The Importance of Positive Assessments: A Universal Lesson and Ubiquitous Source of Cultural Conformity

It may well be that the particular "shalts" and "shalt nots" taught in childhood socialization are not the most important lessons of this crucial period as concerns culture's effectiveness. They are unquestionably important, but what is learned varies from family to family and person to person. This variability is far less characteristic of the teaching of two quite unspecific things.

The first is that the judgments passed on one depend on others' assessments of one's behavior. The second is that positive assessments are far more desirable than negative and that this is truer as the judges matter more. If group members learn these two things, and they do in every society as an essential part of becoming human, a solid basis is laid for participation in social life that is independent of extensive and uniform sharing of the specific understandings that guide behavior, including behavior in social relationships.

Learning that evaluation is constant and that positive evaluation is profoundly desirable has a number of important consequences for culture's effectiveness. One of these is making the cultural models displayed through the use of common terms characterizing behavior an effective force for cultural conformity. These models are not the only source of the common standards essential to interaction, but they use the universal concern with evaluation to encourage the operation of a reasonably uniform foundation for interaction. They do this regardless of differences among individuals concerning the virtues or vices of specific behaviors by depending less on particular beliefs and values for their strength than on everyone's awareness of being constantly judged by people whose judgments matter.

The judgments may or may not involve understandings that the judge, the judged, and those aware of the particular judgment all share in the sense that they had similar knowledge of them beforehand or in the sense of all equally accepting them as just, true, or desirable. What they do is provide schemata concerning what is and is not desirable in social behavior as that is understood by some group members. These are presented in a concise but value- and emotion-laden way through relationship terms whose use in evaluation is unmistakable.