Socialisation
The sociological theory is that of culture and socialisation. In basic terms, the idea is that we are born into a society that has certain rules of behaviour (culture) and we, as human beings, learn these rules through a process of socialisation.
For the moment, socialisation simply means the various ways we learn how to be a human being and are taught the basic rules of the society in which we live. We will define and develop this idea in more detail at the appropriate point.
In this respect, one of the central ideas of Sociology is that people are not born knowing how to behave. If this claim is valid, it means people must, in effect, learn how to "be human" (in the most general sense of the phrase).
This teaching and learning process, sociologists argue, is related to human development and need (both physical and cultural) or, to put it another way, to the concepts of physical development and psychological development.
Another idea that leads us to favour a cultural approach to understanding patterns of human behaviour is that people choose to do things in a wide variety of different ways. Whenever we look at human social behaviour, whether from an historical or cross-cultural perspective, we find a massive amount of cultural diversity (cultural differences in the way things are done, organised and so forth), just as we also find a huge range of cultural similarities. Examples of cultural diversity (evidence of the way our cultural relationships shape not just individual behaviour but also behaviour at the group and institutional level) are not difficult to find.
Finally, we can suggest, experimentally, how behaviour is learnt, not instinctive.
One way of doing this is to isolate a human infant at birth, keeping it away from human contact for as much time as possible. We could then observe the child over a number of years to see what effect this would have. Would that child after, for example, 10 years of such treatment:
a. Have recognisable forms of human behaviour?
b. Be able to take its place in society and lead a relatively normal life?
Clearly, this form of experimentation is not something that could be done in our society (even if we wanted to), since such cruelty would not be ethical. However, although it is not ethically possible to set-up laboratory-type experiments (a situation in which people are studied under very tightly-controlled conditions specified by the researcher), it is nevertheless possible to take advantage of natural experiments that have occurred in this particular area and there have, fortunately, been a number of documented instances where just such behaviour has been observed.
On the basis of the above (and the various forms of evidence involved), it seems clear that human beings do not have instincts in the way that we understand some animals, birds and insects to have this type of genetic programming. Having said this, we can note that human beings, like any other living thing, have certain biological drives which are sometimes confused with instinct-type behaviour but which are not, in the general sense, as influential on our behaviour as instincts would be.
Thus far I’ve suggested that, as sociologists, we need to note the concept of biological drive at the same time as rejecting the concept of instinct as an explanation for human social behaviour. In so doing, of course, we necessarily bring the role of culture to centre stage in our quest to understand both the similarities and diversities in human behaviour. In so doing, however, we need to address a further set of questions relating specifically to how cultures develop and persist over time.