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Module 4 The Socialization Processes of the Individual

PSYC 225 Social Psychology

Recognize the importance of the various socialization processes including the following components: linguistic, moral, and sexual.

Identify the concepts of social identity, focalization, and efficacy

Describe how the attribution process is used to explain our behavior and the behaviors of others. Identify the in-group and out-group

Explain how people think, feel, and behave with members of different social groups based on theories of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

Objectives At the end of this module, the student will be able to:

Socialization Processes (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

Another of the definitions most often cited in the literature refers to socialization as: o"The process by means of which the human person learns and internalizes, in the course of his life, the sociocultural elements of his environment, integrates them into the structure of his personality, under the influence of experiences and significant social agents, and thus adapts to the social environment within which he must live" (Rocher, 1990).

Socialization Processes (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

• The agents of socialization are considered to be institutions and individuals who have the necessary powers to assess compliance with the demands of society and have sufficient power to impose them.

• Sociology affirms that socialization tries to see how society manages to transmit its ideals, values, beliefs, acceptable behaviors; and for Psychology the emphasis is on seeing how the individual assimilates and integrates them into his personality.

Socialization Processes (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

 The agents of socialization are the instances or ways, through which the transmission of knowledge, norms, values, etc. is carried out.

• The Family

• In childhood and school years predominate the family and school respectively

• The Groups of Equal

• Adolescence and Adulthood are for the group of equals. In old age, again the family?

• The Education System

• In childhood and adolescence

Socialization Processes (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

The mass media. The mass media have a permanent presence although filtered by the family in the first years of life and filtered by one's own ideology in adulthood and old age.

Socialization Processes: Linguistic Component (Martín-Baro, I. 1982).

• Language plays an important role in the formation and development of intelligence. It is fundamental to understand the communication flows between people, as well as the character of available knowledge.

• Language turns out to be a conditioning element of the human whole, both of what someone is and what someone does. In social life, the construction of reality is largely carried out through language (Berger and Luckman, 1968).

Socialization processes: linguistic component (Martín- Baro, I. 1982).

Psychology is interested in the language as a behavior, rather than language as a communication system, which is the domain of the linguist. The social psychologist is not only interested in language as a behavior; rather, in how language interacts with other psychological processes, how it influences and is influenced by perception, memory and knowledge, what it does in action and how action conditions, inhibits, and enhances it.

Socialization Processes: Linguistic Component (Martín-Baro, I. 1982).

 Socialization through language o Language serves as a socializing mediation between the person and the community,

between the individual experience and the social order.

 Linguistic socialization: language as social behavior. Socialization through language (example: monkey infants are socialized as monkeys and not as human beings; they learn their norms and principles). Construction of reality through language, comes from human beings and their socialization, Chomsky: difference between linguistic capacity (phonetic and semantic rules) and linguistic activity (concrete execution or use of language). Sapir: language configures worlds of reality. Whorf: language indicates a certain type of behavior.

The individual becomes a social person by learning a language. Each language carries meanings shared by a community and perhaps shared in different ways by each social group. By acquiring a language, the individual becomes deeply attached to his social group, incorporating not only a lexicon and a syntax, but, above all, a scheme of life.

Socialization Processes: Moral Component (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

Kohlberg (1992) affirms that individuals go through a sequence of three levels and six universal stages in their moral development, which do not vary according to culture.

To reach any of these stages, it is necessary to go through all the previous ones. Moreover, each of these stages is considered morally superior to the preceding one.

Stages:

Preconventional level: It is characteristic of children's moral reasoning. It is present in many adolescents and in some adults. It is the least mature form of moral reasoning. It is based on a selfish perspective; moral issues are judged from self- interest.

Stage 1. The child directs his behavior towards obedience to the rules established by adult authority to avoid punishment.

Stage 2. The child directs his behavior in a selfish and instrumental way. What is fair is what satisfies one's own needs and interests. Human relationships are understood in a similar way to those of the market.

Conventional level: Arises during adolescence and is dominant in the thinking of most adults. It is characterized by conformity to social norms. However, adolescence is the stage in which the person prepares to overcome this conformism and achieve moral autonomy. Failure to overcome this level can generate prejudice towards those who are different and intolerance towards those who do not submit to the rest.

Stage 3. What is fair and correct is what others like, and what the group accepts.

What interests the person is to be accepted by the group, therefore, he/she follows

their customs. Stage 4. The behavior is oriented towards the maintenance of the

social order as it is.

Everyone must fulfill his obligations without critically analyzing them.

Post-conventional level This level is the least frequent. It arises during adolescence or early adulthood. The person is capable of critically analyzing the norms and customs in force in the social group

Stage 5. Fairness is defined by the basic rights and values recognized by society in a constitutional and democratic manner. What is right, provides the greatest good for the largest number of people.

Stage 6. What is right is defined by the decision of the individual conscience. Universal principles are used to judge moral issues.

Socialization Processes: Moral Component (González Navarro and Tinoco, 2012).

 Each of the three levels reflects a different type of relationship between an individual and the norms of the society in which he/she lives.

Socialization Processes: Sexual Component

(Martín-Baro, I. 1982).

The most sociologically oriented theorists explain that the sexual identity of men and women is fundamentally based on the specific roles they must play in each society.

 The origin of masculine or feminine identity is found in the functions that social organization and interaction demand of them in each historical circumstance. The sex of the person determines the role he or she will play in society.

This is the approach preferred by some of the leading promoters of women's liberation. According to Betty Friedan (1964), Western society has locked women into a constricting role, rationalized through a supposed feminine mystique that serves the needs of men, but not those of women themselves. Kate Miller (1970) speaks of "sexual politics" to refer to those socializing practices that have perpetuated the submission and social discrimination of women to the benefit of men, justifying it as something connatural to the reality of being human.

Socialization Processes: Sexual Component (Martín-Baro, I. 1982).

• According to this approach, an individual's masculine or feminine behavior and values are determined by his or her particular learning: people learn to be masculine or feminine, to act morally or immorally, to speak English or Spanish.

• Individuals acquire sexually typified behaviors; that means, those that have various consequences for individuals of different sexes. Certain body movements are considered very proper in women and make them more attractive, but trigger rejection when performed by a man; these are sexually typified gestures.

The school of cognitive development emphasizes the role played in the acquisition of sexual identity by the cognitive image that the individual acquires about himself/herself. According to Kohlberg (1972), at a relatively early stage of development the individual establishes a basic judgment about his or her own physical reality that will classify him or her, as a boy or a girl. This sexual identity or self-classification is the organizing principle of the attitudes that the person will acquire with respect to his or her sexual role.

Attribution Processes (Psicología- online.com, 2019).

 In social psychology, attribution is the process by which individuals explain the causes of behavior and events.

The development of models to explain these processes is called attribution theory. Attribution theory proposes that the attributions people make about events and behavior can be classified as either internal or external.

In an internal attribution, people assume that an event or a person's behavior is due to personal factors, such as traits, abilities, or feelings. In an external or situational attribution, people assume that a person's behavior is due to situational factors.

Attribution Processes (Psicología- online.com, 2019).

 Attribution is the explanation or interpretation that an individual gives to the behavior or behaviors, his own or others' (more frequently others') that occur at a given time and in a given context.

 This definition leads us to see the attributive phenomenon as a fundamental concept to understand that it is not so much the behavior that generates the interpersonal or intergroup conflict, but the different interpretations of the same behavior by the actor and the observer.

According to Rodríguez, E. (2019), in social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring the causes of events or behaviors. Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider, the father of attribution theory, defined it as a method for evaluating how people explain the origin of their own and others' behavior.

Attribution theories, in our daily lives, is something we all do constantly, without any awareness of the underlying processes and biases that drive our inferences. The attributions we make on a daily basis are no small matter; but it have an important influence on our feelings and also on the way we think and relate to other people.

In this sense, we are prone to make internal or external attributions, depending on our personality or the influence that different factors have on us. Cognitive biases, for example, play an important role in this regard.

Heider's attribution theory: In his book ,The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships (1958), Heider suggested that people observe others in order to analyze their behavior. He further postulated that they draw their own conclusions to explain the meaning of the actions they observe.

Heider's attribution theory attempts to analyze how we explain people's behavior and life events. In social psychology, this is called the attributional process. For Heider, we tend to attribute the behavior of others to one of two possible causes: an internal cause or an external cause. Internal causes or internal attributions refer to individual characteristics and traits, such as personality traits, intelligence, motivation, and so on. External causes or external attributions are those attributed to situational forces, such as luck, weather, or the actions of third parties. Jones and Davis's Corresponding Interference Theory: In 1965, Edward Jones and Keith Davis suggested that people make inferences about others when actions are intentional, rather than accidental, in their corresponding interference theory. The goal of this theory is to explain why people give internal or external attributions. According to this theory, when people see others act in certain ways, they look for a correspondence between motives and their behaviors. Thus, the inferences we make would be based on the degree of choice, the probability of occurrence of the behavior, and the effects of that behavior.

Weiner's motivational model: Weiner's theory, derived from Heider's work, is an integrative model of causal adscriptions and the cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects that attributions can have. Weiner developed attribution theory to explain the association between causal inference and academic success and failure. To do so, he focused on identifying differences in people's needs and performance when they think about their successes or failures. Weiner's (1986) motivational model explains achievement behavior through people's perceived causal attributions to past achievement outcomes. Put more simply, success would be related to how people have explained their past successes. This theory relates expectations for the future to the stability of the attributions made. Thus, more stable attributions sustain expectations of obtaining the same outcome in the future, while more unstable attributions produce changes in expectations about the future outcome.

Attribution Processes (Suría, 2019).

 Attribution errors and biases  The same behavior can be interpreted in completely

different ways. Causal attributions are not made solely based on the information available to us, but are also mediated by our attitudes and expectations, as well as by the particular perspective we have of the observed event or behavior.

 All these factors remind us of the subjective character of attribution. This subjectivity resides in the frequent attributional errors or biases that we commit. We are going to highlight: the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus, biases favorable to the self, biases favorable to the group, and Seligman's insidious bias.

Attribution Processes (Suría, 2019).

Attribution errors and biases oFundamental attribution error:

• This is the tendency to attribute one's own positive outcomes to internal causes (example: skill or personal characteristics), and negative outcomes to external causes (example: chance or assignment difficulty). Several possible explanations have been suggested for this tendency, which can be grouped into two categories: (a) cognitive and (b).

oFalse consensus: • This is understood as a tendency to estimate that our behavior or our opinions are relatively common, that others think and act as we do.

Attribution Processes (Suría, 2019).

Attribution errors and biases o Pro-self-bias: This category of biases refers to the tendency to attribute one's own positive

outcomes to internal causes (example: ability or personal characteristics), and negative outcomes to external causes (example: chance or assignment difficulty). Several possible explanations have been suggested for this tendency, which can be grouped into two categories: (a) cognitive and (b) motivational.

o Pro-group bias: The tendency of subjects, in intergroup contexts, to explain the positive behaviors performed by other members of their own group based on the actor's personal dispositions, while their negative actions are explained by situational factors. This pattern is reversed when the actor is perceived as a member of an exogroup.

Seligman's insidious attributional bias: The insidious attributional bias consists of attributing successes to external, specific, and unstable factors and attributing failures to internal, global, and stable factors. The insidious attributional style is depressive.

Social Identity (Muelas Lobato, R.2019).

• Each person is different, even if they have a shared social identity. We all have different experiences, which combined with specific genetics, constitute what is understood as mind. By having a different mind, each person develops his or her own identity.

• However, people are social beings, and as such we are in continuous interaction with other people. In these interactions, social networks are formed giving rise to social groups. Social groups are diverse and varied, and we generally belong to several. Some of them, we cannot choose; but generally, belonging to groups is voluntary.

Social Identity (Muelas Lobato, R. 2019).

Belonging to these groups will determine how we are and how we behave; because when we belong to a group, we tend to internalize its norms and values. Thus, through different social processes we develop what are called social identities.

A social identity will emerge from belonging to these social groups (Scandroglio, López and San José, 2008), one of each group with which we will identify ourselves to a greater or lesser degree.

Social Identity (Muelas Lobato, R.2019).

Functions of social identity Social identities have advantages that make them beneficial. Thus, social identities serve basic psychological functions such as belonging, distinctiveness, respect, understanding or meaning, and agency (Fiske, 2000). For example, social identity confirms that one belongs to a particular place in the social world.

At the same time, it also tells us to which places we do not belong. It tells us that we are like other people who will show us respect, but different from others. In addition, social identity provides a shared view of the world from which it can be interpreted and understood.

Finally, social identity tells us that we are not alone as we have the support and solidarity of other group members.

Social Identity (Muelas Lobato, R.2019).

 Social identity are the aspects of self- image that derive from social categories to which we think we belong (Tajfel & Turner, 1986).

 Thus, when we define ourselves as men or women, we appeal to our social gender identity and, in doing so, the attitudes, norms, and behaviors of our social group become part of our personal identity.

Processes of social identity

For social identity to emerge and for the previously mentioned attitudes to appear, several processes must take place. These are:

1. Categorization

To simplify the world and understand it better, we categorize. In the same way, we also categorize other people into social groups while becoming aware of the categories to which we belong.

The consequence is that we adopt the attitudes of those categories (Hogg, Terry, & White, 1995). The general tendency is to favor one's own group by emphasizing similarities with members of one's group and differences with other groups (Turner, 1920).

2. Comparison

We normally compare ourselves with other people to see similarities and differences. Similarly, we also compare our group with other groups (Farley, 1982). These comparisons will form an image of our group that will determine our relationships with other groups.

3. Identification

We tend to identify with our social groups. Part of who we are will depend on the group to which we belong, so that sometimes we think of ourselves as members of a group rather than as unique individuals (Jans, Postmes, & Van der Zee, 2011).

This social identity that comes from categorization and comparison will therefore determine our behaviors.

Schema Theory (Psychologenie, n.d).

• Concept of schema theory, one of the theories of cognitivist learning, was first introduced in 1932 through the work of British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (some suggest it was first introduced in 1926 by Jean Piaget) and was developed mainly in the 1970s by the American educational psychologist Richard Anderson.

• Schema theory describes how knowledge is acquired, processed, and organized.

The initial assumption of this theory is that "a very act of understanding involves knowledge of the world." According to this theory, knowledge is a network of mental frameworks or cognitive constructs called schema. Schemas organize the knowledge stored in the long-term memory.

The term schema is often used even outside cognitive psychology, it refers to a mental framework that humans use to represent and organize remembered information.

Schema ("the building blocks of cognition") presents our simplified personal view of reality derived from our experience and prior knowledge, allowing us to remember, modify our behavior, focus attention on key information, or try to predict the most likely outcome of events.

Schema Theory (Psychologenie, n.d).

 Schemas also expand and change over time, due to the acquisition of new information; but deeply installed schemas are inert and slow to change.

 This may provide an explanation for why some people live with incorrect or inconsistent beliefs, rather than change them.

 When new information is retrieved, if possible, it will be assimilated or changed into the existing or related schema to integrate the new information.

Schema theory was influenced in part by failed attempts in the area of artificial intelligence.

Teaching a computer to read natural text or exhibit other human-like behavior was quite unsuccessful, as it has proven to be impossible without a fair amount of information that was not directly included but was intrinsically present in humans.

Investigations have shown that this inherent information stored in the form

of a schema, example:

Content schema - prior knowledge about the topic of the text formal schema - knowledge of the structure of the text, and.

Language schema - knowledge of vocabulary and relationships of words in the text can cause easier or more difficult text comprehension, depending on how developed the above-mentioned schema, and the climate they are successfully activated.

According to Brown, when reading a text, by itself it does not carry the meaning that a reader attributes to it.

Meaning is formed by the information and the cultural and emotional context that the reader brings to it through his or her schema rather than through his or her schema.

the reader provides through his or her schema rather than by the text itself.

Therefore, text comprehension and retention depend primarily on the schema possessed by the reader, among which content schema should be one of the most important, as Al- Issa suggests.

Stereotype (Ramírez Lago, 2019)

• Stereotypes are organized beliefs or ideas about the characteristics associated with different social groups: physical appearance, interests, occupations, ethnic groups, etc.

• They are simplified images of how groups are seen and what they do. The categories are made up of interpretations, ideas, and opinions about the elements.

Stereotype (Ramírez Lago, 2019)

 From Psychology, these cognitions and interpretations about social groups are stereotypes.

 We all have stereotypes because our mind organizes concepts into categories, and they are not always negative; they must be understood as two sides of the same coin.

 In short, stereotypes are widespread generalizations about the members of a social group that cause a tendency to emphasize similarities within the group, especially when the categorization has value or importance for the person making it and differences with other groups.

References

Mondal, P. (n.d.). Socialisation: Definitions, aims and mechanism of socialisation. yourarticlelibrary.com.

https://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/socialisation-definitions-aims-and-mechanism-of-

socialisation/35090

Muelas Lobato, R. (2023, January 2). Group psychology. Exploring Your Mind. https://exploringyourmind.com/group-

psychology/

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