Consequences of Socialization Process | Essay | Social Psychology

In this essay we will discuss about the Consequences of Socialization Process.

Consequences of Socialization Process

Essay Contents:

1. Essay on Achievement Motivation
2. Essay on Identification Process
3. Essay on Interpersonal Communication
4. Essay on the Development of Self

1. Essay on Achievement Motivation:

One of the most depressing features of socialization process in Indian society is that more than nine-tenth of Indians have no desire to achieve some standard of excellence in their work or other activities. As is well known, Indian farming till recently was one of subsistence farming. The farmers, over thousands of years, were quite content to produce grains just to satisfy their food needs and a small surplus to satisfy other needs.

It is only in the seventies, with the success of the new hybrid seeds developed in the Agricultural Research institutions and universities that food pro­duction has gone up from a mere 50 million tonnes in 1950 to 130 million tonnes in 1981. As a result, for the last two or five years there is a substantial surplus in food-grains besides exporting rice to other countries.

Increased production of goods and production of high quality goods is due to the desire to achieve some standard of excellence. It is well known that Indian cloth and Indian handicrafts were of excellent quality thousands of years ago and even today. But amongst the people at large this desire to achieve excellence is not there.

Even according to the 1981 census report, 64 per cent of the people are illite­rate. Hardly 20 per cent complete the seven year primary school edu­cation. Further, according to the Sixth Plan (1980-85) document, more than 50 per cent of Indians are below the poverty line, that is, they do not earn enough to have adequate food to get the necessary strength to work and earn their livelihood.

According to the 1981 census, the population of India is 684 millions. More than 78 per live in rural areas. And even among the 22 per cent who live in urban areas, quite a good proportion live in the urban slums. Nearly 70 per cent of Indian citizens are illiterate and unskilled.

This is why inspite of the great strides in industrialization as a result of the many Five Year Plans, the huge masses in India live in utter poverty without food to eat, clothes to wear, houses to live in, and education for the children.

David McClelland (1961) has shown that achievement motivation is an important antecedent for economic development. Studies have shown that it plays an important role in education, profession and various occupations. The need to excel is on the basis of this motive. Achievement motivation is defined as a disposition to strive for success and the capacity to experience pleasure with the achievement of success.

The joy is not so much in what one has achieved as in the striving to achieve. By contrast the vast masses of not only citizens but even the students in schools and colleges have not set high goals for themselves to achieve and to attain higher levels. High level of achievement implies persistent effort to attain the goal set for oneself by one­self.

The need for achievement is measured by assessing the stories written by the subjects when they see a set of ambiguous pictures deve­loped for this purpose. The pictures can be interpreted in many ways. The assumption is that the individual will interpret the picture in terms of achievement, whether the person in the picture has a desire to succeed.

The individual is asked to look at the picture and write about what is happening, who is doing what, and to whom? Also he is asked to relate what events and thoughts might have led to the situation depicted in the picture, what are the thoughts, hopes and fears that may be happening in the minds of the persons in the picture.

Finally, he is asked to write as to what may happen in the future. By answer­ing these questions in his story, the individual provides material for an objective scoring of the strength of the achievement motive.

The studies conducted so far show two aspects which are of interest to us. First of all it has been found that socialization plays a signi­ficant part in an individual having this motive. Winter-bottom (1958), studied the stories told by boys of eight to ten. She then interviewed the mothers of these boys to find out whether any socialization pro­cesses were related to the scores in the test.

She found that the mothers of the boys who had high scores in need for achievement had demand­ed independent behaviour in them at an earlier age than the mothers of the boys with lower scores. Also, they had given more frequent and stronger rewards for independent accomplishment than the other mothers.

Other studies have also found that the parents and children with strong achievement motivation set high standards of excellence and showed their appreciation when those standards were achieved.

That mere independence does not lead to the development of need for achievement is clear from the fact that the children of beggars enjoy a great deal of independence, but grow up to be beggars. They have no standards of excellence. That is independent behaviour coupled with high standards, lead to the growth of need for achievement.

The second aspect of the studies is that it is possible to give training to youth and adults to develop the need. McClelland (1969) developed a training program in Hyderabad in 1964. Fifteen potential entrepre­neurs were taken at a time for training. Four such groups were trained.

The training consisted in influencing the fantasy of the person with achievement-oriented imagery. They were given training to examine their current behaviour and their possible future plan in the achieve­ment-motive framework.

The results showed that there was a signifi­cant difference between the pre-training and post-training period in their business activities. It may be assumed that people belonging to Gujarat, Marwar, Chettinad and other areas may actually get similar training by way of tradition at home and in the family business. This is a problem which has to be studied.

These studies show how important child-rearing practices are in building up a society in which many persons strive for excellence. There can be no achievement when there is neither aspiration nor effort.

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2. Essay on Identification Process:

One of the striking consequences of the socialization process is the fact that the child adopts many of the behaviour patterns of the parents. The child’s responses are not only shaped by the direct application of rewards and punishments but also by the process of modelling (imita­tion) by which the child takes over certain distinctive features of the parent’s behaviour.

Identification is the general process by which the attributes of another person are internalized by one. While imitation is the reproduction of specific responses in specific situations to attain specific goals, identification is more general.

It was Freud who showed that the child resolves the Oedipus complex through the process of identification; the child takes on the characteristics and values of the father somewhere between the third and the fifth year. Freud also showed that it is through the identification process that the child deve­lops the super-ego.

The two major components of the super-ego accord­ing to Freud are:

(a) The conscience, and

(b) The ego ideal.

He said “the external restrictions are introjected so that the super-ego takes the place of the parental function, and thenceforward observes, guides and threatens the ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the child before”.

He distinguished between two kinds of identification:

(a) Developmental (or analytic, from the Greek “lean­ing on”) identification, and

(b) Aggressive (or defensive) identification.

In developmental identification the attributes of the nurturant parent are internalized.

Whiting and Child (1953) have shown that when the disciplinary techniques are love-oriented, when there is a threat by the parents to deny or to withdraw love, or a threat to isolate the child if he displeases them, then the tendency towards identification is high; love-oriented punishment clearly involves the manipulation of nurturance, the care for and providing aid and comfort to the child.

On the other hand, non-love-oriented techniques of discipline like physical punishment exploit fear in the child; as a result the tendency toward identification with the parents will be less. As regards the aggressive identification, it occurs when the child takes on the aggressive demea­nour of those who are aggressing against them; the child internalizes the attributes of the more powerful persons, partly to reduce his own powerlessness and partly to produce behaviour that will gain acceptance and protection. Both these ends are achieved by becoming like the more powerful person.

As noted above another aspect of socialization is based on the child’s desire for information. The newborn child has his neurosensory equipment to respond to stimuli; out of this develops an active interest in what exists in the environment and a selective attentiveness to changes in stimulation.

Berlyne (1960) has shown that exploratory behaviour manifests itself in orienting responses, locomotors exploration and investigatory responses. Such exploratory behaviour may or may not lead to the acquisition of knowledge. As the child grows older there is information-seeking when there is some conceptual conflict, that is a conflict between beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and ideas. The goal of information-seeking is the resolution of this conflict. In other words, the child as well as the adult seek information when there is some uncertainty.

As regards modes of information transmission, the most common form involves the answers to child’s questions. Another common form consists of giving advice. While answers to questions relate to events and general problems of interpreting the world around us, advice deals with the behaviour of the child in relation to restrictions and opportu­nities in the environment; it deals with what is right and what is wrong, etc.

A third way of giving information is to make social comparisons; this is the general process of reducing uncertainty about beliefs, attitudes and emotions by observing the statements and performances of other people. The parents and teachers help the child to evaluate his beliefs, attitudes, etc., by speaking of the beliefs etc., of the appro­priate reference persons. The child also obtains information by obser­vational learning, through imitation of models.

Finally, the child may- obtain information by empathy, by anticipating the behaviour of signi­ficant persons in the environment; in a difficult situation, when the parent is absent, the child may try to imagine what the parent might do in that particular situation.

By all these various kinds of information the child acquires an out­look of the world in which he lives and of the people with whom he lives and about the various beliefs and attitudes he cherishes. The child selects, stores and transforms these various kinds of information so that his understanding and knowledge, his cognitive structure becomes coherent and stable. He is now in a position to evaluate his experiences; his experiences become meaningful; the world in which he lives becomes meaningful.

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3. Essay on Interpersonal Communication:

As noted above, social behaviour is concerned with interaction bet­ween individuals. Social behaviour starts, if one may so put it, right from the birth of the infant. There is mutual interaction bet­ween the infant and the mother. The infant starts life with biological needs and the mother satisfies these needs of hunger, thirst, sleep, etc. The infant ‘communicates’ his needs through the pre-speech form of crying.

After a few months, the baby communicates through ‘babbling’ sounds and through bodily gestures. By the third or fourth week, the mother is able to understand what the cry of the baby signifies. Pain, for example, is expressed by shrill loud cries. Hunger cries are loud and interrupted by sucking movements.

Within a few weeks after birth, the baby learns that crying is a sure method of gaining attention. When his vocal mechanisms develop, there is ‘babbling.’ By the end of the first year of life, babbling gives way to ‘speech.’ Gestures, bodily and facial accompany cries, babblings and speech.

Herodotus, the Greek historian of fifth century B.C. reports that a king of Egypt tried to find out if children start speaking the Egyptian language or any other language. To test this, he is said to have had several children raised by nurses who were forbidden to speak to them. According to the story, the children used some ancient tongue to ask for bread.

In thirteenth century Emperor Frederick is reported to have attempted to repeat the experiment. It is reported that the children died. King James IV of Scotland tried to find if children would start speaking Hebrew, the language of Adam according to the Bible. He arranged to place the children on an island in the care of a woman who could not speak.

According to the report they grew up and started speaking Hebrew. All these attempts were to find out the language of God in which human beings untaught could speak. A similar story is told about Akbar’s attempt to find if the isolated children would start speaking in Arabic, the language of the Koran. Growth of the child depends as much on affection and soothing language as on nutrition.

By the time the baby is twelve to eighteen months of age, he can use one word sentences, accompanied by gestures. But he learns to respond to words much earlier. By the time the infant is three to four months, he smiles when his mother ‘speaks’ to him. His gestural res­ponses to the speech of the mother become more and more expressive as his age advances in the first year.

Learning to speak involves the various tasks of comprehending words used by the mothers, learning to pronounce words so that they are associated with meanings. He learns to pronounce partly by trial and error, but mainly by imitating others. When the baby learns to associate meaning with an object and a sound symbol which stands for the object, language learning and communication with others starts.

By eighteen months, the baby learns the names of objects and persons. Later he learns verbs such as “give” and “take.” Gradually he learns the meaning of words and to use words and sentences. Studies show that he can use about a thousand words by four years of age and twice that by five years. Language growth in early childhood is indeed very rapid. Piaget has shown that about half of the speech of a five or six year old child is egocentric, mainly about himself, his possessions, his family, etc.

With increase in command over language and with the widening of social relation among the members of the family, neighbourhood and in the school, the scope of interpersonal communication increases greatly as the child grows up into adolescence.

Interpersonal communication refers to the transmission of messages from one person to another. As noted above, the infant communicates to the mother his bodily needs, pains and pleasures. With growth the messages relate to information. Thus communication involves two persons – the transmitter and the receiver, and the message, which is understood and appropriately responded to by the receivers.

The messa­ges are ‘symbolic,’ they represent or stand for something else. That is, it is ‘encoded’ and the receiver has to ‘decode’ it. Thus, communication can occur only when there is a correspondence between the symbol — systems of the two persons, the transmitter and the receiver. And the communication is useful or successful only when the two interacting persons respond to the needs of each other.

Messages have to be understood, like other forms of behaviour, in terms of motives and attitudes of the transmitter, toward the receiver. The communication may be based on self-oriented motive. It may refer to the goals of the transmitter. Or it may be receiver-oriented, to obtain information which the receiver is assumed to possess.

For example, you are in a strange locality in your own city or in a new village. When you enquire about the address of the house to which you want to go, you ask the person you meet for information. Or when you are standing in a confused state, a man of the locality may ask you whether he could help you. The same thing happens when you go to a shop. You may ask the shopman what you want or the shopman may ask you what you want.

Sending the message as well as receiving the message, are both directed toward the satisfaction of some goal, some motive satisfaction. This depends on how accurately the message is communicated and how accurately it has been received. If it is not properly communicated, it is bound to lead to frustration. Whether the communication has been accurate and adequate can be judged by the effects produced by it. The information that one gets by noting the effects of one’s behavi­our is called ‘feedback.’

In a broad way, it will be useful to distinguish between:

(a) Two-way communication in which both the parties are able to share messages and interact with each other on a level of equality as among friends; and

(b) One-way communication in which most of the messages are directed toward the receiver, as in the classroom situation in which the teacher is the transmitter and the students are the receivers or in the master-servant relationship in which messages flow from the master to the servant.

It is obvious that the two-way situation pro­motes involvement and encourages initiative, while in the one-way situation the receiver becomes dependent and obedient and loses any desire to initiate action. By contrast, the two-way situation promotes mutual dependence and helps one to develop a sense of self-dependence. In the one-way communication situation, the teacher or the master or the leader is looked upon as having great capacity to control others.

Such a perception interferes with an open dialogue between people. In that situation everyone expects the master to solve the problems, to take care of the subordinates, to tell them what they should do, and how they should do. It is obvious that such dependence easily leads to apathy and lack of initiative. Another significant feature of this situa­tion is that dependence leads to resentment and frustration.

Another aspect of interpersonal communication is the part played by emotion. When the parent or teacher or friend criticizes the child or student or the friend, his motive may be constructive and positive. But the latter may perceive the criticism as a form of ridicule. Interper­sonal conflicts arise on the basis of such misunderstandings. Both the transmitter and the receiver must be aware of these possibilities and must rectify the messages to promote harmony rather than conflict and bitterness.

In order to understand what happens in a communication process, we must go beyond the simple meaning of the words and sentences, to the personal and interpersonal concerns of the speaker and the listener. As noted earlier, our motivations, feelings, values and attitudes influ­ence what we say and how we say. Here it is useful to distinguish between the manifest and latent content of our messages.

The manifest content refers to the facts communicated, the obvious meaning of the sentences used. The latent content refers to the attitudes and motivation. The system of transactional analysis developed by Berne and Harris proceeds on the assumption that each person has three components in his personality, the parent, the child, the adult, and that each of these three components influences our daily transactions.

The parent component of the personality arises out of the internalization of the parental commands and prohibitions. There is the child com­ponent of dependence in our personality. Thirdly, there is the adult component of self-dependence, decision-making, thinking ahead, anti­cipating the future. This component takes the situation into account, while the parent component and child component are based on past situations, in our lives.

In interpersonal situation, the two persons in­volved may take one or the other of these three components. That is, A may speak to B, as if he was a parent of a child or an adult. Similarly B may respond to A as a child or a parent or an adult. That is, they two may take complementary roles to each other.

In the first and the second the relationship between the two is one of superior-subordinate. In the third it is one of equality, in which the two can share their opinion and jointly solve the problem.

According to information theory developed by Shennon and Werner in forties, it is possible to check the effectiveness of our communication and identify the skills which will enable us to improve communication effectiveness. Communication is not a mere exchange of words between people.

According to information theory, the quality of a communi­cation is judged by the amount of new information that was shared between the two or more persons involved. It is indeed a poor inter­action if, at the end of the communication each is uncertain of the other’s ideas, feelings, motives, etc.

When there is uncertainty about the message or what is to be done, it is obvious that there is failure in communication. The aim of communication is to reduce uncertainty and increase certainty. In information theory terms, our messages are considered signals which exist in a noise background, as it is in the telephone or the radio set.

To be heard, the message must be stronger than the background. In human communication, noise refers not only to environment out also to the cognitive and emotional factors. Does the other person, the receiver, have the ability to understand the message? Is he ready emotionally to receive and act upon the message?

That is, the speaker should be able to share his thoughts and feel­ings, so that he can speak clearly and convincingly. The listener must have the ability to understand and respond adequately. They should be in a position to ask questions to clarify the implication of the message.

Further, the transmitter or speaker is ready to provide feed­back, to correct the ongoing behaviour, so that the response is adequate. The message has to be so worded that it is easily understood by the receiver or listener. The speaker must simplify and make the message clear so that there is the least uncertainty about it. Adverse comments on performance constitute negative feedback and will either provoke anger in the other person or diffidence. Negative evaluative judgments must be avoided.

Further, the feedback must be immediate, as soon as there is an error in the ongoing behaviour. One of the common mistakes committed is to refer to past failures, which are irre­levant to the current situation. Finally, the positive feedback may be given as frequently as necessary. These precautions help to clarify the intent of the message and will promote efficient performance.

The listener, on his part must develop certain skills. He could summarize the message in order to ensure that what he has understood is as closely approximate to what has been conveyed. This is possible only when he is very active in listening and asks questions to clarify certain doubts or uncertainties. Asking a question is an indication that one is concerned and interested in what is being said. It is also helpful if the listener himself asks for feedback so that adjustments and cor­rections could be made in the response to the message.

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4. Essay on Development of Self:

The most important result of the socialization process is the deve­lopment of self. It has already been seen how person perception arises in the second half of the first year. The infant is able to perceive other persons and gradually learns to differentiate the familiar persons from the unfamiliar persons towards the end of the first year. The next step in the process is the perception of the self.

But this is one of the most difficult achievements of man. It is well-known that the most abstruse Indian thought is to be found in the Upanishads which were com­posed more than three thousand years ago and that the central pro­blem discussed in them, is the problem of the self. Our present interest now is not in the problem of the self but how the concept of self-arises in the child and how the self-concept affects social behaviour.

During the second year, with the acquisition of language, the child learns to use, the personal pronouns. Even the two year old child is not able to use the pronouns correctly. Once he learns the correct use of the pronouns “I” and “me,” he uses them constantly. Self-reference becomes the dominant feature of his language in the third year.

Thus, the child learns to look upon himself as an object to himself. Because of the use of language and because of his superior intelligence, man has the ability to think of his body, his behaviour, his appearance to other per­sons; he is aware of his feelings and his self.

It is convenient to think of a person’s attitude toward himself as having three aspects the cognitive, the affective and the behavioural. The cognitive component represents his thoughts about himself, what he is, who he is, what his ambitions are, what his physical appearance is, etc.

The affective component represents his- feelings towards him­self, the feeling of self-worth etc. The behavioural component is the tendency to act toward oneself in various ways, he may condemn him­self, he may be oversensitive to some of his characteristics, etc.

The child not only responds to the objects and persons in his environ­ment but also to his own body, his own feelings, and his own thoughts. In so doing he develops cognitions about the self. Gradually the self becomes the nucleus around which the many diverse wants and goals of the individual become organized. The self also becomes the central and valued object. Thus, the self-concept becomes a source of motiva­tion.

The self-concept like so many other aspects of personality arises out of the interaction of the individual with others. The self is a pro­duct of social interaction. As Mead (1934) pointed out: “The self-arises in conduct, when the individual becomes a social object in ex­perience to himself. This takes place when the individual assumes the attitude or uses the gesture which another individual would use and responds to it himself or tends to so respond. The child gradually becomes a social being in his own experience, and he acts towards him­self in a manner analogous to that in which he acts toward others.”

Gradually he learns to conceive of himself as having characteristics which are perceived by others. Because others say that he is a good boy or bright boy, he looks upon himself as such. He incorporates into himself all these characteristics.

By giving the child a name, by making him respond to the name, by making him repeat the name in response to such questions as “Who are you?,” the parents and others make him recognize his name and build up in him a sense of identity.

As the child matures and has more and more experiences, he begins to organize his perceptions into a fluid but consistent and recognizable pattern which Rogers (1951) called long back the “self-structure.” The individual’s way of looking at himself becomes the self-concept; it is for the most part consistent with the individual’s general mode of thinking, feeling and acting.

Snygg and Combs (1959) state that the basic human need is to pre­serve and enhance the self that we perceive and believe in. In other words, all our behavior, including our thoughts, attitudes, values and feelings, is directed toward keeping ourselves in fact and functioning in accordance with our expectations of what adequate functioning is or should be. The self-concept also includes the expectations of others about the individual.

Just as a child learns that others are important to him, to satisfy his needs, he also learns that he is important to others. He also be­comes acquisitive—he wants things for himself, he grabs at things which belong to others and clings to them and resists attempts of the other children to take them away from his grasp. As he grows he learns that he can explore the physical environment and gradually learns the difference between self and not-self.

During the third year the child increasingly finds himself in conflict with the standards of his parents as his explorations become more vigorous and, in a middle class home, he starts pulling books from the shelves and other articles in the room. He may also annoy his parents by urinating in inappropriate places.

Gradually there is a check over his impulsive and spontaneous behaviour which comes into conflict with the possessions of the parents and their other standards. Sooner or later he is punished for these acts. This leads him to the next step in his development, namely, to incorporate into his self-structure and self-concept, the parental expectations, and thus accepting restrictions.

Thus at this stage, there is a lot of negativism in the child since he has to change his self-concept. In the past his relationship with the parents had been characterized by cuddling and caressing and soft words. Now he finds that they speak loudly and with anger and they may slap him. He finds himself rejected by the parents.

The only way of gaining their love again is to internalize their restrictions and to change his self-concept to include the new standards of the parents. He now learns to accept the limits placed by his parents not only when they are present but also when they are not present. A further step in his development is to feel guilty when he does something bad or wrong. He may react to this by punishing himself.

He may say “I am a bad boy” and he may slap his own hands. Thus he does to him­self what his parents would do to him under those circumstances when he has transgressed or violated the parents’ rules. This restraining and punishing aspect of his self-structure is “conscience.” Freud called it the superego. Essentially conscience is a pattern or way of reacting to ourselves.

The conscience itself now becomes a socializing agent in preventing misbehaviour. It is possible that the child learns to develop and react to such internal controls more easily when he is brought up by verbal control by his parents and where “loss of love” rather than physical punishment becomes the chief strategy by which the parents deal with the child’s misbehaviour.

In other words, it is possible that where physical punishment is the main method of control used by the parents, the child finds it difficult to develop these internal restraints and depends more on external rather than on internal controls.

This is why often the employers who have to deal with illiterate and un­skilled labour have to use scolding and actual physical punishments or threats of physical punishments to make them do their legitimate work.

Bandura and McDonald (1963) found that the behaviour of the models had a greater influence on the behaviour of children than the amount of reinforcement which the children received. This finding throws light on the development of conscience during the early years of childhood.

It is likely that the parents who make a great use of physical punishment are themselves unable to depend on inner con­trols. Hence their lack of confidence in their children’s ability to develop and use such controls. Many studies have shown that lower- class parents are more likely to make use of physical punishment in child control than are middle-class parents.

In later childhood years, that is, after six years of age, the child comes into contact with the peer groups and with new sets of stan­dards; he incorporates these standards into his self-structure in the same way he incorporated the parental standards earlier.

Thus the growth of self depends on continual learning, unlearning and relearning; it involves adjustments and readjustments. These changes are difficult for any person. This is why in later childhood years and during adolescence every individual needs emotional support and understanding from others.

Thus, conformity, conscience, superego and guilt feelings, all result in the attempt of the growing individual to meet the needs concerned with “belongingness,” to maintain satis­factory relations with other persons, first at home, later outside the home.

In essence, the problem of every individual is to learn the best ways of satisfying his basic needs without trespassing on the rights of other people and in conformity with his own ideas. With the establish­ment of necessary controls over his own impulses, an individual is able to obtain acceptance as a participating member of the society.

As he becomes more competent and effective, the later develop­ment of the self is related to higher needs as Maslow (1954) has shown, namely, the needs connected with achievement and self-expression, in other words, to become a self-reliant and productive person; finally, he has to proceed towards self-actualization and self-integration.

It is little wonder that some persons are unable to build up their selves through this complicated process and become victims of delin­quency and crime, on the one hand, or of neurosis and psychosis, on the other.

More than two thousand years ago, the author of the Gita wrote: “Let a man lift himself by himself; let him not degrade himself; for the self alone is the friend of the self and the self alone is the enemy of the self”:

“For him who has conquered his (lower) self by the (higher) self his self is a friend but for him who has not possessed his (higher) self, his very self will act in enmity like an enemy.”