How Much of You Is Really You? | Socialization & Identity
Discover how family, culture, education and society shape your identity. Explore socialization, free will and the hidden influence of your environment.
By Juno Anna Martin
3 min read
Are Your Choices Really Yours?
Imagine you’re swimming in a river. Swimming against the current is hard; you’ll probably move very slowly or maybe even backwards from where you’re swimming to. But if you just swim with the current, it would be much easier, and you would move forward faster. If you do nothing intentionally, you move with the current anyway. Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, obviously that’s common sense. But I promise I have a point. Because the current and the river are a metaphor for your environment.
You may think you are completely free. You choose your clothes, hobbies, beliefs, goals and so much more. But do you?
The Invisible Force Shaping Your Life
The theory of social determinism would beg to differ. It states that social interaction and cultural constructs, like customs, education and expectations, determine your individual behavior. It argues the nurture side of the classic nature versus nurture debate.
And think about it: if you had been born in a different country, with different parents, friends and teachers and a different culture, would you be the same person? Probably not.
That doesn’t mean free will doesn’t exist, but it means that maybe our environment determines which options seem like the best options. Our brains are designed to adapt to what is around us, often without us noticing. Our culture and the values of the people around us determine what we consider success, what we consider normal, how we behave and what goals we pursue, even if we don’t consciously necessarily realize it.
Even when we think we’re being unique, often we’re still influenced by the people around us. So we have free will to make our own choices, but our environment shapes which choices we make. So is it your free will? Or is it the will of a combination of environmental factors and the people around you?
Who Taught You to Be You?
The environment starts shaping us as children; we learn how relationships work by watching our parents and others around us interact. This is called the process of socialization: learning the norms, values and behaviors of society.
We develop attachment patterns, social skills, ways of dealing with emotions and basic beliefs about ourselves and others.
We do this by imagining what people think about us. We are what we think others think we are.
Now that sounds complicated, but it’s something we all experience. Think about your friends. You might ask yourself: do they think I’m funny? Smart? Weird? Confident? You think about how you appear to others, like your friends, and then interpret how they feel about you. And that’s how you’ll see yourself.
This is called the looking-glass theory. People look at how they act, then fill in how other people see that and judge it, and that is then how they see themselves.
The Flower That Could Have Been
Imagine we’re all flowers. Every flower has the potential to bloom, but not every flower grows in the same conditions. If one is put in fertile soil with plenty of sunlight and water, and a flower that’s exactly the same grows in rocky ground with little space to develop, they won’t be the same or have the same growth.
Their potential might be the same, but their opportunities and limitations are not. Not only if and how much that flower grows, but also how it grows is determined by the environment.
You might have also seen people coloring flowers like roses by putting them in a glass with water and pigment. Those flowers become a different color because of the environment they’re in. They can be in a perfect environment to grow, but their growth will be colored by the environment.
Humans are similar. Your environment determines your opportunities and limitations, and it also colors the way you develop, because everything you experience, learn and know to be true comes from the world around you, the world you have access to.
Author: Juno Anna Martin
Editor & Publisher: Lucía Lobato
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