spend in the presence of their children has not changed much, but parents today spend more of it doing hands-on child care. Time spent on activities like reading to children; doing crafts; taking them to lessons; attending recitals and games; and helping with homework has increased the most. Today, mothers spend nearly five hours a week on that, compared with 1 hour 45 minutes hours in 1975 — and they worry it’s not enough. Parents’ leisure time, like exercising or socializing, is much more likely to be spent with their children than it used to be. While fathers have recently increased their time spent with children, mothers still spend significantly more.

Ms. Sentilles’s mother, Claire Tassin, described a very different way of parenting when her two children were young, in the 1970s. “My job was not to entertain them,” said Ms. Tassin, who lives in Vacherie, La. “My job was to love them and discipline them.”

Of her grandchildren, Isaac and his three cousins, she said: “Their life is much more enriched than mine was, but it definitely has been directed. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. They’re amazing. But I know I felt free, so free as a child. I put on my jeans and my cowboy boots and I played outside all day long.”

The new trappings of intensive parenting are largely fixtures of white, upper-middle-class American culture, but researchers say the expectations have permeated all corners of society, whether or not parents can achieve them. It starts in utero, when mothers are told to avoid cold cuts and coffee, lest they harm the baby. Then: video baby monitors. Homemade baby food. Sugar-free birthday cake. Toddler music classes. Breast-feeding exclusively. Spraying children’s hands with sanitizer and covering them in “natural” sunscreen. Throwing Pinterest-perfect birthday parties. Eating lunch in their children’s school cafeterias. Calling employers after their adult children interview for jobs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics promotes the idea that parents should be constantly monitoring and teaching children, even when the science doesn’t give a clear answer about what’s best. It now recommends that babies sleep in parents’ rooms for a year. Children’s television — instead of giving parents the chance to cook dinner or have an adult conversation — is to be “co-viewed” for maximum learning.

An American phenomenon

At the same time, there has been little increase in support for working parents, like paid parental leave, subsidized child care or flexible schedules, and there are fewer informal neighborhood networks of at-home parents because more mothers are working.

Ms. Sentilles felt the lack of support when it became clear that Isaac had some challenges like anxiety and trouble sleeping. She and her ex-husband changed their work hours and coordinated tutors and therapists.

“Friends are constantly texting support, but no one has time,” she said. “It’s that we’re all doing this at the same time.”

Parenthood is more hands-off in many other countries. In Tokyo, children start riding the subway alone by first grade, and in Paris, they spend afternoons unaccompanied at playgrounds. Intensive parenting has gained popularity in England and Australia, but it has distinctly American roots — reflecting a view of child rearing as an individual, not societal, task.

It’s about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis whose book, “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving,” comes out in February. “It distracts from the real questions, like why don’t we have a safe place for all kids to go when they’re done with school before parents get home from work?”

In a new paper, Patrick Ishizuka surveyed a nationally representative group of 3,642 parents about parenting. Regardless of their education, income or race, they said the most hands-on and expensive choices were best. For example, they said children who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked.

“Intensive parenting has really become the dominant cultural model for how children should be raised,” said Mr. Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow studying gender and inequality at Cornell.

Americans are having fewer children, so they have more time and money to invest in each one. But investment gaps between parents of differing incomes were not always so large. As a college degree became increasingly necessary to earn a middle-class wage and as admissions grew more competitive, parents began spending significantly more time on child care, found Valerie Ramey and Garey Ramey, economists at the University of California, San Diego.

Parents also began spending more money on their children for things like preschools and enrichment activities, Sabino Kornrich, a sociologist at Emory, showed in two recent papers. Rich parents have more to spend, but the share of income that poor parents spend on their children has also grown.

In states with the largest gaps between the rich and the poor, rich parents spend an even larger share of their incomes on things like lessons and private school, found Danny Schneider, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues in a May paper. Parents in the middle 50 percent of incomes have also increased their spending. “Lower socioeconomic status parents haven’t been able to keep up,” he said.

Besides having less money, they have less access to the informal conversations in which parents exchange information with other parents like them. Ms. Jones recalled that one of her sons liked swimming, but it wasn’t until he was in high school that she learned about swim teams on which he could have competed.

“I didn’t know because I don’t live in a swim tennis community,” she said. “Unfortunately colleges and universities tend to look at these things as a marker of achievement, and I feel like a lot of kids who have working-class backgrounds don’t benefit from the knowledge.”

Race influences parents’ concerns, too. Ms. Jones said that as a parent of black boys, she decided to raise them in a mostly black neighborhood so they would face less racism, even though it meant driving farther to many activities.

This is common for middle-class black mothers, found Dawn Dow, a sociologist at the University of Maryland whose book, “Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood,” comes out in February. “They’re making decisions to protect their kids from early experiences of racism,” Ms. Dow said. “It’s a different host of concerns that are equally intensive.”

The growing backlash

Experts agree that investing in children is a positive thing — they benefit from time with their parents, stimulating activities and supportive parenting styles. As low-income parents have increased the time they spend teaching and reading to their children, the readiness gap between kindergarten students from rich and poor families has shrunk. As parental supervision has increased, most serious crimes against children have declined significantly.

But it’s also unclear how much of children’s success is actually determined by parenting.

“It’s still an open question whether it’s the parenting practices themselves that are making the difference, or is it simply growing up with college-educated parents in an environment that’s richer in many dimensions?” said Liana Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and director of the Time Use Laboratory there. “I don’t think any of these studies so far have been able to answer whether these kids would be doing well as adults regardless, simply because of resources.”

There has been a growing movement against the relentlessness of modern-day parenting. Utah passed a free-range parenting law, exempting parents from accusations of neglect if they let their children play or commute unattended.

Psychologists and others have raised alarms about children’s high levels of stress and dependence on their parents, and the need to develop independence, self-reliance and grit. Research has shown that children with hyper-involved parents have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life, and that when children play unsupervised, they build social skills, emotional maturity and executive function.

Parents, particularly mothers, feel stress, exhaustion and guilt at the demands of parenting this way, especially while holding a job. American time use diaries show that the time women spend parenting comes at the expense of sleep, time alone with their partners and friends, leisure time and housework. Some pause their careers or choose not to have children. Others, like Ms. Sentilles, live in a state of anxiety. She doesn’t want to hover, she said. But trying to oversee homework, limit screen time and attend to Isaac’s needs, she feels no choice.

“At any given moment, everything could just fall apart,” she said.

“On the one hand, I love my work,” she said. “But the way it’s structured in this country, where there’s not really child care and there’s this sense that something is wrong with you if you aren’t with your children every second when you’re not at work? It isn’t what I think feminists thought they were signing up for.”

______________

See the excerpt from a NYT article on parenting in the Netherlands. It centers on a tradition that trains children for independence and autonomy. Think about what this anticipates? What are children prepared for when they are systematically raised to rely on their own resources, with no adults around? But, does this mean that adult influences are completely missing?

Shortly after 10 p.m. on a recent night, a car came to a stop at the edge of the woods. The door opened to release three children: towheaded boys of 12 and 15, and a 12-year-old girl with dark pigtails and an emoji-covered backpack. Then the driver threw the car into gear and sped away, gravel crunching under its tires.

They were tiny figures at the foot of the forest, miles from the summer camp they were attending, with only a primitive GPS to indicate the right direction. Darkness was falling. And they were alone.

They peered into the night: Was this the path?

“Could be,” said Thomas, the 12-year-old team leader.

And then, because there was nothing else to do, they plunged into the woods.

This is the Dutch scouting tradition known as a “dropping,” in which groups of children, generally pre-teenagers, are deposited in a forest and expected to find their way back to base. It is meant to be challenging, and they often stagger in at 2 or 3 in the morning.

The Dutch — it is fair to say — do childhood differently. Children are taught not to depend too much on adults; adults are taught to allow children to solve their own problems. Droppings distill these principles into extreme form, banking on the idea that even for children who are tired, hungry and disoriented, there is a compensatory thrill to being in charge.

Droppings are such a normal part of Dutch childhood that many there are surprised to be asked about it, assuming it is common to every country. But Pia de Jong, a novelist who has raised her children in New Jersey, said it reflected something particular about the Dutch philosophy of parenting.

“You just drop your kids into the world,” she said. “Of course, you make sure they don’t die, but other than that, they have to find their own way.”

Still, Ms. de Jong, 58, has begun to question whether droppings are really all that fun. “Imagine that you are lost and have no idea where to go,” she said. “It could be 10 hours, it could be the whole night, you just don’t know. It is late and long and people are a little frightened.”

She paused, in thought. “I don’t think it’s a nice thing to do to kids, actually,” she said.

In 2011 and 2014, children on droppings were fatally struck by cars while walking alongside roads. Since then, the practice has become far more regulated.

The dropping team does carry a cellphone in case of emergency, and the scouting association requires participants to wear high-visibility vests and distributes a long list of guidelines, mainly geared toward traffic safety. “Pushing boundaries is fun,” reads one recommendation, “but that, too, has boundaries.”

The scout leaders of the recent dropping, staring into the embers of a campfire, murmured about the proliferating paperwork, the way childhood has softened in recent years. “Society is changing,” Mr. Oudega said. “It’s a miracle that we are allowed to have a fire.”

But the core experience of dropping, he added, has not changed.

“It really is being on your own,” he said. “It really does make you feel that you are in charge.”

“In Dutch Summer, a Child Can Be Left Behind”, Ellen Barry, NYT (7.22.19) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html

Also see video “PBS Kids Parenting Minutes: Expressing Emotions” [the Corporan family], WNET Education https://www.wnet.org/education/video/expressing-emotions/ (accessed 1.7.20). The video focuses on interaction of mother and children that takes into account of emotional as well as intellectual development. The mother, Doris Corporan, is a high school guidance counsellor by occupation as well as a mother mindfully teaching her children; parents are their children’s first teachers. When the teacher is a parent, learning is embedded in a deep emotional bond. An emotional connection to a teacher can similarly impact learning. Parents and teachers become role models promoting learning through identification.

Parents have to anticipate what lessons their children should learn in order to adapt to the world. Also see the article below for the dilemmas added to parenting at the time of COVID. See also “Resist Fear-Based Parenting”, Miranda Featherstone, NYT (6.21.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/coronavirus-parenting-fear.html

Sociologists emphasize the importance of the family for placing the individual in the social structure. Kamala Harris cited the importance of her parents and wider family for shaping her as a person (i.e., her “self”) in her speech accepting nomination as Vice President. Her mother was an immigrant from India and her father had emigrated from Jamaica. Both ancestries figured prominently in who Kamala became:

The couple soon had two daughters: Kamala, meaning “lotus” in Sanskrit, and Maya, meaning “illusion.”…For Ms. Gopalan [Kamala’s mother], it was important to maintain her Indian heritage. She introduced her daughters to Hindu mythology and South Indian dishes such as dosa and idli, and took them to a nearby Hindu temple where she occasionally sang. She also stayed close to her parents and flew back every few years to Chennai, on India’s southeast coast, where her parents had settled.

But as Ms. Harris explained in her memoir, published last year: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls.”

“How Kamala Harris’s Family in India Helped Shape Her Values”, J. Gettlemen and S. Raj, NYT (8.17.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/world/asia/kamala-harris-india.html

Social class as well as race/ethnicity create different “opportunity structures” as individuals grow up (see the work of Annette Lareau on syllabus). Wealthy parents tend to have better educations and often work in managerial positions or careers that require creative problem solving, so they teach their children behaviors that are beneficial in these positions. This means children are effectively socialized and raised to take the types of jobs their parents already have, thus reproducing the class system (Kohn 1977). Both of Kamala Harris’s parents had PhD degrees; her mother benefitted from a family tradition of encouraging women to pursue advanced professional education. Poor families usually emphasize obedience and conformity when raising their children, while wealthy families emphasize judgment and creativity (National Opinion Research Center 2008). This may occur because working-class parents have less education and more repetitive-task jobs for which it is helpful to be able to follow rules and conform. Children are also socialized to abide by, or conform to, gender norms.

_________

Modern societies are characterized by the outsourcing of socialization. In other words, social institutions outside the family increasingly encroach on the family. This increased the likelihood of conflict between agents of socialization and for the individual. This also increases the likelihood of rebellion by individuals. Traditional cultures like the Amish and Hasidic Jews keep their distance from the dominant society by minimizing contact with mainstream education and mass media. The Amish, for example, do not make the electricity necessary for TV and internet connections available in their communities. Amish children meet only the minimum requirements for school attendance and are allowed to stop attending altogether at 14. Amish children learn to be Amish from their families. See article and book review below for the socialization of Donald Trump which steered him into his father’s business and as much as $14 million to buy buildings of his own in Manhattan in the 1970s. Trump’s children have similarly secured places in their father’s business.

“Like Father Like Son: President Trump Lets Others Mourn”, Annie Karni and Katie Rogers, NYT (7.29.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/politics/donald-fred-trump.html

 “7 Takeaways From Mary Trump’s Book About Her Uncle Donald”, Elisabeth Egan, NYT (7.8.20). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/books/review/mary-trump-book-takeaways.html

School (Formal Education)

The school, or formal education, weans the child from the family into the larger society including the labor force (gainful employment is the ultimate destination anticipated by socialization). Most U.S. children spend about seven hours a day, 180 days a year, in school, which makes it hard to deny the importance school has on their socialization (U.S. Department of Education 2004). Students are not in school only to study math, reading, science, and other subjects—the manifest function of this system. Schools also serve a latent function in society by socializing children into behaviors like practicing teamwork, following a schedule, and using textbooks. They also reproduce status differences because all schools are not equal. Thus, private schools and public schools in the suburbs have greater financial resources relative to inner city schools which translate into lower teacher-student ratios.

It is important to note that schools continue to encroach on the family. Although parents, etc. are the child’s first teachers, they are superseded by the authority of the child’s “Teachers”. This relationship has been exposed and shown signs of strain with remote instruction ushered in by the pandemic. See syllabus.

School and classroom rituals, led by teachers serving as role models and leaders, regularly reinforce what society expects from children. Sociologists describe this aspect of schools as the “hidden curriculum”, the informal teaching done by schools.

For example, in the United States, schools have built a sense of competition into the way grades are awarded and the way teachers evaluate students. When children participate in a relay race or a math contest, they learn there are winners and losers in society. When children are required to work together on a project, they practice teamwork with other people in cooperative situations. The hidden curriculum prepares children for the adult world. Children learn how to deal with bureaucracy, rules, expectations, waiting their turn, and sitting still for hours during the day. Schools in different cultures socialize children differently in order to prepare them to function well in those cultures. The latent functions of teamwork and dealing with bureaucracy are features of U.S. culture.

Schools also socialize children by teaching them about citizenship and national pride. In the United States, children are taught to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Most districts require classes about U.S. history and geography. As academic understanding of history evolves, textbooks in the United States have been scrutinized and revised to update attitudes toward other cultures as well as perspectives on historical events; thus, children are socialized to a different national or world history than earlier textbooks may have done. For example, information about the mistreatment of African Americans and Native American Indians more accurately reflects those events than in textbooks of the past.

Quarantining during the pandemic which resulted in the abrupt closure of schools prompted reflection on how formal education takes place. See the article by Kim Bosch: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/parenting/remote-learning-outcomes.html

Also see article below to appreciate the “hidden curriculum” of formal education and the possibility of an alternate approach (“unschooling”) ushered in by the pandemic quarantine. See this excerpt:

Education reformers have been asking that question since at least the 19th century. When the German educator Friedrich Froebel invented kindergarten in the 1830s, he stressed the educational value of games and free play. Progressive reformers like Maria Montessori and John Dewey pushed for a more “child centered” approach to education that stressed experience and experimentation over rote memorization. African-American activists assailed mainstream schools for belittling students of color. In 1933, the historian Carter Woodson called the “crusade” against inferior Black schools and textbooks full of white supremacist propaganda “much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

By the 1960s, progressives’ insights had become (and largely remain) mainstream. But a new generation of activists denounced traditional schools as “prisons” whose origins lay in capitalists’ desire for educated and obedient workers, and whose tyrannies demanded a new civil rights revolution.

Local Black and Indigenous communities organized independent ethnocentric schools. Other reformers, inspired by humanistic psychology’s rosy vision of every person’s capacity for free will and self-actualization, called for loosely supervised “free schools” and even the abolition of schools altogether. (They often sidestepped the overwhelming social necessity of public schools to not only educate, but also provide child care and healthy food for millions of children.)

In 1968 the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire warned in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that “education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”

A few years later his friend Ivan Illich, a philosopher and Catholic priest, argued in “Deschooling Society” that real learning happens casually, through personal relationships; compulsory schooling has become a purveyor of false consciousness, “the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”

Unschoolers have long complained that mainstream education turns students into serfs of capitalist exploitation (although it’s worth noting that “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is not a fringe text; Freire is widely read in schools of education today). Recently the unschoolers’ critique has intersected with more pro-capitalist voices coming out of Silicon Valley.

School “came close to really beating any curiosity out of me,” Steve Jobs once said. Seth Godin, an entrepreneurship guru and best-selling author, wrote in his 2012 manifesto on education, “Stop Stealing Dreams”: “Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory workers?”

These education critics may disagree about the sins and virtues of modern market capitalism, but they seem to share a theory of freedom reminiscent of Rousseau’s radical ideas. Unschooling assumes that humans become free by throwing off society’s conventions and immediately enacting that freedom; passion comes first, and competence will follow.

Children “ought to leap, to run, to shout, whenever they will. All their movements are necessities of nature, which is endeavoring to strengthen itself,” Rousseau wrote in “Emile,” his 1762 treatise on education. This stands in contrast to the message of most world religions and tiger moms everywhere: that we gain freedom and nurture passion by learning self-mastery and complex skills, and that means submitting to a long, difficult time of discipline and direction outside ourselves.

“When you get into unschooling, it’s almost like a religion,” Amanda Enclade, a mother of three who has unschooled her two younger children, told me. “You have to be determined and have faith.”

In this faith, a child’s motivation to learn is an instinct to be unleashed, rather than a virtue whose development requires some mixture of coercion, oversight and artificial rewards. “It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call ‘motivation,’” John Holt, an unschooling pioneer, wrote in his 1967 book “How Children Learn.” “A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.”

When Ms. Richards, the Atlanta podcaster, began unschooling with her family, she realized “that human nature is that of a little scientist,” she said. But scientists don’t usually drift along, following their impulses, abandoning experiments when they become boring. How does an unschooled child learn to stick with the hard stuff, the boring stuff? Unschoolers’ faith in free choice can seem like an extreme version of the consumerist impulse that has crept into education, in which the student is no scientist, but a customer who is always right.

“When I came into this world, I thought that when you remove restrictions, the paraphernalia of school and coercion, then kids’ curiosity and self-direction would naturally bloom,” Blake Boles, the author of “Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?,” told me. “That’s not what happens. There are plenty of motivational challenges. They struggle like other kids, and I think that’s OK. I say when you choose to unschool, you’re choosing to take on this heightened sense of freedom and responsibilities that most people don’t choose until they’re 18 or 22. It’s the same struggle, just happening earlier.”

We can’t pretend that mainstream schools have solved the motivation problem, even as many teachers try to combine the advantages of schoolroom structure with respect for children’s urge to explore. This problem is all the more pressing at a time when social isolation forces students to rely on apps and social media.

“When You Get Into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like A Religion”, Molly Worthen, NYT (9.25.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html

Peer Groups

A peer group is made up of people who are similar in age and other determinants of social status (i.e., social equals) and who have similar interests (e.g., managing parents and teachers that create academic expectations, expressive preferences like music that signal at least symbolic rebellion). Peer group socialization begins in the earliest years, such as when kids on a playground teach younger children the norms about taking turns, the rules of a game, or how to shoot a basket. As children grow into teenagers, this process continues. Peer groups are important to adolescents in a new way, as they begin to develop an identity separate from their parents and exert independence. Additionally, peer groups provide their own opportunities for socialization since kids usually engage in different types of activities with their peers than they do with their families. Peer groups provide adolescents’ first major socialization experience outside the realm of adult authority in families and schools. Interestingly, studies have shown that although friendships rank high in adolescents’ priorities, this is balanced by parental influence. On the other hand, peer group influence in modern societies has been reinforced by the mass media and now the internet. Consider the way that rock and roll and Hip Hop have informed youth peer cultures that are able to oppose adult authority in the family and school. See my article on the Italian American youth culture, Guido. See the PBS video “Generation Like” (Frontline, 2014) which focuses on peer group interactions that build a youth culture in a social media space using pop culture content that is thoroughly commodified – youth are turned into consumers that are bought and sold. https://www.thirteen.org/programs/frontline/frontline-generation/

Also see the article below which frames the adolescent/youth peer group as a critical reference for identity formation and, in particular, body image that has been further complicated by “masking” during the pandemic.

For Belle Lapos, high school has been weird. Her freshman year started in 2020 with a mix of learning from home and in-person school in Stillwater, Minn. Now a sophomore, she has been full-time at school for months, with everyone in masks. So when her school lifted its Covid-19 mask mandate a few weeks ago, she and her friends had a lot of processing to do.

They worried they may be deemed less attractive. They worried about acne that had been exacerbated by face coverings. They worried about getting sick or getting family members sick. And they worried about whether wearing, or not wearing, masks might align them with certain political beliefs.

Ultimately, Belle, 16, and her friends decided to keep their masks on for now, “not because of their views on the pandemic, mostly because of their views on themselves and how they think people are going to judge them,” Belle said. “Only seeing half of someone’s face for two years straight and then completely opening up to them, like, ‘Oh, here’s my face’ — you know, it’s a lot.”

Adolescence has long been defined by insecurities about body image, social pressures to conform, a growing sense of identity and a susceptibility to social anxiety. As mask mandates end in school districts around the country, many teenagers have mixed emotions like Belle and her friends do.

Even when requirements to wear masks disappear, peer pressure and ongoing disagreements about whether to cover their faces are causing new anxieties for some teenagers. Understanding what young people are going through emotionally can help parents and kids navigate the transition, experts said.

“At this developmental stage, a change in how one is presenting oneself is really significant,” said Sophia Choukas-Bradley, a clinical psychologist and director of the Teen and Young Adult Lab at the University of Delaware in Newark. “Absolutely, we should expect this transition to be difficult.”

The Imaginary Audience

Taking off masks also represents a social transition during a developmental period when young people become hypersensitive to what others think of them and particularly concerned about their appearance, Dr. Choukas-Bradley said. Starting in the preteen and early teen years, she said, kids often develop what psychologists call an “imaginary audience” that makes them feel like there is a spotlight on them and their flaws. And as they start to spend less time with parents and more time with peers, social status and cultural standards of beauty become extremely important, especially for girls, she said.

The imaginary audience shapes how teenagers think about even ordinary tasks like getting dressed, speaking in class or going shoe shopping, said Seth Pollak, a psychologist and director of the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Whereas an adult may be thinking about cost or comfort, an adolescent may think about what specific people at school are going to think when they walk into homeroom in the new shoes. Those people aren’t necessarily friends. They may even be enemies.

“Some adolescents’ lives are very dominated by these audiences in their heads that they think are really attending to and scrutinizing them,” he said.

Social media has only exacerbated the fixation that teens may have about their appearance and concerns about being judged, many studies show. Even before the pandemic, teenagers were concerned with looking attractive on social media, said Dr. Choukas-Bradley, whose research has connected these kinds of concerns with an elevated risk of depression.

The implications of mask choices are also being magnified on social platforms. “Mask fishing,” the idea that someone could be hiding facial flaws under a mask, first emerged on dating apps but became a trend on TikTok late last year. Several recent videos have amassed tens of millions of views, with young people pointing out kids in their schools who may or may not be mask fishing, and even asking others to rate their own faces.

“The imaginary audience is no longer imaginary,” Dr. Choukas-Bradley said. “At any given moment, I could be photographed or videoed, and my peers can see what I’m doing and what I look like.”

This isn’t the first internet phenomenon to rate people on their physical appearance, said Hannah Schacter, a developmental psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. And these kinds of trends can compound the pain and judgment teens already feel when perceived as unattractive by their peers.

“Mask fishing is concerning because it may open teens up to embarrassment or humiliation, especially when peers are passing negative judgments on their mask-less appearance,” Dr. Schacter said. “They may feel like they’re essentially opening themselves up to unwanted peer scrutiny after two years of being hidden away.”

“For Some Teenagers, That Mask is a Security Blanket”, Emily Sohn, NYT (3.17.2022).

Mass media 

Mass media distribute impersonal information to a wide audience, via television, newspapers, radio, and the Internet. With the average person spending over four hours a day in front of the television (and children averaging even more screen time), media greatly influences social norms. People learn about objects of material culture (like new technology and transportation options), as well as nonmaterial culture—what is true (beliefs), what is important (values), and what is expected (norms). See the video “Growing Up Online” for the powerful influence of the Internet, in particular new social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Tik Tok, especially as these online resources articulate with youth peer groups. Note that these social media networks are largely outside the purview of the family and the school. Adult authorities have historically attempted to manage and even suppress mass media content (ideologies, values, practices, etc.) empowering alternate or oppositional youth identities like rock and roll and Hip Hop.

Amanda Anne Klein points out that MTV has merchandised “identities” to young people from its beginning in 1982. More recently, these identities are made available in reality TV shows. In “Real World” and “Teen Mom”, MTV provides insights for “can-do” women and “at-risk” youth. In the case of “Jersey Shore”, MTV presents an “identity” referenced to “partying”. In general, MTV targets “the youth market” in order to “merchandise cool” which includes the merchandising of MTV itself.

For this project, consider the way popular culture is mediated for the purpose of constructing “identity”. For example. the Tex-Mex musical artist Selena has become a role model for Latina youth in the United States. Consider the importance of mass media access as well as the way gender, age, and ethnicity combine to promote an identification with the performer that can exert influence on a certain audience. See excerpts of the article below:

Whether or not the film registry accepts it, a recent wave of appreciation for Selena’s work has swept through the entertainment industry.

“You have these kinds of artists that we lost when they were blossoming,” said Daniel Chavez, a Latin American studies professor at the University of New Hampshire. “These young figures become mythical in a way.”

In addition to the coming Grammy, Selena was recognized last year in the National Recording Registry for her 1990 album, “Ven Conmigo.” A Netflix show, “Selena: The Series,” premiered last year and will return in May. And a podcast about her legacy, named “Anything for Selena,” released its first episodes last week.

The podcast’s host, Maria Elena Garcia, said that as a young girl struggling with her identity, she was inspired by how Selena unapologetically embraced her Mexican and American heritage.

“She was whole in both places,” Ms. Garcia said in an interview. “Even though she didn’t sound like people born in Mexico, she told them, it’s my heritage, and I can claim it too. That was incredibly profound for me, even though I was a little girl.”

Seeing her success, Ms. Garcia added in the podcast, felt like “she brought us with her.”

It was that feeling of representation for young Latinas that moved the filmmaker Gregory Nava to direct “Selena,” he said. While weighing whether to make the movie in the mid-1990s, Mr. Nava recalled taking a walk in Los Angeles and seeing two young Mexican girls wearing Selena T-shirts. “Why do you love Selena?” he asked them.

“Because she looks like us,” they said.

“Our stories need to be told,” Mr. Nava said in an interview. “Those young girls I made ‘Selena’ for, they’re grown up and have young girls, and they need more beautiful images about who we are.”

Some scenes from “Selena” have loomed large for many Latinos, like one where Selena and her father, Abraham Quintanilla, are talking about the problems Mexican-Americans face simply speaking English and Spanish to different audiences.

“Being Mexican-American is tough,” Mr. Olmos says as Mr. Quintanilla. “Anglos jump all over you if you don’t speak English perfectly. Mexicans jump all over you if you don’t speak Spanish perfectly. We’ve got to be twice as perfect as anybody else.”

“Hispanic Lawmakers, Pushing for a Change in Hollywood, Start with ‘Selena’”, Christina Morales, NYT (1.21.21). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/movies/selena-national-film-registry.html

In the article below, the writer bell hooks is credited with shaping a self that is specifically in opposition to what is expected by adults in the family (e.g., parents and grandparents) and the school (e.g., teachers). bell hooks was a feminist writer whose work was read for a distinctive way of thinking that cultivated a self capable of “talking back” to traditional authority figures:

Growing up, parents, teachers or elders sometimes scolded me for speaking when not called on, for not instinctively accepting what they said about me or the world around me. In other words, for talking back. “Rude” is what they called it.

That didn’t deter me. I had the audacity to believe my voice not only mattered but was at least of equal value to those around me, if for no reason other than my own youthful enthusiasm. Still, I felt a certain guilt in talking back.

That contradiction ran deep. You must understand, I’m Nigerian — Urhobo. Although my family and I lived stints in countries between Africa and the West, I was still raised in an ostensibly Nigerian way: with a spoonful of “speak when spoken to” and a deference to authority.

When I encountered the work of the feminist, scholar and cultural critic bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins), who died at 69 on Dec. 15, I was in graduate school and 22 years old. The first book of hers I read was the 1989 collection of essays, “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.” It was only then that my habit of talking back to adults took on a new meaning for me. As a child, it felt like a personal act of necessary disobedience. As an adult, it became a politic worth abiding.

In the collection, a young Ms. hooks dissected and pushed back on existing conventions that insisted she speak only when spoken to. She situated her work primarily in her experience as a Black woman who belonged, in particular, to the American South and Kentucky, where she was born. Yet like many other Black women of a different generation, nation and experience from Ms. hooks, I found a home in her work.

She gave me language to understand the shame and triumphs of Black girlhood through describing her own childhood in which she was punished for talking back, or “speaking as an equal to an authority figure.” Children, and especially girls, were not supposed to have this audacity. The triumph, in part, was having it anyway.

She also considered it necessary to do. Ms. hooks noted that when girls became women, they would be allowed more room to speak, but that their words would be “audible but not acknowledged as significant.” Women could say the right, socially acceptable things in everyday conversation, but if their ideas called into question the structure of patriarchy, they would often be dismissed. That’s a reality that won’t change unless we reject it.

Indeed, the mere act of speech isn’t enough; we must also speak truth to power, sometimes even within our own communities. Ms. hooks understood what this looks like for Black girls and women who are often socialized under a “cult of privacy” — the belief that it breaks a certain code to openly discuss the things that take place within our homes and personal relationships. She made it clear that talking back in your own communities can be a radical act.

“It Was bell hooks Who Taught Me How to ‘Talk Back’”, Kovie Biakolo, NYT (12.26.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/26/opinion/bell-hooks-death-black.html

_____

Social Media

Social media platforms on the Internet create space where popular culture and peer group pressures are combined. In the article below, influences on female adolescents revolve around body image and eating disorders, consumerism, and poor self-worth.

When Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, told a Senate hearing this week that the company put its “astronomical profits before people,” the outcry was loud and indignant. The social media company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a Facebook post insisting, “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.”

But the whistle-blower was citing the company’s own research, which among other things found that, based on surveys, “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. (Ms. Haugen provided internal documents to The Journal from Facebook, which owns Instagram.)

What exactly are we talking about here? Say you’re a 13-year-old girl who is beginning to feel anxious about your appearance, who has followed some diet influencers online. Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.”

In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Ms. Haugen called this “tragic.” “As these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed,” she said. “It actually makes them use the app more. And so they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more.”

Anyone who has ever spent time as a teenage girl is unlikely to find any of these revelations particularly surprising. Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.

There’s plenty of cash at stake here. The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z. The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.

For girls in America, taking in content that seems intended to make you hate your body is an adolescent rite of passage. The medium changes but the ritual stays the same. Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue. At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.

It’s scary how much these messages can stick with you. I haven’t been a teenager for nearly two decades, but I vividly remember the advice in the teen magazines I brought home from the library and studied like my textbooks: Celery is “negative calories” (whatever that means). If you succumb to dessert, for the love of God, make it fat-free. I read once that if I was still hungry, I might try eating ice. I can still look at a plate of food and instantly assign it a number of calories in my mind.

The advice of how to look and be your best often came dressed up in language of empowerment — and it wasn’t wrong about what it took to succeed in a sexist, appearances-driven society. If magazines left girls with the distinct impression that our bodies and faces were being constantly appraised, assessed and compared, that impression was confirmed by our experiences in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg participated in the ritual of ranking girls too. When he was experimenting before building Facebook, as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.

To some extent, the way these dynamics play out on Instagram is just a natural extension of how girls are treated in our culture anyway. The body positivity movement may have helped, but girls still internalize the message that part of their success in life will rest upon their ability to be admired for their appearance. Instagram measures and gamifies that — creating a virtual high school cafeteria as global as the “explore” button, one that’s peopled by countless unreal bodies. ​​ (Adults aren’t exempt — they are more likely to consider plastic surgery if they frequently use image-heavy social media platforms like Instagram.)

Many of these messages are conveyed under the guise of health or wellness, but Facebook’s leaked research suggests that this charade does less to promote health than to damage it. No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities. Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.

That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.” We are supposed to protect minors from products like this, not dish it out.

For his part, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t ranking girls in public anymore. Instead, he is the father of daughters. Citing his perspective as a parent, Mr. Zuckerberg pledged in his Facebook post his commitment to continuing to research and prioritize the welfare of children, framing their exposure to his products as inevitable. “The reality is that young people use technology,” he wrote. “Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe.”

But more telling than what Silicon Valley parents say is what they do. Many of them have long known that technology can be harmful: That’s why they’ve often banned their own children from using it.

“For Teen Girls, Instagram Is a Cesspool”, Lindsay Crouse, NYT (10.8.2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/instagram-teen-girls-mental-health.html

Religion

While some religions are informal institutions, here we focus on practices followed by formal institutions. Religion is an important avenue of socialization for many people. The United States is full of synagogues, temples, churches, mosques, and similar religious communities where people gather to worship and learn. Like other institutions, these places teach participants how to interact with the religion’s material culture (like a mezuzah, a prayer rug, or a communion wafer). For some people, important ceremonies related to family structure—like marriage and birth—are connected to religious celebrations. Many religious institutions also uphold gender norms and contribute to their enforcement through socialization. From ceremonial rites of passage that reinforce the family unit to power dynamics that reinforce gender roles, organized religion fosters a shared set of socialized values that are passed on through society. Religion is typically passed down in families, at least nominally. Families can enlist the support of formal religious institutions.

In the article below, research is presented that establishes religious belief and affiliation as a causal factor in college success. Pay attention to the way the variables of gender, class, and race intersect in this equation. The author uses Lareau’s concept of family “capitals”:

American men are dropping out of college in alarming numbers. A slew of articles over the past year depict a generation of men who feel lost, detached and lacking in male role models. This sense of despair is especially acute among working-class men, fewer than one in five of whom completes college.

Yet one group is defying the odds: boys from working-class families who grow up religious.

As a sociologist of education and religion, I followed the lives of 3,290 teenagers from 2003 to 2012 using survey and interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, and then linking those data to the National Student Clearinghouse in 2016. I studied the relationship between teenagers’ religious upbringing and its influence on their education: their school grades, which colleges they attend and how much higher education they complete. My research focused on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the United States.

I found that what religion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways, religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career.

However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.

Religious boys are not any smarter, so why are they doing better in school? The answer lies in how religious belief and religious involvement can buffer working-class Americans — males in particular — from despair.

Many in the American intelligentsia — the elite-university-educated population who constitute the professional and managerial class — do not hold the institution of religion in high regard. When these elites criticize religion, they often do so on the grounds that faith (in their eyes) is irrational and not evidence-based.

But one can agree with the liberal critique of conservatism’s moral and political goals while still acknowledging that religion orders the lives of millions of Americans — and that it might offer social benefits.

A boy I’ll call John (all names have been changed to protect participants’ privacy under ethical research guidelines) was a typical example of the kind of working-class teenager I’ve been studying. He lived an hour outside Jackson, Miss. His father owned an auto-repair shop and his mother worked as a bookkeeper and substitute teacher. His days were filled with playing football, fishing and hunting with his grandparents, riding four-wheelers with friends and mowing the occasional lawn to earn pocket money.

John aspired to attend college, but given his parents’ occupations, income (the equivalent of $53,000 today) and education (both had earned vocational certificates), the odds were not in his favor.

Still, he reached a milestone that has become largely out of reach for young men like him: He earned his associate degree. And his faith and involvement in church played a large part in that.

Children with college-educated parents have many advantages that make their academic trajectories easier. They tend to live in neighborhoods with a strong social infrastructure, including safe outdoor spaces. They have more familial and geographic stability, which means they rarely need to transfer between schools, disrupting their educations and severing social ties.

Children from wealthier families also benefit from a network of connections and opportunities that many poorer children lack. College-educated parents tend to work in professional organizations and have robust social networks from college where they meet other members of the professional class. All these social ties — from the neighborhood, the workplace, and college — provide a web of support for upper-middle-class families, which sociologists refer to as “social capital.”

But working-class families like John’s do not have the same opportunities to develop social capital. The workplace used to be a central social institution for working-class families, but in the gig economy it is nearly impossible to feel a sense of stability, acquire health insurance or develop relationships with colleagues.

The lack of social capital — along with systemic problems and inequities — has contributed to the unraveling of the lives of millions of working-class Americans, especially men. Since the early 2000s, just as the kids in my study were entering adolescence, there has been a drastic rise in the number of working-class men dying “deaths of despair” from opioids, alcohol poisoning and suicide.

But despair doesn’t die: It gets transmitted to children. Most of the working-class kids in my study — especially boys — seemed to look out in the world and feel despair physically, cognitively and emotionally. I found that most of the working-class boys in the study had dropped out of the educational system by their mid-20s and seemed on track to repeat the cycle of despair.

But not John. He and dozens of other boys in the study had a support system that insulated them from the hopelessness so many of their peers described. Through his teenage years, John regularly attended his local evangelical church and was active in its youth group. There were organized social activities like rafting and weekly gatherings at the minister’s house to talk about what was going on in their lives.

Being involved with his church reinforced biblical teachings, leading John to think of Christ as the person he most wanted to emulate (most teenagers answer by referring to an actor, an athlete or a family member). By observing how his parents and others in his religious community behaved, John learned to see God as someone he “can talk to and tell personal things to.”

The academic advantage of religious working-class children begins in middle and high school with the grades they earn. Among those raised in the working class, 21 percent of religious teenagers brought home report cards filled with A’s, compared with 9 percent of their less-religious peers. Grades are also the strongest predictor of getting into and completing college, and religious boys are more than twice as likely to earn grades that help them be competitive for college admissions and scholarships.

Religious girls from working-class families also see educational benefits compared with less religious girls, but there are other factors that help them be academically successful outside of religion. Girls are socialized to be conscientious and compliant, have an easier time developing social ties with family members and peers, and are less prone to get caught up in risky behaviors.

Why does religion give boys like John an academic advantage? Because it offers them the social capital that affluent teenagers can get elsewhere. Religious communities keep families rooted to a place and help kids develop trusting relationships with youth ministers and friends’ parents who share a common outlook on life. Collectively, these adults encourage teenagers to follow the rules and avoid antisocial behaviors.

Although John cited peer pressure as the most stressful problem facing teenagers, he avoided falling into a pattern of drug and alcohol abuse that often derails kids from academic success. The research for my book focused on Christians, but I’ve found that religious communities are a source of social capital for Jewish people as well.

Theological belief on its own is not enough to influence how children behave. Adolescents must believe and belong to be buffered against emotional, cognitive or behavioral despair. I found that religion offers something that other extracurricular activities such as sports can’t: It prompts kids to behave in extremely conscientious and cooperative ways because they believe that God is both encouraging and evaluating them.

As John put it at the beginning of my study, when he was 16, religion “helps me in my problems or when I’m down.” When he was unsure of how to handle a situation, he looked to his minister and scripture for answers. John said he suspected that if he weren’t part of his weekly church youth group, he would have been “doing a lot of things wrong.”

Religion doesn’t just help boys from working-class families during their teenage years — it also deters them from falling into despair in adulthood. We can see this in the way John’s life unfolded. In his early 20s, John stopped reading the Bible and no longer participated in his church community. Other parts of his life also started to fall apart. He dropped out of college and got arrested for marijuana possession.

That was a wake-up call, and John decided to return to church. Within a few years, he managed to get his life back on track. John is now living with his grandmother, whom he cares for, and his girlfriend, whom he plans to propose to. He believes that God has called him to serve others by working in the medical field. He returned to community college and earned an A.A. while working as an E.M.T. and plans to become a paramedic or a nurse. He attributes much of this to his faith.

In his final interview with researchers at age 26, John said, “The most important things in life to me is my family and my relationship to God.”

Ilana Horowitz, I Followed the Lives of 3,290 Teenagers. This Is What I Learned About Religion and Education, NYT (3.16.2022)

Supplementary Reading:

“Like Father Like Son: President Trump Let’s Others Mourn”, Annie Karni and Katie Rogers, NYT (7.29.20); “Resist Fear-Based Parenting”, Miranda Featherstone, NYT (6.21.20); “In Dutch Summer, a Child Can Be Left Behind”, Ellen Barry, NYT (7.22.19); “What Happened to American Childhood?”, K. Julian, The Atlantic (4.17.20); “No Cell Signal. No WiFi, No Problem. Growing Up in America’s ‘Quiet Zone’”, Dan Levin and Annie Flanagan, NYT (3.6.20); “I Had a Gloriously Wild Childhood. That’s Why I Wrote ‘How to Train Your Dragon’“, Cressida Cowell, NYT (2.9.20); “Youth Football is a Moral Abdication”, Kathleen Bachynski, The Atlantic (2.2.20); “48 Hours in the Strange and Beautiful World of Tik Tok”, Amanda Hess et al., NYT (10.10.19); “Everyone Wants to ‘Influence’ You”, Annalisa Quin, NYT (11.20.18);”Stress, Exhaustion and Guilt: Modern Parenting”, Claire Cain Miller, NYT (12.25.18); “The American Obsession with Parenting”, A. Wong, The Atlantic (12.12.16); “’Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard”, Jessica McCrory Calarco, NYT (4.3.18); “Helicopter Parenting Works”, Pamela Druckerman, NYT (2.8.19); “In Sweden’s Preschools, Boys Learn to Dance and Girls Learn to Yell”, Ellen Barry, NYT (3.23.18); “Let the Lunch Lady Feed Your Kid”, Jennifer Gaddis, NYT (2.12.20); Shapiro, Eliza, “’I Love My Skin!’ Black Parents Find Alternative to Integration”, NYT (1.8.19); “You Are What You Watch? The Social Effects of TV”, Jonathan Rothwell, NYT (7.29.19); “TV Commercials Are Being Replaced by Something More Nefarious”, Ashley Fetters, The Atlantic (2.2.20); “Schools Sue Over Vaping, Calling It An Epidemic”, Adeel Hassan, NYT (10.8.19); “China Imposes Limits On Its Young Gamers: Stop After 90 Minutes”, Javier C. Hernandez and Albee Zhang, NYT (11.7.19).

Video:  “Generation Like” (Frontline, 2014); “PBS Kids Parenting Minutes: Expressing Emotions” [the Corporan family], WNET Education https://www.wnet.org/education/video/expressing-emotions/ (accessed 1.7.20)

________

2 The Social “Self”

Openstax, Chapter 5

“Agents of Socialization” is focused on the social institutions that influence the way the individual in your case study acquires culture and fits into society; this project asks you to consider the relationship among these “agents of socialization”. This includes the possibility of conflict because “agents” outside the family have become increasingly important in modern society.

The second option builds on the previous discussion of socialization. It focuses on the relationship between the individual and “significant others”.

Socialization is essential to us as individuals. In the course of socialization – as we acquire culture and fit into society – we acquire a “self”. It refers to a person’s individuality – a distinct identity or sense of who he/she is. The self is not innate not is it something that the individual fashions on his own. It is a social product – an outcome of interaction with significant others including agents of socialization. Social interaction provides the means via which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we learn who we are and how we fit into the world around us. As with Danielle, without socialization we literally have no self.

Certain theories of self-development are prominent in sociology. These are explanations that situate the emergence of the self in social interaction. Charles Cooley asserted that self-understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them – a process termed “the looking glass self”. For Cooley, the self was made up of feelings about who we are. These self-feelings are an outcome of how we interpret the perceptions and evaluations of significant others like parents, friends, teachers and even mass media others. Because these others are significant, there are pressures to internalize these feeling as our own, that is as self-feelings or feelings that constitute a self. According to Cooley, we base our image on what we think other people see; we imagine how we look to others, draw conclusions based upon their reactions to us, and then we develop our personal sense of self. In other words, people’s reactions to us are like a mirror in which we are reflected.

George Herbert Mead also regarded the self as a distinct identity developed through social interaction. In order to engage in this process of “self,” an individual has to be able to view him or herself from the point of view, or the eyes, of others. That’s not an ability that we are born with. Through socialization we learn to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and look at the world through their perspective. This assists us in becoming self-aware, as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the “other.” These significant others who figure prominently in how we internalize a self-concept can be peers, teachers, and even media celebrities.

How do we go from being newborns to being humans with “selves?” Mead believed that there is a specific path of development that all people go through. During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their caregivers. This is followed by the play stage, during which children begin to take on the role that one other person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behavior, like playing “dress up” and acting out the “mom” role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see their father do.

During the game stage, children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another clears away dirty dishes). Mead used the example of a baseball game in which individual players understand themselves in terms of interconnected roles – roles, like a second baseman, that make sense only in relation to the other roles (e.g., a first baseman) that combine to define baseball as a team sport.

Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other, the common behavioral expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to imagine how he or she is viewed by one or many others—and thus, from a sociological perspective, to have a “self”. A generalized other is what we internalize when we are exhorted by moral leaders during the pandemic like Governor Cuomo to wear masks not for ourselves but to keep others safe. At the root of the concept of public health is to not spread the contagion outward, to self-quarantine and socially distance. The individual is asked to internalize a  collective morality that governs a self.

In general, self-consciousness (a consciousness of a self) varies inversely with self-centeredness. An individual becomes more aware of a self with greater awareness of what significant others expect of them. In the words of Mead, the self is equated with self-knowledge which is acquired by taking the point of view of the other, including seeing the self the way others see you, that is as an object. To tie this back to Cooley, the self we see in the mirror is an image that is routinely perceived by others. This is also the case for the photos that smart phone users take of themselves, in other words “selfies”.

The critical concept, here, is “internalization”. The question is whether and to what extent does the individual “internalize” the expectations of others into a “self”. While others are necessary to validate a self, the individual can find a new set of significant others.

We learned above that early childhood socialization in the family creates a foundation for self-development. The family tells us who we are before we can become someone else. This includes social identities defined by religion and race. In the opening of the documentary film, “Little White Lie” (Kanopy), Lacey Schwartz calls attention to an ancestral narrative passed down by her family from as early as she could remember. She was explicitly told by her parents and relatives that she was “descended from a long line of Jews from Eastern Europe”. She was made aware of photographs of ancestors and watched home movies of Jewish family rituals. The film presents her “family tree” in the form of a schematic drawing; an interesting branch in her family tree is represented by her father’s Sicilian grandfather who is remembered to explain her “swarthy” complexion. It is only later that she “constructs” an identity as an African American outside in opposition to her family. For this, she relies heavily on her college peer group. Her new ethnic identity is constructed by crossing a racial boundary although the result is complicated by retaining a Jewish identity. Theoretically, the case illustrates the transactional nature of ethnic and racial identities, in particular, the problems for identity claims that are not validated by significant others like parents and representatives of the referenced ethnic group. See this also for Rachel Dolezal (below).

You can stream “Little White Lies” via Kanopy on the QCC Library site.

________

Modern societies are age-graded which means that children grow up surrounded by age peers in spaces like school. Age peers become more important for self-development relative to adult authority in the family and school. Internet platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok have found new ways to connect youth and their peer cultures to consumerism – a mainstream American ideology that bases identity on commodities like cell phones, clothing and cars. See the video “Generation Like” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/generation-like/ for an investigation of the new online patterns of online communication that have been enthusiastically adopted by the younger generations. The video suggests that online social media shapes a peer group culture that is relatively insulated from adults, and that pressures individuals to conform to behaviors that are largely orchestrated by large corporations actively marketing commodities to this demographic including social media companies like Facebook. Social media is a site where youth pursue “likes” from peers that validate a “cool” self.  The Internet makes it possible to search for significant others willing and able to sustain a self that offline others (parents, teachers, peers) are not. See the role of social media in the formation of a new teenage persona called “Autumn Edows”:

See the Kanopy video “Little White Lie”, this time to consider the influence of the youth peer group on Lacey Schwartz’ reconstruction of her ethnic identity. Peer group reaction to her “off-white” skin color created doubt for Schwartz in the white, Jewish identity that her family instilled in her (“internalized”) from birth. Encountering college peers that instructed a young woman raised white to “act Black” mediated the transition to a Black identity. Although she experiences complications, Schwartz learned from her college peers how to “present a self” that was authentically “Black”.

Previously, we learned that the mass media including Internet platforms play a major role as an “agent of socialization”. The article below shows the power of media content for self-development in this case for an impressionable adolescent. Notice the way that this media content, in this case a popular series of novels aimed at adolescent females, was “internalized” by the author as she negotiated a “self” with her peer group in high school. Pay attention to the elements of “self” that he author cultivated including a specific body image (ultra-thin) and demeanor (“mean”).

In 2005, I stopped rubbing my face with washcloths, for fear that I might stimulate early wrinkles. I asked my mother to buy me lower-calorie foods for breakfast. I became brand-obsessed, convinced that if I could own just a Coach purse or pair of Tory Burch flats, all my problems would be solved.

I was 11 years old.

I’d internalized these beliefs from the Clique books, a popular series of novels by Lisi Harrison that follow a group of fabulously wealthy middle-school girls in Westchester, N.Y. As I clung to their every word, the stories taught me that other girls could not be trusted and that unpopularity, dowdiness and fatness were essentially worse than death.

In “The Clique,” the first of Harrison’s series, the mega-popular megalomaniac Massie Block and her three best friends Kristen, Dylan and Alicia — collectively known as the “Pretty Committee” — relentlessly bully a newcomer named Claire. They mock her middle-class wardrobe, love of sugary candy and general childlikeness. Where Claire wears Gap jeans and Keds to her first day of seventh grade, Massie wears a Moschino miniskirt and Jimmy Choo sandals. Claire captures moments with a pocket-size digital camera; Massie sums up her days with short “in” and “out” lists because, the book’s omniscient narrator says, “diaries could fall into enemy hands.”

I was not the only girl under the Clique’s thrall. From 2004 to 2011, Harrison published 23 Clique books (including a prequel, five novellas, a “Cliquetionary” and a manga) through Little, Brown and Company and repeatedly hit best seller lists. Tyra Banks’s Bankable Productions made a faithful, straight-to-DVD adaptation of “The Clique” in 2008.

By the late 2000s, our collective obsession with affluent teenagers was still in full swing. A “Beverly Hills 90210” revival and “Gossip Girl” had essentially saved The CW. More shows about the twisted superrich, like “Privileged” and “Pretty Little Liars,” would soon join the party. And I was spending every trip to my local Borders pawing through the Y.A. section for more novels about mean, rich girls. As a scholarship student in private schools, I spent much of my adolescence fascinated by how the other half lived. And my fixation had started back in grade school, when I picked up “The Clique.”

Rereading the Clique books as an adult, I was shocked to discover that they are intended as satire. Massie’s precocity is often just for show, and she is constantly learning that true friendship is more valuable than Fendi or facials.

“I wanted to show you how despicable bullying, snobbery, and elitism are by creating a character — Massie Block — who worked tirelessly, and often heartlessly, to maintain her alpha status,” Harrison wrote in her foreword to the final Clique book, “A Tale of Two Pretties.”

But as a preteen and young teenager — i.e. the series’ target audience — I wasn’t equipped to pick up on parody. I thought Massie was awesome: She had a quick mind and a sharp tongue, knew all the “right” things to wear and owned everything a mid-2000s girl could want, including a desktop Mac, a PalmPilot and a horse. Even rereading the books now, I find Massie compelling. She’s witty and dramatic, the main driver of most of the books’ plots. I get the sense that Harrison fell in love with her monster and didn’t have the heart to sideline her.

Were the series truly interested in promoting healthy girlhood, Claire should have been its standout protagonist, forever denouncing the Pretty Committee’s superficial ways. Instead, she falls into the Clique’s ensemble cast, led by Massie, and fights to join the group. Her exhortations that young girls should prize comfort over comeliness become a cutesy trademark. Kristen is the sporty one; Dylan, a size six, is the “fat” one; Alicia is the one with the C-cup breasts; and Claire is the one who thinks it’s OK for middle-school girls to be themselves.

Dylan constantly tries new diets at the behest of her celebrity mother, and Alicia’s breasts get called out by size nearly every time she enters a scene. The books hardly sympathize with Dylan, painting her negative self-image as a laughable side effect of her wealth instead of treating it with horror or gravity. Boys are obsessed with the buxom Alicia, and she capitalizes on this to try and out-popular Massie. As a young reader, I gathered that eating disorders were frivolous — but also that healthy appetites (and above-average bustlines) were shameful.

For the Clique books to be successful works of satire, they would have to spend more time critiquing superficial materialism and less time glorifying it. A quick, unscientific keyword search across the series’ 15 books and five novellas found 421 references to lip gloss, while the word “smart” only made 39 appearances. Inspired by the adult-seeming protagonists, I wore eyeliner and high heels to my middle school dances and got my uniform skirt hemmed as high as my parents would allow. My mother, who prefers cargo shorts to cashmere sweater sets, was baffled by my behavior.

The series does little to subvert preconceptions of “mean girls,” a wildly popular subject during my childhood thanks to the movie of the same name. Massie is undeniably cruel, but she never suffers any real consequences for her actions. Though she alienates her friends, they always come back together, and even apologize to her for leaving. Their attempts to escape Massie’s clutches are mere speed bumps on her road to world domination. The books’ names say it all: “Best Friends for Never,” “It’s Not Easy Being Mean,” “P.S. I Loathe You.”

I was not a popular kid in middle or high school. I loved my dorky, funny friends, but I wondered what it would be like to be one of the girls that all the boys in my school had crushes on. They seemed shinier than me, somehow. And partly because of books like the Clique series, I hated them indiscriminately. I gossiped about them to my friends and called them names behind their backs, because I figured they were doing the same to me. In seeking to escape the mean-girl behavior I so desperately feared, I became, in my own way, a very mean girl.

Girls undoubtedly bully other girls, and are increasingly doing so online. But our society has always loved to raise a magnifying glass to female misbehavior, and in the mid-2000s we were inundated with mean girl literature, from pop psychology books to “The Clique.” “Mean Girls” — which came out when I was in the third grade — overtly criticizes the phenomenon through satire, but it still links cattiness to femaleness. I have to wonder: As a girl, was I destined for meanness, or had essentialist ideas about “girl behavior” vs. “boy behavior” taught me that in order to correctly perform girlhood, I also had to be mean?

It’s been about 15 years since I first picked up “The Clique.” In that time, I’ve gotten more comfortable with my intelligence, calorie intake and penchant for loosefitting clothes. I’ll take ChapStick over lip gloss any day. And I think teenage girls are probably one of the least understood groups in our society.

Still, even after a women’s college education and a lot of therapy, I rarely rub my face with washcloths. I can’t shake that anxiety about the wrinkles.

“’The Clique’ Books Taught Me to Hate Other Girls and Myself”, Lena Wilson, NYT (10.6.21).

Popular music perhaps figures even more prominently in self-formation especially in the case of adolescents and teens. Youth identify with musical celebrities whose creative work and, now, biographical information is easily accessible in the mass/social media. In the example below, rock music provided a counterpoint in self-development for a teen age girl the growing up in the traditional culture of immigrant Arab parents:

During my first week of school in Kentucky, in 5^th grade, at the very beginning of the first Gulf War, a boy drew a picture and hung it on the classroom wall. On one side was an illustration of me; on the other, the rest of my classmates and teacher. Above my head, in marker, the words “Saddam Salam.” The teacher came in, examined it, peeled it off and never said a thing. I’ve since joked that I was the “literal poster child for bullying,” but it’s not so funny.

In that town, a tight-knit community in the Bible Belt, my Arabness and my Muslim background were glaring targets. I was terrorized ruthlessly, by those looking to elevate their station or find the butt of a joke, including the occasional teacher. For stretches over the next few years, throughout middle school, I would sit in a classroom during lunch or in the front office during recess, for my safety.

Hometown pride is everything in a town like that, and it was made exceedingly clear that this was not my hometown. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

I spent my first four years in Beirut, Lebanon, during one of the worst eras of its civil war. The pandemonium of bombs detonating was the soundtrack of my formative years. (Memories that surged back to the surface with the blast in Beirut last month.) My parents, with little choice but to chase down a better life, moved with their three daughters to the United States, landing in Colorado and Missouri for a few years before Kentucky.

Like so many immigrant children, I didn’t belong — here, there or anywhere. And I was cornered between two cultures by an unspoken guiding principle: Don’t stand out, but don’t fit in. And so I was a ghost, spending most of my time alone deep in my hobbies, including watching absurd amounts of TV. My parents, coping with their new reality and skeptical of American childhood rituals like sleepovers, were largely hands-off as long as I stayed at home.

Then in 1994, days before my 14^th birthday, the Nine Inch Nails video for “Closer” premiered on MTV: A macabre fever dream crawling with insects and gritty with cobwebs. There was a wired heart thumping, a pig head spinning, a monkey on a cross and the skull of a bull. And a singer, Trent Reznor, sometimes blindfolded, levitating or writhing as a panel of similarly suited businessmen cast a judgmental eye. It was a far cry from the uninspired videos peddled to adolescent girls, a battery of spinning, polished Jordans and Joeys that had long left me confused and a little repulsed.

On my birthday (which I share with Reznor, I’d later learn), I went to the mall and slid cash across the counter for “The Downward Spiral,” the album with “Closer,” which had been released a couple months prior. At home, I slipped the CD in my Discman, hid the case under my mattress and listened to it on headphones until my ears were trashed.

The music — a kind of mechanical cacophony I’d never heard before — landed in my life with no context, a meteor from the sky. But instead of it creating a crater in my life, it slipped perfectly into the one already there.

On the surface, a bleak concept album about a man spiraling toward suicide, packed with explicitly sexual and violent lyrics — even if it’s regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time — might seem like an unlikely, even dangerous, salve for a sad girl paralyzed with anxiety. But instead, it threw me a line. Its themes of religious alienation, loss, loneliness, fear, anger and maybe most important, NIN’s signature theme, control — which I was desperate for — resonated deeply. To break free, I had to see my pain reflected and swim across that dark pool. That grinding, banging, cranking scream of industrial sounds transformed my shame to rage.

“There are others,” I realized. My people: outcasts, nerds, misfits, loners. And with that, my rebellion was underway. I began slowly shape-shifting from a ghost to a flesh-and-blood human. My choices, even the risky ones, were, for the first time in my life, mine.

We’re taught that risk-taking, thrill-seeking and fearlessness are the domain of boys and men. And that girls are flowers — precious, vulnerable and evanescent, to be protected from perceived forces of destruction. To me at 14, dark industrial music that flouted boundaries was the embodiment of courage and the antithesis of fear. Maybe that was part of the point: This music, and the identity that went along with it, was not intended for me (or so I thought), which only made me want it more. I guess I’m more of a weed, resilient and determined to progress, like so many girls and women.

 “The Downward Spiral” gave me the nerve to fight for what’s mine, and with my newfound armor, I began high school transformed, inside and out, to the point that some of my classmates didn’t recognize me. I inscribed the letters “nin” on my backpack in Wite-Out — an audacious signal in that conservative community, where such music was considered devilish. The bullying stopped almost on a dime, and I felt what was once unthinkable: cool.

By going public with my fandom — in the time just before the internet allowed us to find our tribes with relative ease — the other others came into view. I wasn’t so alone after all. I became aware that tucked into corners all around me, in that very school and town, were creative kids similarly struggling. These newfound connections opened up new worlds of sounds, messages and musicians that would further mold me: Fiona Apple, Rage Against the Machine, Garbage, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Nirvana, Ani DiFranco and my favorite of all, Tori Amos. These artists would provide the score as I carved an atypical path through my 20s. The decade culminated in me coming out as gay.

Today, when I stream “The Downward Spiral,” every palpitation-inducing thwack, growl and whisper is branded in my memory. And I’m reminded that for those like me, the status quo is a mirage, elusive no matter how hard we chase it. By existing as an Arab in America and a gay person, I am inherently an outsider. But outside, as it turns out, is good. And recently, as we all navigate this new era of transformation and bid farewell to a norm that was unwelcoming to many, maybe it’s great.

Us rebels, well-suited to adapt, get to continue imagining reality on our terms and, like a weed that will flourish anywhere, take our opportunities and claim space in any way we want.

“I Was Bullied for Being Arab. Nine Inch Nails Threw Me a Lifeline”, Maya Salam, NYT (9.24.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/arts/music/nine-inch-nails-trent-reznor.html

Reference to a “generalized other” is the third and highest stage of “self-consciousness” for Mead. This entails an awareness of a self in relation to larger social wholes like the “community”, “the race”, even “humanity”, and it drives social movements like “climate change” and “Black Lives Matter”. The article excerpted below illustrates Mead’s concept of a “generalized other” in the public discourse of mask-wearing. Pay attention to the way the commitment to masking in public is internalized as a “social contract” in which individuals display a regard for the “community” over self-interest:

Walking around New York City these days, one might not guess that it’s been a little over two weeks since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced more relaxed mask guidelines, which state that fully vaccinated people can remove their face coverings when outside.

Last Friday, for instance, the faces of SoHo appeared largely masked, with the minor exception of outdoor diners. A walk through Harlem the weekend after the announcement presented a neighborhood with a mask-wearing rate approaching 100 percent.

No one, it seems, wants to be mistaken for a person not in possession of a mask.

Why? The politicization of the mask throughout the pandemic seems to be one driver. Shortly after the C.D.C. announcement, the writer Jessica Valenti tweeted about the prospect of going maskless, “How can I ensure people don’t think I’m a Republican?”

That may be an oversimplification of the matter. Not to mention, being mistaken for a Republican has never been that likely in a city that is overwhelmingly blue. But New York is also a walking city, where residents rely heavily on visual cues, so the continued masking up seems to be signifying something.

For many, that something is a genuine concern for others. I shared an elevator in my building for the first time recently with a woman who was double-masked. “I’m fully vaccinated,” she assured me, “I just want other people not to worry.” Indeed, every fully masked person I’ve interacted with in the last two weeks in my Upper West Side neighborhood has been fully vaccinated.

The social contract in New York runs deep, perhaps deeper than any official health guidelines. New Yorkers masked up early, and it’s not entirely surprising that after the brutality of last spring — when deaths in the city surged, with refrigerator trucks acting as temporary morgues — the shift back to normalcy might be on the slow side.

ADVERTISEMENT

“It’s our social covenant,” said Tene Raymond, who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and is fully vaccinated. “I’m still in the mind-set that it’s out of respect that I have this,” she said of her mask.

“My Mask, My Safety Signal”, Glynnis MacNicol, NYT (5.12.2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/style/masks-outdoors-new-york.html

______

Presentation of Self

Sociological theories of self-development (see Cooley and Mead) are often criticized for failing to represent individual agency, or the ability of the individual to shape a self. This is addressed in the classic work of Erving Goffman.

Goffman theorized that a person is like an actor on a stage. Calling his theory dramaturgy, Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different roles depending on who is present. Think about the way you behave around your coworkers versus the way you behave around your grandparents versus the way you behave with a blind date. Even if you’re not consciously trying to alter your personality, your grandparents, coworkers, and date probably see different sides of you.

As in a play, the setting matters as well. If you have a group of friends over to your house for dinner, you are playing the role of a host. It is agreed upon that you will provide food and seating and probably be stuck with a lot of the cleanup at the end of the night. Similarly, your friends are playing the roles of guests, and they are expected to respect your property and any rules you may set forth (“Don’t leave the door open or the cat will get out.”). In any scene, there needs to be a shared reality between players. In this case, if you view yourself as a guest and others view you as a host, there are likely to be problems.

As in theater, “props” figure prominently in performing a self. The “credibility bookcase” became a staple and a cliché for impression management during the pandemic quarantine. What impressions are give off? See the article by Amanda Hess below:

Self-presentation relies heavily on how we speak; speech is a status marker that is difficult to cultivate. See NYT video “You Tawkin’ to Me?” In the video, a young Italian American woman from Howard Beach explains that she sought the help of an image consultant to help her find the right voice – to “manage” a speech style that is associated with higher status positions that are not typically associated with her ethnic family and community.https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/1248069311927/you-talkin-to-me.html

______

“Impression management” is a critical component of self-presentation. For example, a judge in a courtroom has many “props” to create an impression of fairness, gravity, and control—like her robe and gavel. Those entering the courtroom are expected to adhere to the scene being set. Just imagine the “impression” that can be made by how a person dresses. This is the reason that attorneys frequently select the hairstyle and apparel for witnesses and defendants in courtroom proceedings. We don certain clothes, prepare our hair in a particular manner, wear makeup, use cologne, and the like—all with the notion that our presentation of ourselves is going to affect how others perceive us. We expect a certain reaction, and, if lucky, we get the one we desire and feel good about it. It is important to note that it is necessary for significant others to validate the identity claims or self being performed. It is online protocol for people to submit “selfies” for validation or approval by significant others. Does it work the same way offline as when people solicit favorable comment for a new hairdo or a change in clothing style?

_____

Presenting a self via impression management remains only one side of the transaction of a social self. A presented self still has to be validated by significant others. Lacey Schwartz validated an “authentic” Black self in her college peer group; this could not happen in her Jewish family. Rachel Dolezal claimed a “Black” identity and actually headed the chapter of the NAACP in Boise, Idaho. However, significant others repudiated this identity claim, including her biological parents. See this link for an interview in which Dolezal presents a beleaguered Black self. “Rachel Dolezal Breaks Her Silence: ‘I Identify as Black’”, Today Show interview, 6.16.15 (Youtube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG9Q2_Hv83k 

For more on the Rachel Dolezal case see “Black or White? Women’s Story Stirs Up a Furor”, R. Perez-Pena, NYT (6.12.15). https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/us/rachel-dolezal-naacp-president-accused-of-lying-about-her-race.html

____

We don’t get to be who we say we are. The self is “presented” in a social context that is dominated by definitions that are “institutionalized”, or built-into the situation. See the example below in the case of racial “labels” that are at hand for healthcare providers that have relative power in defining a category of people based on institutional power:

Medical records contain a plethora of information, from a patient’s diagnoses and treatments to marital status to drinking and exercise habits.

They also note whether a patient has followed medical advice. A health provider may add a line stating that the patient is “noncompliant” or “non-adherent,” signaling that the patient has been uncooperative and may exhibit problematic behaviors.

Two large new studies found that such terms, while not commonly used, are much more likely to appear in the medical records of Black patients than in those of other races.

“In medicine, we tend to label people in derogatory ways when we don’t truly ‘see’ them — when we don’t know them or understand them,” said Dr. Dean Schillinger, who directs the Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and was not involved in the studies. “The process of labeling provides a convenient shortcut that leads some physicians to blame the patient for their illnesses.”

The first study, published in Health Affairs, found that Black patients were two and a half times as likely as white patients to have at least one negative descriptive term used in their electronic health record. The study was based on an analysis of more than 40,000 notes taken for 18,459 adult patients at a large urban medical center in Chicago between January 2019 and October 2020.

About 8 percent of all patients had one or more derogatory terms in their charts, the study found. The most common negative descriptive terms used in the records were “refused,” “not adherent,” “not compliant” and “agitated.”

“It’s not so much whether you should never use these words, but why are we applying these words with so much more frequency to Black patients?” said Michael Sun, the lead author of the study and a third-year medical school student at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. “Do we really believe Black patients are truly not compliant, so many more times than white patients?”

Rather than assume the patient is lacking in motivation or disengaged, he said, the medical team should inquire whether the patient is facing financial barriers, transportation difficulties or other obstacles to adhering to treatment, such as illiteracy or trouble with English.

The researchers found that outpatient clinic records were far less likely to contain the negative comments, compared with records from hospitals and emergency rooms, perhaps because outpatient providers have ongoing relationships with their patients and are more familiar with their circumstances.

Regardless of race, unmarried patients and those on government health plans like Medicare and Medicaid were more likely to have negative descriptors applied to them than married or privately insured patients. Patients in poor overall health, with several chronic underlying health problems, were also twice as likely to have negative adjectives in their medical records, the study found.

The second study, published in JAMA Network Open, analyzed the electronic health records of nearly 30,000 patients at a large urban academic medical center between January and December 2018. The study looked for what researchers called “stigmatizing language,” comparing the negative terms used to describe patients of different racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as those with three chronic diseases: diabetes, substance use disorders and chronic pain.

Overall, 2.5 percent of the notes contained terms like “nonadherence,” “noncompliance,” “failed” or “failure,” “refuses” or “refused,” and, on occasion, “combative” or “argumentative.” But while 2.6 percent of medical notes on white patients contained such terms, they were present in 3.15 percent of notes about Black patients.

Looking at some 8,700 notes about patients with diabetes, 6,100 notes about patients with substance use disorder and 5,100 notes about those with chronic pain, the researchers found that patients with diabetes — most of whom had type 2 diabetes, which is often associated with excess weight and called a “lifestyle” disease — were the most likely to be described in negative ways. Nearly 7 percent of patients with diabetes were said to be noncompliant with a treatment regimen, or to have “uncontrolled” disease, or to have “failed.”

The medical record is the first thing a hospital-based health provider sees, even before meeting the patient, said Dr. Gracie Himmelstein, the paper’s first author, and it creates a strong first impression.

The labels have consequences, Dr. Schillinger warned. While some of the notes convey critical information, the terms used can cloud the physician’s — and future clinicians’ —  judgment and decision-making, diminishing their compassion and empathy. And that may cause patients to lose trust in their providers.

“Patients whose physicians tend to judge, blame or vilify them are much less likely to have trust in their doctors, and in the medical system overall,” Dr. Schillinger said. “Having health care providers who are trustworthy — who earn their patients’ trust by not judging them unfairly — is critical to ensuring optimal health and eliminating health disparities.”

“Doctors Are More Likely to Describe Black Patients as Uncooperative, Studies Find”, Roni C. Rabin, NYT ( 2.16.2022).

____

See the article below for the presentation of a self that negotiates racial codes. Minorities typically engage in “code switching” in order to fit into segregated social settings. In general, pay attention to the way individuals adjust their self-concepts in the interest of establishing social connections – calling attention to one aspect of the self while muting another. It also raises the question of misrepresenting an identity, what is called “passing” in the language of race relations:

Last September, when Remy Barnwell, 26, started dating Ben Podnar, who is white, she was hesitant to wear her hair in its natural state. As a Black woman, she was uncertain of how he would respond to her tightly coiled strands.

On her first date with Mr. Podnar, Ms. Barnwell, a tax attorney in Washington, D.C., arrived wearing box braids that concealed her natural Afro. Six months would pass before she let Mr. Podnar see her kinky coils.

“I definitely noticed the first time she took her braids out and I remember her being very concerned about how I would feel,” said Mr. Podnar, 29, an audience development director for the Center for American Progress in Washington.

Ms. Barnwell, who said straightening her hair since childhood “reinforced the idea that my natural hair was not enough,” was pleasantly surprised at Mr. Podnar’s response to her Afro. “At first I was really nervous, but he was immediately obsessed with it, which was a relieving and satisfying moment,” she said.

“I know a lot of people in her life have criticized her tight coils, so it’s especially been nice getting to see her feel that attraction from me no matter how she wears her hair,” added Mr. Podnar, who said he likes all of the different ways Ms. Barnwell styles her hair.

Hair isn’t the only thing Ms. Barnwell said she has toned down when getting to know someone who is not Black. She won’t play soul music, wears clothes that don’t expose her curves and avoids using African American Vernacular English, commonly known as Ebonics, in conversations.

“I also wore my Birkenstocks to my first date with Ben, which I’d never wear on a first date with a nonwhite man,” Ms. Barnwell said.

The alteration of hairstyles, clothes, and interests in order to gain social acceptance and limit the risk of falling victim to bias is a form of code-switching, a term that refers to the common practice of adapting or altering speech, dialect, look or behavior depending on the social setting.

Ms. Barnwell and other Black people say code-switching is common when they date interracially because first impressions determine if a second date is in the cards.

Joseph Lamour, 38, a journalist and illustrator who lives in Washington, said it wasn’t until a white boyfriend confronted him about his change in vernacular that he realized he altered his speech.

“We were driving to Boston and got a little lost, so I asked a Black person on the corner for directions,” said Mr. Lamour, who is Black. When he rolled his car’s window back up, Mr. Lamour said his then-boyfriend, a white man, asked why his voice changed when he spoke to the man. “I hadn’t even noticed I did it, but then he did an impression of it and it all came full circle,” he said, and added: “It’s kind of like a job interview where you sort of make yourself more corporate-sounding in order to seem more standard so that a second date can happen.”

Mr. Lamour, who said he mostly dates white men, later realized he code-switches in other ways when meeting someone who isn’t Black for the first time. “When I’m going on a first date, I consciously put on clothes that make me appear to be a Don Lemon-type instead of a 50 Cent-type — even though I have both types of clothing,” he said.

For Black people and other minority groups, code-switching is a way of existing within multiple worlds at once by repressing their authentic selves while playing up behavior seen as acceptable by a majority.

While a person of any race may adapt their authentic self to make a good impression on a date, this switch in behavior is often more prominent in interracial or interethnic relationships.

“The greater the perceived distance, cultural difference, or racial difference between the two people involved, the more code switching is likely to occur,” said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist and professor at N.Y.U.

Breuna Westry, 24, who lives in Austin, Texas, and works as an assistant marketing director for Clinical Compensation Consultants, said she mostly dates white men. Originally from New Orleans, Ms. Westry, who is Black, said she uses a vocabulary that is authentic to the Black community in her hometown. However, she said she consciously changes her vocabulary when going on a date with someone who isn’t Black.

“The slang is ingrained in me. I say things like ‘yes’m’ which is a total Southern, Black country term,” Ms. Westry said. “But sometimes I feel that I wouldn’t necessarily use certain phrases around the white guys I date.”

She said her mother’s use of Southern slang has also made her anxious about introducing her family to that of a prospective partner who isn’t Black.

“My mom is in her 60s and old-school, from Mobile, Alabama,” said Ms. Westry. “She feels comfortable in the way that she talks and I would never want somebody to judge her intellect level or anything based on that, because my mom’s a smart nurse.”

In the United States, the application of code-switching outside of linguistics is historically and culturally Black.

In his book “The Souls of Black Folk,” first published in 1903, W.E.B. Dubois described such behavior as “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Black academics began using the term code-switching to describe their interactions and relationships with white people.

Shan Boodram, a Los Angeles-based sex and relationship educator, who is Black, Indian, and white, said many Black Americans see code-switching as an obligation, rather than a choice.

“Code-switching is speaking specifically to Black people who have to assimilate, or feel that they have to assimilate, to white culture in order to receive success,” Ms. Boodram said, including “a romantic potential with somebody” who is white.

“There are so many negative stereotypes associated with blackness: if you dress a certain way, look a certain way, or if your hair is a certain way, you get lumped into what is perceived as ‘urban culture,’ and that’s not seen as professional,” Ms. Boodram added. “And maybe for some people, that’s not seen as the person that you want to bring home to mom.”

Black women in particular resort to code-switching when dating because of the bias they often face, a result of being stereotyped as angry and discontent, hypersexualized and lacking positive representation in TV and film. This bias has led to Black women being the least contacted on dating apps and facing the most racial and sexual discrimination in online dating settings.

“If we’re talking about interracial dating, specifically about Black women, they might ask, ‘Do I feel comfortable with showing myself to this person that maybe has their own preconceived notions about Black women? Is there some eroticism or thoughts around what it means to date me as a person?’” said Camille Lester, a relationship therapist based in New York, who is Black.

“Everybody, when they’re dating, puts on some type of mask and then the longer you’re with someone, or the closer you allow yourself to get, you take off pieces of that mask,” Ms. Barnwell said, adding: “It’s especially difficult to take off pieces of that mask when you’re a Black woman because we’re already the least appreciated.”

While code-switching might be the thing that gets someone a second date, those who acknowledge doing it said it wasn’t a long-term strategy. Mr. Lamour said that, lately, he has been interested in dating only people who are comfortable with his authentic self.

“I’ve been getting more comfortable with myself and therefore the person that I’m going to be with is going to have to be comfortable with me, because I am,” he said.

Ms. Barnwell had a similar realization. “I finally got to a place where I didn’t really want to spend the time or money to get my hair braided again,” she said of the moment she decided to let Mr. Podnar see her natural hair. “I was like, ‘OK, am I going to let my white boyfriend see me with my Afro?’ And I really had to tell myself this was dumb, and if he sees me in my Afro and he hates it, then we simply should just break up.”

“Do You Hide Your True Self While Dating?”, Brianna Holt, NYT (11.11.2021)

________

Is the Self “Authentic”?

The presentation of self raises questions about authenticity: to what extent is their reason to believe that the self being “presented” is real? This has been heightened now that performances have moved online including social media. This applies not only to identity claims made on dating apps but also job interviews:

Kristin Zawatski, 44, who works in information technology, in a department of about 70 people, was helping to conduct a virtual job interview. She said she was impressed by the candidate’s sharp understanding of the technical skills required for the position. But about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of her colleagues muted the video call.

“The person answering the questions isn’t the person on camera,” he declared, according to her recollection, prompting an audible gasp from his teammates.

Ms. Zawatski’s colleague had recognized the voice coming from the screen and realized it was an acquaintance who was answering the technical questions while the job candidate moved his lips onscreen — something the candidate’s friend had just confessed to over text message.

“What did he think was going to happen when he moved across the country and realized he couldn’t do the job?” Ms. Zawatski later wondered aloud.

Job interviews have always demanded a pair of somewhat incongruous qualities: authenticity and polish. Interview guides urge candidates to put their best foot forward. Recruiters encourage people to be genuine, even have fun with the process. (“The surprising secret to interview success — be yourself,” goes the typical advice.) It can be a psychologically taxing combination of tips, compelling job seekers to wonder how they can simultaneously convey a real sense of their flawed, leave-dishes-in-the-sink personalities while also boasting of their abilities as a math whiz, polyglot, team leader, calendaring virtuoso or whatever.

“It’s very easy to present yourself as you would like to be, as opposed to the way you really are,” said Robert Feldman, a psychologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of “The Liar in Your Life.” People, he added, tend to learn from a young age the advantages conferred by fibbing.

Children are taught that when Grandma comes over with the gift of an impossibly ugly sweater, they should act as if they had gotten a PlayStation, Dr. Feldman said. As they get older, the stakes of lying are raised — most notably in a job interview, when there’s money on the table.

Remote hiring processes have given some job seekers the impression that they can get away with extreme forms of dishonesty. Virtual interviews leave open the possibility that candidates can ask a friend to feed them answers. Telephone calls can create a psychological distance between the interviewer and interviewee, Dr. Feldman noted, which may make it easier for people to justify presenting themselves in an inaccurate way. At the same time, people are doing far more interviews than before, with about one in five employees voluntarily switching jobs in 2020.

Still, recruiters know to expect some gloss in the hiring process. It’s even acknowledged in pop culture. “Fluent in Finnish?” Isla Fisher’s character is asked in “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” by a friend who is scanning her job qualifications. Ms. Fisher’s character responds: “Everyone has fudged their résumé a little.”

Psychologists who study interviews note that a wide range of inauthentic behaviors can be in play. Most job seekers use what’s called “impression management” in the interview process, which means they’re thinking about how to present the best version of themselves, according to Joshua Bourdage, an organizational psychologist at the University of Calgary, and Nicolas Roulin, an organizational psychologist at Saint Mary’s University.

But there are honest, relatively honest and flat-out deceptive versions of that. Deceptive ingratiation can mean laughing at unfunny jokes, and honest ingratiation can be connecting with the interviewer over real shared interests, like hiking or watching the Knicks. Slight image creation means inflating your skills just a bit (maybe that camping trip becomes a passion for wilderness survival), while extensive image creation means making up stories of fake accomplishments (maybe that camping trip includes wrestling a bear). Some two-thirds of job applicants use deceptive ingratiation, and over half admit to slight image creation, according to research by Dr. Bourdage and Dr. Roulin.

“Do You Know Who That Worker You Just Hired Really Is?”, Emma Goldberg, NYT (2.17.2022)

Supplementary Reading:

 “How to Ace an Online Job Interview”, J. Weed, NYT (8.3.20); “The ‘Credibility Bookcase’ Is the Quarantine’s Hottest Accessory”, A. Hess, NYT (5.2.20); “What Do Famous People’s Bookshelves Reveal?”, Gal Beckerman, NYT (4.30.20); “Our Fear of Being a Nobody”, Bianca Vivian Brooks, NYT (10.4.19); “The Rise of the Haphazard Self”, David Brooks, NYT (5.14.19); “How to Dress for a Job Interview”, Malia Wolan, NYT (2.4.20); “Want to Sound More Persuasive? Just Speak Up”, Tim Herrera, NYT (11.18.19); “How to Prove You’re Middle Class”, Karyn Lacy, NYT (1.22.20); “This Is How Scandinavia Got Great”, David Brooks, NYT (2.14.20).

Acting Your Age

“Young Adulthood in America”, Kevin Quealy and Claire Cain Miller, NYT (3.13.19); “Why Are Adults Living with Their Parents?”, Michael Kolomatsky, NYT (4.18.19); “A Movie Date with My Younger Self”, Mark Caro, NYT (3.26.17); “When Are You Really An Adult?”, J. Beck, The Atlantic (1.5.16); “What is it About 20-Somethings?” by Robin Henig (NYT (8/18/10); “How Adulthood Happens”, D. Brooks, NYT (6.12.16); “Is Rock n’ Roll Dead, or Just Old?”, B. Flanagan, NYT (11.20.16); “Is It Legal for 14-Year Olds to Marry. Should It Be?”, L. Foderaro, NYT (3.13.17); “Adulting, But With Your College crowd”, Ronnie Koenig, NYT (3.26.17); “Why One Woman Pretended to Be a High School Cheerleader”, Jeff Maysh, The Atlantic (7.6.16); “69-Year-Old Dutchman Starts Legal Bid to Become 20 Years Younger”, Tara John, CNN, 11.8.18; “Why Millennials are Bad at Adulting”, Conor Matchett, Elite Daily (2.3.17); “When A Child Is Leading The World”, David Brooks, NYT (5.16.17); “Four-Year Olds Don’t Act Like Trump”, Allison Gopnik, NYT (5.21.17); “You May Be Only as Old as You Feel”, Emily Laber-Warren, NYT (10.22.19); “The Quinceanara Redefined” [photo essay], June Canedo, NYT (11.13.19).

___________

Need Help with Your Assignment? Let us Help you

Place Your Order

We guarantee you the following if you order your paper with us

High Quality Papers

All papers are written by ENL (US, UK, AUSTRALIA) writers with vast experience in the field. We perform a quality assessment on all orders before submitting them.

Timely Delivery

Do you have an urgent order?  We have more than enough writers who will ensure that your order is delivered on time. 

100% Original

We provide plagiarism reports for all our custom written papers. All papers are written from scratch.

24/7 Customer Support

Contact us anytime, any day, via any means if you need any help. You can use the Live Chat, email, or our provided phone number anytime.

Confidential and Secure

We will not disclose the nature of our services or any information you provide to a third party.

Stressed? We got you covered

Money-Back Guarantee

Get your money back if your paper is not delivered on time or if your instructions are not followed.

We Guarantee the Best Grades

Get a Professional Answer