IB Psychology SLTopic 2 — Development of the SelfPaper 1 & 2Sociocultural approach~11 min read
Enculturation and a Sense of Self
Nobody sat you down and taught you how close to stand to a stranger, how loudly to laugh, or what counts as rude. You absorbed all of it. That silent absorption is enculturation, and it ends up feeling less like something you learned and more like who you are.
📘 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 rarely notice it is happening to them.
What is absorbed becomes embedded in identity and is then very resistant to change.
Three routes: vertical (from parents), horizontal (from siblings and peers), oblique (from other adults, media, institutions).
It is adaptive: it helps people fit in and thrive, and passes practices to the next generation.
Gender roles are one of the clearest examples — what girls and boys “should” do is culturally taught, not obvious.
Key study: Basu et al. (2017) interviewed adolescents and parents in Delhi and Shanghai about gender socialisation.
Culture as the water you swim in
Enculturation is not the same as being told a rule. It is watching what adults do, noticing what gets praised, seeing what gets laughed at, and quietly building a model of normal.
The reason it is so powerful is that you never experience it as an opinion. You experience it as reality. That is also why it is so hard to shift later — changing it feels less like changing your mind and more like betraying yourself.
Definition
Enculturation = the process by which a person learns and internalises the norms, values and practices of their own culture, mostly without being consciously taught them.
This is why travelling can be so disorienting. The visible differences are interesting; the invisible ones are what actually make you feel out of place.
Three routes in
Culture does not arrive from one direction. Examiners like these three terms, and they are easy marks if you can name them and give an example of each.
Vertical means down the generations. Horizontal means across your own generation. Oblique means from other adults who are not your parents — teachers, celebrities, media, institutions.
What enculturation does for you
It is easy to write about enculturation as if it were only a way of limiting people. It is not. It is adaptive: it teaches you how to survive and get along in the specific place you happen to have been born, and it carries useful practices from one generation to the next.
It also reaches into almost everything, including how people parent. Adults tend to raise children using the practices they themselves experienced, which is exactly how a culture keeps reproducing itself.
Gender roles are the classic example. What girls and boys “should” wear, how they should speak, what they should be ambitious about — almost none of this follows from biology. It is taught, mostly without anyone realising they are teaching it.
One warning before the next section. The collectivist and individualistic labels are useful shorthand, but they are broad generalisations. Plenty of families inside a collectivist culture are liberal, and plenty inside an individualistic culture are strict. Use the terms, but keep them tentative — examiners reward that.
The key study
KEY STUDY
Basu et al. (2017) — gender socialisation in Delhi and Shanghai
Aim
To investigate how adolescents and their parents understand gender-appropriate behaviour, and how it is passed on.
Sample
Adolescents aged 11 to 13 and their parents.
Delhi, India: a highly disadvantaged area — 16 boys and 15 girls, parents aged 25 to 44, about 40% with no formal education.
Shanghai, China: a low-income area — 17 boys and 17 girls, parents aged 35 to 54, about 75% with some formal education.
Method
Narrative interviews, conducted separately with the adolescents and with the parents, about how each gender should dress, behave and prepare for adulthood. Responses were analysed using thematic analysis.
Conclusion
Both cultures passed on traditional gendered expectations, with boys given noticeably more freedom than girls, and rule-breaking sometimes punished harshly. Mothers were the most influential figures, with teachers and older siblings also playing a part.
Themes from Delhi
Girls were expected to dress modestly and behave in a way described as ladylike, with punishment for stepping outside it.
Boys were encouraged to be brave and tough, and lived under fewer restrictions.
Girls were prepared for future roles as wives and mothers.
Themes from Shanghai
Girls were expected to show a “proper” manner — upright posture, gentleness, quietness — to avoid bringing shame on the family.
Boys had more freedom, but were expected to be polite and considerate.
Parents pushed career success for daughters as well as sons.
Both samples also showed strict limits on contact between boys and girls, with real punishments for breaking the rules. The similarity across two very different countries is part of what makes the study interesting.
Evaluating the research
Strengths
Limitations
Rich qualitative data. Narrative interviews produce depth and detail, which suits a complex topic like enculturation.
Interviews can drift. A participant who wants to talk about something else can take the interview off topic.
Good explanatory power. You can see the reasoning behind the rules, not just the rules themselves.
Not representative. Both samples were disadvantaged. Wealthier areas of the same cities might have reported far less traditional views.
Two generations interviewed, allowing a direct comparison of how much has changed.
Translation loss. Two languages and two cultures means nuance can disappear on the way into English.
Avoids assuming a Western norm by studying two collectivist cultures rather than comparing them against a Western baseline.
Etic risk. Unless the research is genuinely emic, it may not capture what being enculturated feels like from inside.
Link to concepts
Change: interviewing both generations shows how much gendered expectations are shifting. Younger people are exposed to far more media from elsewhere, which reshapes what they think is normal.
Cognitive dissonance: children of first-generation immigrants often feel part of their parents’ culture and separate from it at the same time — they value it while feeling disconnected from it.
Bias: the study deliberately avoids treating Western individualism as the standard everything else is measured against. That is a real methodological strength.
Exam practice
EXAM QUESTION
Discuss the role of enculturation in the development of self. [22]
The word “self” is doing work in this question. Do not just describe culture — explain how it becomes part of who someone is.
Define and set up
Enculturation = internalising your own culture’s norms, mostly unconsciously, until they feel like identity rather than rules.
Explain the mechanismvertical (parents) + horizontal (peers) + oblique (media) → embedded in identity → resistant to changeSupport with research
Basu et al. (2017): Delhi and Shanghai, narrative interviews, thematic analysis, gendered expectations in both.
Evaluate the research
Rich data, two generations, avoids Western baseline — but unrepresentative samples and possible translation loss.
Evaluate the concept
Enculturation is not total: globalisation and migration mean young people receive competing messages.
Judgement: powerful in explaining identity, weaker at explaining who resists itan essay that only says “culture shapes us” is stuck in the bottom bands
💡 Exam tips
Name all three transmission routes with an example each. It is quick, precise and easy to credit.
Stress the unconscious nature of enculturation — it is what separates it from ordinary teaching.
Use gender roles as your worked example. It is the clearest and the best supported.
Keep collectivist and individualistic labels tentative. Write “tends to” rather than “always”.
Learn the two samples separately. Being able to say Delhi and Shanghai shows you actually read the study.
Have the emic and etic terms ready — they are the fastest way into a culture-bias criticism.
⚠ Common mix-ups
Confusing enculturation with acculturation. Enculturation is learning your own culture. Acculturation is adjusting to a new one.
Treating enculturation as deliberate teaching. Most of it happens through observation, not instruction.
Saying only parents enculturate. Peers, media and institutions do too.
Presenting enculturation as purely negative. It is adaptive; it is how people learn to function where they live.
Stereotyping whole countries. Basu’s samples were specific disadvantaged areas, not all of India and China.
Calling narrative interviews unreliable and stopping there. Say what they gain as well as what they cost.
Up next: Peers, Social Identity and Who You Become — culture shapes the child from the outside in. Group membership does something narrower and sharper, especially in adolescence.
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