Assignment # 1

Topic:
Effect of Socialization on Personality Development

Submitted To:
MAM TAIYEBA

Submitted By:
MUHAMMAD HAMZA JAVED BBS-10-38 BBA 3rd

BAHAUDDIN ZAKARIYA UNIVERSITY

SAHIWAL CAMPUS

Department of Business Administration

Effect of Socialization on Personality Development

An individual's personality is an aggregate conglomeration of decisions we've made throughout our lives. There are inherent natural, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to the development of our personality. According to process of socialization, "personality also colors our values, beliefs, and expectations ... Hereditary factors that contribute to personality development do so as a result of interactions with the particular social environment in which people live. Socialization has had diverse meanings in the social sciences, partly because a number of disciplines claim it as a central process. In its most common and general usage, the term socialization refers to the process of interaction through which an individual (a novice) acquires the norms, values, beliefs, attitudes, and language characteristic of his or her group. In the course of acquiring these cultural elements, the individual self and personality are created and shaped.

Socialization
Cultures differ in the social behavior they demand; thus, children have to learn through experience how people like them are expected to behave in their society. The problem is that acceptable behavior in every society differs for children and adults. Children who imitated the behavior of their parents would not make a success of childhood (Harris, 1999). According to GS theory, children solve this dilemma by means of a cognitive process called self-categorization(Turner, 1987). Children sort people into cognitive categories such as kid and adult or boy and girl (the relevant categories depend upon the social context), and then decide which one they belong in. The "group" in GS theory is actually a social category. Its members need not congregate in one place or even interact; a child can identify with a group even if its members reject her. When people identify with a group, they take on its behaviors and attitudes (Turner, 1987). Thus, according to the theory, the way children learn to behave outside the home is by identifying with a group of others they perceive to be similar to themselves and

taking on the behaviors and attitudes of that group. To a large extent, at least in the early years, this means taking on the behaviors and attitudes the majority of the children learned at home -- a parents'-group-to-children's-group effect that can be identified as such only by observing the small minority of children who learned something different at home. This view of socialization agrees with descriptions of childhood in huntergatherer and tribal societies. According to Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989), once children in these societies have been weaned, they spend most of their time in the local play group. "Thus," he observed, "the child's socialization occurs mainly within the play group"

Some Effects in Personality Development

Context Effects
One reason why people believe so strongly in the nurture assumption is that they can see parents influencing their children. They observe the child of permissive parents being obnoxious and the child of abusive parents looking cowed and fearful, in the presence of their parents. The fundamental attribution error causes observers to assume that these children will be obnoxious or fearful in other social contexts too. This section describes how that assumption has misled researchers; in a later section I will summarize the evidence against it. In an article in a medical journal, Straus, Sugarman, and Giles-Sims (1997) reported that children whose mothers administered frequent spankings tended to become more aggressive over a 2-year period. The researchers concluded that a reduction in parental punitiveness could "reduce the level of violence in American society". Largely unnoticed, another article on the effects of punishment, in the same issue of the same journal, came to a different conclusion. Gunnoe and Mariner (1997) used a longitudinal design similar to that of Straus et al. but found no overall tendency for children who were spanked to become more aggressive. The apparent inconsistency can be explained by context effects. The method used by Straus et al. to assess aggressiveness (mothers' reports) was a measure of how the children behaved at home; the method used by

Gunnoe and Mariner (children's reports of how many fights they got into at school) was a measure of how they behaved outside the home. The proposition that the effects of spankings are limited to the context in which they were administered makes both results understandable. Context effects also solve the puzzle of birth order. Why do most psychologists continue to believe that birth order has noticeable and lasting effects on personality, even though most studies of adult personality offer no support for this belief? The answer is that birth order effects are real, but they are tied to the context of the family. We ordinarily know the birth order only of people we are close to, and these are the people we are most likely to see with their parents and siblings. Birth order studies in which parents are asked to rate their children's personalities, or adults are asked to compare themselves with their siblings, generally do yield significant birth order effects; studies that use other methods generally do not. In a study in which pairs of siblings were rated both by parents and by teachers, parents judged the older sibling to be more aggressive than the younger one, but teachers judged them to be about the same. The assumption that experiences at home affect behavior or adjustment in other contexts also causes researchers to overlook the fact that family misfortunes such as divorce have repercussions on children's lives outside the home and to assume that adverse outcomes are the results of experiences at home. A parental divorce often involves moving to a different residence, and moving disrupts the child's life outside the family.

Genetic Influences on Parent and Child Behavior

Contemporary develop mentalists acknowledge that babies are born with distinctive characteristics that make certain developmental outcomes more likely. It is also accepted that parental behavior is, in part, a reaction to the child's past and current behavior and physical appearance. Every published report of a correlation between parental behavior and child outcome now contains a disclaimer admitting that the direction of effects is uncertain and that the correlation could be due in part to what I call a child-to-parent effect a type of evocative geneenvironment correlation. It is never admitted, however,

that the correlation could be due entirely to the child-to-parent effect and that the parentto-child effect could be zero, even though that possibility cannot be rejected because neither effect has been measured. Another kind of geneenvironment correlation -- the passive kind -- is unlikely to be mentioned at all. There is a perplexing gap between the understanding that babies are born with innate characteristics and the understanding that they inherit these characteristics from their parents. In fact, the word heredity is seldom used nowadays; it has been replaced by words like nature and genetic, which acknowledge children's genes without acknowledging their source. Children share 50% of their genes with each of their biological parents, which means that for genetic reasons alone, children born with a predisposition to be timid (Kagan, 1994) are more likely to be raised by timid parents, and children born with a predisposition to be aggressive are more likely to be reared by aggressive parents.

Within-family environmental differences

Each child in the family grows up in a unique home environment, as a result of differential treatment by parents and asymmetric relationships between siblings. Can these within-family environmental differences account for the unexplained differences between siblings? It is a difficult question to answer. If parents treat their children differently and the children are different, how can we tell if the parents are causing the differences or reacting to preexisting differences between the children? "Differences in home environments for children in the same family are related to differences in child and adult mental health outcomes" A major study designed to resolve the ambiguity was launched in 1987; its results are described in an important new book by Reiss (2000). Reiss and his colleagues studied 720 pairs of same-sex adolescent siblings over a 3-year period, from early to midadolescence. The adolescents' behavior and adjustment, and the behavior of their parents,

were judged by observers, the parents, and the adolescents themselves; these multiple sources of information were combined to produce measures of unusual reliability. Virtually all correlations between parental behaviors and child outcomes were accounted for by genetic factors. The parents did indeed treat their children differently but they were reacting to genetic differences among the children, rather than causing the differences. The study confirmed the finding that the environment not shared by siblings was by far the largest nongenetic contributor to the adolescents' behavior and adjustment, but it eliminated all of the following as possible sources of nonshared environmental influence. Turkheimer and Waldron (2000) and Reiss (2000) came to the same conclusion: that develop mentalists and behavioral geneticists alike have so far been unable to identify the important environmental influences on development, the sources of the nongenetic variation in personality and behavior. These researchers also agreed that it is fruitless to try to find them in studies that provide no way of controlling for genetic influences. Parents'-Group-to-Children's-Group Effects Vandell's claim that I attribute all correlations between parenting and child outcomes to direct genetic effects or geneenvironment correlations is incorrect.The results of Reiss's (2000) study seem to imply that genetic factors can indeed account for almost all correlations between parental behaviors and child outcomes, but the participants in that study were overwhelmingly white and middle class. In studies that mix together families from different ethnic groups or socioeconomic classes, there is another source of misleading correlations between parents and offspring: the effects of shared culture or subculture. The fact that parents and children are usually members of the same culture is generally attributed to parental influence; according to the prevailing view, children learn culturally appropriate behaviors and attitudes from their parents. Group socialization theory offers an alternative explanation: Culture is not passed directly to individual children from individual parents but to a group of children from a group of parents -- their own parents

and the parents of their peers. Because most children are reared by parents who belong to the same culture as the parents of their peers, most children end up sharing a culture with their parents. Only in atypical circumstances is it possible to test the predictions made by these alternative views of cultural transmission . Most contemporary studies include participants from various socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups. The effects of shared culture -- what I call parents'-group-to-children'sgroup effects can produce misleading results because different cultural groups are likely to vary both in child-rearing styles and in the behavioral norms of the children's peer groups. For example, African American parents tend to use more physical punishment than European American parents and African American children who live in low-income neighborhoods tend to be more aggressive than European American children. But African American children are not significantly more aggressive than European American children if they live in neighborhoods composed primarily of middle-class European Americans. Because most African American children do not live in middleclass European American neighborhoods, researchers can easily get the impression, if data from different cultural groups are combined without taking neighborhood into account, that punitive parenting produces aggressive children. Or, if many Asian American families are included in the study, researchers may conclude that punitive parenting leads to academic achievement. Asian American parents, too, use more physical punishment than European American parents.

The Role of Peer Groups in Socialization and Personality Development

Socialization, as I noted in the introduction, makes children more alike; personality refers to ways in which they differ. According to GS theory, socialization results from assimilation to a group and contrast effects between groups. Nongenetic differences in personality, on the other hand, are attributed primarily to differentiation within groups.

Children's groups

Like the studies of parenting and friendship discussed earlier, most of these studies are correlational and provide no controls for genetic effects, so the results are uninterpretable. That is why the Robbers Cave study (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961) is so important -- it was an experiment. The researchers selected 22 boys who were as much alike as possible and arbitrarily divided them into two groups. The two groups quickly developed contrasting behavioral norms. The Rattlers saw themselves as tough and manly; the Eagles saw themselves as pure and religious. The war that broke out between them is evidence of children's deep-rooted predisposition to ally with a group and to feel strongly about their group alliances, even when the groups are created arbitrarily. Most children's groups form spontaneously and consist of individuals who were similar to begin with (Rowe, 1994), which makes it difficult to assess their effects. A study that circumvents this problem was carried out by Kindermann (1993). Vandell (2000) reported that Kindermann "observed that the motivational profiles of students' peer networks at the beginning of the school year predicted changes in the students' academic engagement from fall to spring" (p. 704), but Kindermann did more than that: He observed the effects of changes in group membership over the course of the school year. When a child switched from a clique of academic achievers to a clique of nonachievers (or vice versa), the child's attitude toward schoolwork shifted to match that of the new group. The design of this study provides a control for the effects of the child's IQ and the parents' attitudes, because neither was likely to change over the course of a school year. When children divide or are divided into two groups, GS theory predicts that any preexisting differences between the groups will be widened by contrast effects between groups and assimilation within them. Thus, putting antisocial youth together for a group intervention is likely to make them more antisocial, a prediction that has recently been confirmed by Dishion, McCord, and Poulin (1999).

The teacher

"Miss A" (Pedersen, Faucher, & Eaton, 1978). I attribute the influence of charismatic teachers like Miss A not to their ability to "set the stage for peer interactions" but to their ability to forge a diverse bunch of students into a united group and give them a common goal. When children divide up into proschool and antischool factions, GS theory predicts that average academic performance will go down.8 Smaller classes reduce the likelihood that a division will occur, and children generally do better in smaller classes (Mosteller, 1995). Some teachers (I suspect that Miss A was one of them) have a magical ability to keep a classroom united.

Conclusions
Do parenting behaviors have any lasting effects on child outcomes? Vandell (2000) views parenting effects as "conditional" but the evidence for conditional effects is no more convincing than the evidence for main effects. At best, one can answer this question only with "not proved." Despite herculean efforts by researchers, the efficacy of parenting has still not been proved. Also not proved is the proposition that children learn things from one relationship or in one context that they automatically carry with them to new ones. A good deal of evidence supports my proposition that learned behavior is tailored to fit specific relationships and contexts. The implication is that if parenting behaviors do have lasting effects, the effects are specific to the context in which the behaviors were experienced. Because children are destined to play out their adult lives in other contexts, what they learn in these other contexts will be more important in the long run. Thus, the answer to the question "What are the experiences that do have lasting effects?" should be sought outside the child's home and family of origin. The alternative view of development I have presented is not in accord with people's firmly held beliefs, but firmly held beliefs can get in the way of scientific inquiry. There is a large volume of evidence that does not fit the prevailing view. Group socialization theory can account for that evidence because that is what it was designed to do. Whether it can account for evidence produced by future research remains to be seen.

REFRENCES: www.wikipedia.com