Socialization: Insights from Social Cognition

Abstract

Socialization is the process by which individuals are assisted to become members of their social groups. Findings from social cognition and cross-cultural psychology offer two major insights into the socialization process. First, basic social cognitive principles imply that the immediate environment functions as a socialization agent by activating and inhibiting knowledge structures and thereby shaping cognition and behavior. Second, because the immediate environment factors into cognition and behavior, socialization efforts should involve the modification of the environment for optimal effect. We discuss various examples of socialization through the configuration of the immediate environment, such as rituals and use of physical artifacts. Our review links basic social cognitive mechanisms to socialization processes, which are customarily treated at higher levels of analysis. How do children come to act like other members of their groups? How do immigrants become part of a new culture, and how do people adapt to their occupational roles? All these questions are about the process of socialization, most broadly defined as ‘the way in which individuals are assisted in becoming members of one or more social groups’ (Grusec & Hastings, 2007, p.1). Even though socialization is not a prominent concept in social psychology, ideas emanating from social cognition research are ripe with implications for understanding the socialization process. In this article, we will spell out the implications of social cognitive principles on socialization. Research in social cognition has revealed a great deal about how people process mental representations of social knowledge (e.g., Smith, 1998; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Social and cross-cultural psychologists built on these ideas and have shown how cultural knowledge and identity can fruitfully be conceptualized as mental representations like any other social information (e.g., Hong & Chiu, 2001; Lehman, Chiu, & Schaller, 2004). In this article, we adopt these cognitive conceptualizations of culture and identity as complex and loose knowledge structures, and define socialization as the process by which individuals are helped to acquire, maintain, and apply these knowledge structures. This social cognitive perspective offers two major insights to our understanding of socialization: