IB Psychology HLTopic 2 — Development of the SelfPaper 1 & 2Sociocultural approach~10 min read
Enculturation and a Sense of Self
Nobody sits a child down and teaches them how far to stand from a stranger, or who speaks first at dinner, or what a girl is supposed to want. They pick it up anyway. That invisible learning is enculturation, and it goes deeper into identity than most things that are actually taught.
📘 What you need to know
Enculturation is a form of socialisation: learning and internalising the norms, traditions, rituals, attitudes and practices of the culture you are born into.
It happens largely at an unconscious level — people are not aware it is happening to them.
Enculturated attitudes become deeply embedded in identity and are resistant to change.
Three routes of transmission: vertical (parents), horizontal (siblings and peers) and oblique (other adults, media, institutions).
It is adaptive: it helps people survive and thrive in their own society and passes practices to the next generation.
Gender roles are one of the clearest things enculturation shapes.
Basu et al. (2017) compared gender socialisation in Delhi and Shanghai using narrative interviews.
How culture gets in
Culture does not arrive in one lesson from one person. It comes from three directions at once, and the three do not always agree — which is exactly why adolescence gets complicated.
Learn the three words with one example each. “Oblique” is the one students forget, and it is the route that globalised media travels down.
Definition to learn
Enculturation = the process by which a person learns and internalises the norms, values and practices of the culture they are born and raised in, largely without being aware of it.
Why it is so hard to see
The visible parts of culture — clothes, food, festivals, greetings — are the easy bit. Underneath sits everything you were never told out loud: what counts as rude, how much emotion you show in public, what a “good” son or daughter does. That part feels like common sense rather than culture, which is precisely why it is so resistant to change.
This is why enculturation is described as unconscious and resistant to change — you cannot question something you experience as obvious.
Try it on yourself. How close do you stand to someone you have just met? Nobody measured it out for you, yet you would notice instantly if they got it wrong. That is enculturation working underwater.
Enculturation and gender roles
Parents mostly raise children using the practices and traditions they were raised with, so beliefs about gender pass down almost automatically: how girls and boys “should” behave, and what counts as right or wrong depending on which they are.
Research tends to find that parents from collectivist cultures are more rigid and inflexible about gendered behaviour than parents from more individualistic cultures, who tend to hold more progressive and liberal attitudes.
Key study: Basu et al. (2017)
🧩 The study in four steps
Aim — to investigate enculturation in adolescents and their parents regarding gender-appropriate behaviour.
Participants — adolescents aged 11–13 and their parents, from two disadvantaged areas: Delhi in India (16 boys, 15 girls; parents aged 25–44, 40% with no formal education) and Shanghai in China (17 boys, 17 girls; parents aged 35–54, 75% with some formal education).
Procedure — narrative interviews with adolescents and parents separately, on the topic of gender socialisation: how each gender should dress, behave and prepare for adulthood. Responses were examined using thematic analysis.
Conclusion — some cultures enculturate traditional gendered behaviour, which can harm children, for example through corporal punishment for perceived rule violations. Some hold deeply entrenched rules that appear unequal, such as boys being given more freedom than girls.
Theme
Delhi
Shanghai
Expectations of girls
Expected to be modest and “ladylike”, for example long skirts and no jeans, or risk punishment
Expected to show “proper” demeanour — upright posture, gentleness, quietness — to avoid dishonouring the family
Expectations of boys
Encouraged to be brave and tough, with fewer restrictions
Given more freedom, but expected to be polite and considerate
Future roles
Girls prepared for roles as wives and mothers
Parents emphasised career success for both boys and girls
Shared across both
Strict prohibitions on male–female interaction, with punishments for rule violations
Strict prohibitions on male–female interaction, with punishments for rule violations
Who transmits it
Mothers most influential, with teachers and older siblings also playing a role
Mothers most influential, with teachers and older siblings also playing a role
Notice the pattern in that table. Both cities restrict girls, but for different stated reasons — punishment in one, family honour in the other — and Shanghai adds career expectations for both genders. Two collectivist cultures, two different results. That detail alone shows you are not treating “collectivist” as one thing.
Evaluating the research
Strengths
Rich qualitative data. Narrative interviews produce in-depth, insightful material with good explanatory power, which suits a complex topic like enculturation far better than a questionnaire would.
Both generations interviewed. Talking to adolescents and parents separately lets the researchers compare enculturation across generations rather than assuming it stays fixed.
Limitations
Interviews can drift. Narrative interviews can be derailed if a participant talks at length about something unrelated, which makes the data harder to compare.
Not representative. Both samples came from disadvantaged areas. More affluent parts of the same two cities may well report less traditional attitudes, so the findings cannot speak for Delhi or Shanghai as a whole.
Translation loss. With two very different countries involved, some nuance is inevitably lost in translation.
Link to concepts
Change — younger generations are far more aware of behaviours elsewhere in the world, largely through Western media, which shapes their expectations of what it means to be male or female. Children of first-generation immigrants may feel cognitive dissonance: valuing their original culture while also feeling disconnected from it.
Bias — the study avoids culture bias to a degree by studying two collectivist cultures rather than assuming a Western individualistic norm. But unless research is genuinely emic — understood from inside the culture — it may not capture what being enculturated there actually means.
Exam practice
WORKED EXAMPLE
Explain how enculturation may affect the development of self. [3 marks]
1. Define
Enculturation is learning and internalising the norms and practices of your own culture, mostly unconsciously.
2. MechanismVertical transmission from parents passes on gender expectations before a child can question them.
3. Evidence
Basu et al. found girls in Delhi were expected to dress modestly and prepare for marriage, shaping how they saw their own future.
Define + mechanism + evidence“Culture affects people” earns nothing. Name the route and the study.
WORKED EXAMPLE
Discuss one study of enculturation. [ERQ paragraph]
Strength
Basu et al. used narrative interviews, giving rich data with strong explanatory power for a complex process.
Method point
Interviewing parents and adolescents separately allowed a genuine comparison across generations.
LimitationHowever both samples came from disadvantaged areas, so the findings are not representative of either city.
Judgement
The study describes enculturation in two specific communities very well, and should not be stretched beyond them.
Depth bought at the cost of breadthThat trade-off sentence works for almost any qualitative study.
💡 Exam tip
Always name the route of transmission — vertical, horizontal or oblique. It is the quickest way to show precision.
The word unconscious matters. Enculturation is not deliberate teaching.
Use one Delhi example and one Shanghai example. Two contrasting details beat a general summary.
Thematic analysis, not statistics. Getting the method right protects your description marks.
Say “tends to” when comparing collectivist and individualistic cultures. Absolute claims invite easy counter-examples.
Cognitive dissonance in immigrant children is an excellent point for questions about identity and change.
⚠️ Common mix-up
Enculturation is not acculturation. Enculturation is learning your own culture; acculturation is adjusting to a new one.
Collectivist cultures are not all alike. Basu’s two samples differed clearly — use that.
Do not treat the sample as representative of India or China. It is two disadvantaged urban communities.
Narrative interviews are not surveys. No fixed questions, no percentages.
Emic and etic get swapped constantly. Emic is from inside the culture; etic is from outside.
Avoid judging cultures. Report what the study found and evaluate the method, not the people.
Up next: Peers, Social Identity and Who You Become — culture hands a child their first set of rules, and then adolescence hands them a second set, written by their friends.
Want this explained one-to-one?
Book a free session with an experienced IB Psychology tutor and get your trickiest topics made simple.
