The Role of Socialization in the Formation of Personality. Victimity

From the first days of life, a person is surrounded by other people and is included in social interaction. There is a relationship of interdependence and mutual influence between the environment and the subject. The optimal level of such interaction is reflected in the ability to protect oneself from possible threats and the ability to create a psychologically safe environment. Socialization presupposes the individual's active participation in mastering the culture of human relations, in forming certain social norms, roles, and functions, and in acquiring the skills and abilities necessary for their successful implementation. Social upbringing is of decisive importance for the process of socialization.

Socialization — the process of assimilating and actively reproducing social experience by the individual, carried out in communication, activity, and behavior .

Several factors influencing the socialization of the individual are distinguished (Table 2).

Table 2. Factors of socialization

At the global level, the process of an individual's socialization is influenced by macro-factors determined by large social communities. For example, a person is born and lives in Russia, is a citizen of the Russian Federation, where society is free and democratic, with a multinational culture. His process of socialization will initially differ from the socialization process of a representative of another country. At the same time, he may be Russian, Tatar, Jewish, or of another nationality, may live in any region of Russia, and may be a resident of a city or a village. Such determinants of an individual's socialization, conditioned by residence within communities of medium size, are referred to as meso-factors. The state and society make wide use of mass media in the process of upbringing. Mass media include the press, radio, cinema, and television. Through them, information (knowledge, spiritual values, moral and legal norms, etc.) is disseminated to large audiences. At the micro-level, the institutions of socialization are the family, preschool childcare institutions, school, work collectives, and other collectives (for example, leisure collectives).

The primary experience of an individual's socialization is associated with the period of early childhood, the formation of basic mental functions, and elementary forms of social behavior. Further, the process of socialization can be characterized as a gradual expansion (as social experience is acquired) of the sphere of communication, an increasing complexity of activity and behavior, and the development of self-regulation, self-awareness, and the establishment of an active life stance.

In the process of socialization, a person becomes enriched with social experience and individualized, becomes a personality, and acquires the ability and capacity to be not only an object but also a subject of social influences, and to influence the socialization of other people. If the experience is positive, then the person develops safe ways of interacting with other people and the surrounding environment.

Every person, from the moment of birth, receives their society in "ready-made" form, as a certain objective reality. Growing biologically, the subject also changes socially, and in doing so, willingly or unwillingly encounters certain conditions, recommendations, permissions, requirements, prohibitions, and restrictions — everything that is commonly called social norms.

Social norms — official and unofficial codes, prescriptions, rules and statutes, traditions, stereotypes, standards.

The purpose of social norms is to regulate people's behavior and actions, to set goals, conditions, and methods for performing various actions, and also to serve as a criterion for evaluating human behavior. Social norms give a person an idea of what is considered "correct," "obligatory," "desired," "approved," "expected," or "deviant" in people's activity and behavior. Social norms need to be psychologically internalized by the person, transforming the external regulators of his behavior into internal ones. In this regard, the orientation of the individual's motivation toward fulfilling the social norm is important — positive, neutral, or negative.

Socialization proceeds more successfully the more deeply social norms are mastered and their implementation becomes a habit for the person. This can happen when a particular social norm has become an integral part of his inner world. In mastering a social norm, socio-psychological factors are important for a person, for example: to what extent this norm is recognized and implemented by the people around him, especially family, relatives, friends, and fellow students or coworkers.

Quite often, it is society itself, and the particularities of family upbringing, that become the circumstances hindering a person's normal development. The presence of conditions contributing to the process of a person becoming a victim of socialization is called victimogenicity.

Victimity is a person's predisposition to act

as a victim under certain circumstances, an inability to avoid danger that was

objectively preventable'.

A low standard of living, unemployment, environmental pollution, weak social support from the state, and unfavorable climatic conditions — all these are factors of the victimization of the population. Demographic scientists identify three predominant factors of victimization in modern life:

• • the intensified, widespread pollution of the environment;
• • the decline in people's adaptation due to rapidly changing living conditions;
• • the psychological stress, tension, and overload experienced by the majority of the population.

One indicator of psychological safety is protection from psychological violence. The spectrum of psychological violence includes the following forms:

• 1) psychological impacts (threats, humiliation, insults, excessive demands, prohibitions on behavior and emotional expression, negative evaluation, etc.);
• 2) psychological effects (loss of trust in oneself and the world, anxiety, depression, aggressiveness, etc.);
• 3) psychological interactions (unpredictability, inadequacy, irresponsibility, etc.) .

To renounce psychological violence and create a safe environment, a person must have an understanding not only of what constitutes violence, but also of how to create conditions for internal safety and the safety of the surrounding environment. He must learn to manage his emotions.

The modern world demands far greater effort from a child in order to assimilate social experience and adapt to the surrounding conditions of society. Not all children can adapt without excessive effort, which can lead to emotional disorders, aggression, and antisocial behavior. The Japanese scholar S. Murayama notes a sharp coarsening of children in the modern world, their insensitivity toward other people, and an impoverishment of the soul amid an enrichment of information.