Week 9.2 LIU ZIMENG 유자맹

Week 9.2 LIU ZIMENG 유자맹

1) Summarize 

Socialization is the process of individuals learning and acquiring knowledge, skills, language, norms, values and other social behaviors and personality traits in a specific social and cultural environment, adapting to society and actively acting in society and creating a new culture. It is the result of the interaction between human and society. Through socialization, individuals learn the standards, norms, values and desired behaviors in society. The socialization of an individual is a continuous lifelong experience.

Basic components of socialization:

Socialization of life skills. This includes life skills such as self-care, knowledge of daily living, and life adaptation skills.

Socialization of vocational skills. Imparting production skills and vocational skills to lay the foundation for individuals to enter society to engage in their professional careers.

Socialization of behavioral norms. This is the core of socialization, which is the key to the individual's adaptation to social life and the formation of personality characteristics. It includes the socialization of political norms, legal norms, moral norms and role norms, etc.

Socialization of life goals. The socialization of life goals, on the one hand, is to internalize social goals into individual life goals; on the other hand, it is to create thousands of people who are ambitious and strive to externalize their knowledge, skills, talents and creativity in a dynamic way for the benefit of society, so that they can become the bearers of social culture.

2) Interesting point

Psychosocial mechanisms:

Social Learning Theory

This theory is derived from the reinforcement learning theory of the behaviorist school - that is, learning is essentially influenced by positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, no reinforcement, and punishment, and changes the probability of behavior. . For example, if a child tells the truth, he is rewarded with candy, and he will tell the truth more often in the future; if a child tells a lie and gets candy, he will tell a lie more often in the future.

Social learning theory, on the other hand, suggests that not only can an individual gain or lose a certain behavior by applying stimuli to him or her, but the same effect can be obtained by observing the social learning process of other individuals. For example, if a child sees a kindergarten teacher praise a polite child and give him/her candy, he/she will be polite when he/she sees the kindergarten teacher; other traits such as gender roles are also learned from the social environment.

Social Comparison Theory

The American social psychologist L. Festinger proposed a theory of self-evaluation and affinity behavior in 1954. He believed that individuals are driven to evaluate themselves, and in the absence of objective, nonsocial standards, they use others as a source and measure of comparison to evaluate their own attitudes, abilities, and appropriateness of responses. Festinger points out that when it comes to an individual's emotions and feelings, it is difficult to have objective criteria to state whether a person's emotions are appropriate for a situation, and the attitudes, emotions, and other expressions of others become the only source of information, i.e., the appropriateness of any emotional response of an individual can be determined by the information provided by others. The theory also argues that people are always willing to compare themselves with people in similar situations, and the higher the degree of similarity, the stronger the drive for social comparison. In the process of comparing each other, uncertainty always arises, stimulating a demand to compare oneself with others. Sometimes this demand for comparison can be so strong that individuals will engage in social comparison even though convenient objective criteria exist.

3) Discussion point

Is the evolution of socialization good or bad for society?