Socializing in the Wild

According to sociology, socialization is the process by which people develop a sense of self and or social identity, learn about the social groups to which they belong and do not belong. The two main factors that revolve around socialization are nature and nurture, nature referring to ones biological inheritance and nurture referring to ones social environment.

The text talks about the lives of two infant girls, Anna and Isabelle- who were kept in isolation during the first six years of life. Anna was kept in complete isolation and Isabelle was secluded with her deaf- mute mother. Anna died four years after she was found, where as Isabelle survived because of the bond she had with her deaf-mute mother.

This importance of bonding is not just seen in human beings, but is also common among animals as well. This was clearly evident in Harry Harlow’s clinical experiment “Pit of despair” conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s. His experiment was conducted on newly born monkeys who were raised in isolation chambers for up to one year. Most of Harlow’s experiment was based on maternal love, in other words the ‘nature of love’. However, being raised in isolation, these monkeys were unable to show appropriate affection to their offspring, they did not know the appropriate ways of interacting socially. They ignored their offspring and some even killed their baby by crushing their head on the floor. His experiment also looks into the forms of affection these monkeys tend to look for in different circumstances, showing how socializing is not only an important factor for human, but works the same way even in the wild.