Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Childhood sets what feels familiar
Messages outside the home
Outside the house, a boy absorbs loud messages from social media, pornography, friends, sports culture, fraternity culture, and the way groups talk about girls and women when adults aren't around. He learns what gets laughed at, rewarded, excused, and normalized, and what power, masculinity, and belonging look like. A boy who gets angry in a game is competitive with fire, while a girl who does is dramatic. When a friend does something wrong, loyalty can start to mean keeping quiet.
What feels like home
The question for a parent becomes what will feel familiar to a son. A boy who has learned that he can be disappointed without anyone fixing it, who has practiced noticing people before they put an experience into words, and who has learned to trust an internal voice and not just follow the group, finds those habits feel like home. When he later meets something dehumanizing that everyone around him is going along with, it has no magnet in his body to attach to. That produces dissonance: a pause and a sense of uncertainty about what is happening.
There is no one-to-one guarantee. The effect comes from a mismatch between what he encounters and what he has practiced and seen over and over.
How do children learn what a culture rewards?
Albert Bandura's 1961 Bobo doll experiment showed children copying aggressive acts they had watched adults perform. Later versions found that children imitated a model more when they saw that model rewarded than when they saw the model punished. Bandura called this social learning. Children absorb what is praised, excused, and ignored by watching the people around them.
Why is boys' anger read differently than girls'?
Researchers have found that the same emotion is judged differently depending on who shows it. In a 2008 study in Psychological Science, Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann found that angry men in a job-interview scenario were given higher status, while angry women were given lower status and lower proposed salaries. Studies of emotion socialization also find that adults often describe anger in boys as assertiveness. Those judgments begin in childhood.
Why do groups stay quiet about wrongdoing?
Psychologists call it pluralistic ignorance: each person privately feels uneasy but assumes everyone else is comfortable. Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller found in a 1993 Princeton study that students were less comfortable with campus drinking habits than they believed the average student to be. Because everyone reads silence as approval, nobody speaks. A norm can persist even when most members privately reject it.
Why does a mismatch make people pause?
Leon Festinger's 1957 theory of cognitive dissonance holds that people feel discomfort when an experience conflicts with their beliefs or habits. That discomfort works as a signal that something needs attention. People then resolve it by changing the behavior, changing the belief, or explaining the conflict away. Which resolution wins depends on how strongly each belief is held.
More from Good Inside with Dr. Becky
