How Do We Learn How to Behave?
Most of us know how to behave in situations nobody has ever formally explained to us. We know that a library usually demands a different kind of behaviour from a football match, that interrupting a stranger in a queue feels different from interrupting a close friend, and that what counts as polite at a family dinner may not be the same as what counts as appropriate in a workplace. We also learn how loudly to speak, when to make eye contact, how to dress for particular occasions and what kinds of behaviour are likely to attract approval, embarrassment or disapproval.
Very little of this knowledge arrives in the form of a rulebook. Instead, we absorb it gradually through everyday life.
Sociologists describe this process as socialisation. Socialisation is the process through which people learn the norms, values, expectations, identities and ways of behaving that make participation in social life possible. It begins in childhood, but it does not end there. People continue learning new expectations throughout their lives as they enter schools, friendship groups, workplaces, relationships, online communities and other social settings.
Socialisation helps explain something that can otherwise seem almost mysterious: how millions of people manage to live together while sharing at least some understanding of what behaviour means. At the same time, it raises more difficult questions. Who decides what we should learn? Why do different groups teach different expectations? What happens when those expectations conflict? And if society teaches us how to behave, how much freedom do we really have to decide for ourselves?
Learning the social world
A newborn child does not arrive knowing how society works. Language, manners, gender expectations, ideas about success, attitudes towards authority and even apparently obvious distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour have to be learned.
This does not mean that human beings are blank slates with no biological characteristics or individual personalities. Sociology is not claiming that everything about us is socially created. The sociological point is that being able to participate in a particular society requires learning its shared meanings.
Consider something as ordinary as eating. The biological need for food is universal, but the social organisation of eating varies enormously. People learn what counts as breakfast, which foods are appropriate for particular occasions, whether meals are eaten communally, how cutlery should be used, who serves whom and what behaviour at the table is considered polite. None of these practices follows automatically from the biological need to eat.
The same is true of clothing. Human beings may need protection from weather, but societies give clothing meanings connected to gender, status, religion, occupation, respectability and identity. A suit, school uniform, football shirt or wedding dress tells us something because we have learned how to interpret it.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) argued that the social world comes to appear natural because people encounter its institutions and expectations as already existing realities. Children do not usually experience language, family roles or everyday conventions as things that previous generations created. They encounter them simply as the way the world is.
This is one reason socialisation is so powerful. Much of what we learn eventually stops feeling like something we have learned at all.
Primary and secondary socialisation
Sociologists often distinguish between primary socialisation and secondary socialisation.
Primary socialisation refers to the earliest period of learning, particularly within families and other close relationships. During childhood, people learn language, basic norms, ways of expressing emotion, expectations about relationships and many of the assumptions through which they first understand the world.
Families are especially important because young children are highly dependent on the people around them. Parents, carers, siblings and relatives do not simply tell children how to behave. Children also learn by watching them, copying them and responding to approval or disapproval.
This is one reason family life is such an important sociological institution. Families do not only provide care. They are also one of the places where societies reproduce ways of thinking and behaving from one generation to the next.
However, families do not all teach identical values. Expectations about independence, education, religion, gender, money, discipline and family responsibility can vary between households and across cultures. Socialisation therefore does not produce one perfectly uniform society. It introduces people to particular versions of the social world.
As people grow older, secondary socialisation becomes increasingly important. This refers to the learning that takes place through institutions and social settings beyond the early family environment.
Schools are an obvious example. Education teaches formal subjects, but it also teaches expectations about punctuality, deadlines, authority, competition, cooperation and behaviour in groups. Students learn when they are expected to speak, how achievement is measured and what happens when institutional rules are broken.
Later, workplaces involve another round of socialisation. Starting a new job means learning far more than a job description. People discover how formal the organisation really is, which rules are strictly enforced, how colleagues communicate, who actually has influence and what behaviour is rewarded. Someone changing profession may therefore have to learn a new organisational culture even if they already have considerable work experience.
Socialisation continues because social life keeps placing us in new situations.
How other people help create the self
Socialisation is not only about learning external rules. It also contributes to our understanding of who we are.
George Herbert Mead (1934) argued that the self develops through social interaction. People learn to see themselves partly by imagining how they appear from the perspectives of others. As children develop, they become increasingly able to understand social expectations and to take the viewpoint of people around them.
This helps explain why embarrassment is such an important social emotion. Embarrassment requires some awareness of how other people might judge our behaviour. We realise that we have presented ourselves in a way that does not fit the situation.
Erving Goffman (1959) later explored how people manage their behaviour in social encounters. He compared social interaction to performance, arguing that people adjust how they present themselves according to their audience and setting. This does not necessarily mean that people are being dishonest. Different parts of ourselves become appropriate in different situations.
Someone may behave differently with close friends, with grandparents, during a job interview and when speaking to a teacher or manager. These different presentations can all be genuine while still being shaped by the social expectations of each setting.
This is closely connected to the unwritten rules that make everyday social life possible. Much of our behaviour is regulated not because an authority is constantly watching us, but because we have learned what others are likely to expect and have incorporated those expectations into our own behaviour.
Family, school, peers and media
Traditional accounts of socialisation often describe a series of agents of socialisation, meaning the people and institutions through which social learning occurs. Families and schools are among the most obvious, but peer groups, religion, workplaces and media also matter.
Peer groups become particularly important as children grow older because they provide social worlds that are partly independent of adults. Friendship groups can shape language, music, clothing, humour, attitudes and ideas about what is embarrassing or impressive. Young people may therefore encounter different expectations at home, at school and among friends, learning to navigate between them.
These influences are not always consistent. A family may emphasise academic achievement while a friendship group places greater value on social status. A school may promote one idea of appropriate behaviour while online communities reward something very different. Socialisation is therefore not simply the transmission of a single set of rules from society to the individual.
Media add another layer because people encounter models of behaviour beyond their immediate surroundings. Television, film, advertising and celebrity culture have long influenced ideas about relationships, success, beauty and consumption. Digital media have made this process more immediate and interactive.
Social media platforms do not simply show people what others are doing. They also make approval visible through likes, shares, comments and follower counts. This can intensify social learning because users receive rapid feedback about which behaviours attract attention and which are ignored, criticised or ridiculed.
Algorithms also influence what people see repeatedly, meaning that different users can be socialised into quite different online cultures. Someone immersed in one digital community may develop assumptions about humour, politics, relationships or identity that appear obvious within that group but strange elsewhere.
Digital socialisation therefore complicates the older idea that people simply learn the culture of the society around them. Increasingly, people participate in multiple overlapping social worlds.
Socialisation, class and culture
People are not socialised into society from exactly the same starting point. Social class, neighbourhood, education, ethnicity, religion and family circumstances can all shape which behaviours and forms of knowledge people encounter.
Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus is useful for understanding this. Habitus refers broadly to the durable dispositions people develop through their social experiences, including ways of speaking, behaving, judging and understanding what seems possible or appropriate (Bourdieu, 1984).
These dispositions often feel natural precisely because they have been learned gradually.
For example, children raised in households familiar with universities may grow up understanding how higher education works long before they apply. They may know what kinds of questions to ask, how university applications operate and how to speak confidently with professionals. Other students may be equally capable but have to learn these expectations later because they were not part of their everyday environment.
Neither group has necessarily been formally taught how to behave. The difference lies partly in what has been normal within their social surroundings.
This shows why socialisation can contribute to inequality. Institutions often reward particular ways of speaking, behaving and presenting oneself while treating them as signs of individual ability or confidence. People whose earlier socialisation matches those expectations may therefore possess an advantage that is difficult to see because it appears natural.
Gender and socialisation
Gender provides another clear example of how socialisation can shape behaviour without determining it completely.
From childhood, people may encounter different expectations about clothing, toys, emotion, appearance, behaviour and future roles. Adults may react differently to similar behaviour depending on whether a child is understood as a boy or a girl, while media, schools and peer groups can reinforce or challenge those expectations.
Over time, repeated messages can make certain behaviours appear naturally masculine or feminine even when those expectations vary considerably between societies and historical periods.
Yet people do not simply absorb gender expectations passively. They interpret, resist and sometimes reject them. Social norms can also change as enough people behave differently or challenge the assumptions behind them.
This illustrates an important point about socialisation more generally. Society influences individuals, but individuals also participate in changing society.
Are we simply programmed by society?
It would be easy to take the idea of socialisation too far and imagine that people simply become whatever society teaches them to be. Sociology does not require such a deterministic view.
People encounter competing influences. Families, schools, friendship groups, workplaces and digital communities may all promote different expectations. Individuals interpret these messages through their own experiences and can accept some, reject others or combine them in unexpected ways.
People also change as their circumstances change. Someone moving country may learn unfamiliar social conventions. Becoming a parent, starting university, changing career or joining a new community can all require forms of resocialisation, where previous habits are adapted to new roles and expectations.
Even institutions themselves change because people contest what they have been taught. Ideas about marriage, gender, sexuality, childhood, work and acceptable public behaviour have all changed substantially over time. Those changes could not happen if each generation simply reproduced the previous one without question.
Socialisation therefore exists alongside agency, the capacity people have to act, interpret and make choices. The important sociological question is not whether society or the individual is completely in control. It is how individual action takes place within social environments that have already provided languages, categories, expectations and unequal opportunities.
Why socialisation matters
Socialisation helps explain how society continues from one generation to another without every rule needing to be explicitly taught or constantly enforced. Through families, schools, peers, media, workplaces and everyday interaction, people gradually learn how to make sense of the social world and how others are likely to interpret their behaviour.
This process creates enough shared understanding for social life to function, but it also reproduces inequalities and assumptions. The behaviours institutions reward are not necessarily neutral, and the values people learn are not identical across all groups.
At the same time, socialisation is never completely finished. We continue learning as we enter new situations, and the social worlds into which we are socialised are themselves constantly changing.
This means that knowing how to behave is not simply a matter of having good manners or following instructions. It involves learning a complex set of social expectations that often become so familiar that we stop noticing them.
Sociology makes those expectations visible again.
The next time something simply feels like the “normal” way to behave, it is therefore worth asking a different question:
How did I learn that this was normal in the first place, and who taught me what to expect?
References
- Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor Books.
- Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)
- Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
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