Socialization

I will start this blog off with a little anecdote. The other day my friend told me a story about one time when she went to Peru that in the community she was at they had speakers around the town and a leader or a government official, whatever you want to call it, would make announcements over the speaker system that was around the town. Members of the community were to stop what they were doing and attend to the messages and respond accordingly. She described it as bizarre and felt like she was in the movie “The Hunger Games” if you had ever seen that movie you’ll know what I’m talking about. This got me thinking, and sparked a thought in my mind that related back to my human development course on the topic of socialization. Why was this community acting this way? Was it really bizarre, or was it just foreign to her? Next, we move to development across cultures to explain this. From the moment we are born we begin to interact with other human beings. The first months of our lives we may only interact with a select few people, but as we grow our circle of peers also grows creating the need for a better understanding of social interaction, moral development and justice. As we begin to interact with others we can go one of either way, as Kohlberg’s Theory suggests. We can interact positively with people, or negatively. Our actions can be positive in a way that benefits others, we could be sharing, or doing other actions that benefit the other person. Or, our actions can be negative in that they do not benefit the other person, for example, we could be aggressive, or rude to the person. So what then determines how we respond to people, how we interact and socialize? Well our cultural dimensions play a key role here. Depending what cultural dimension a person belongs to, for example, either individualistic or collectivist cultures this can effect what characteristics are emphasized in socialization. In an individualist community characteristics such as competition, individual achievement might be more prominent, while in a collectivist community cooperation and harmony are more prominent. So, to answer the question mentioned at the start of this blog, was that community acting weird for have a PA system among the community. Probably not. They could have been a collectivist community where equality was important so they depended on each other, worked together as a whole community, thus having a public speaker system to achieve goals together.