A Social Adjustment:
Social adjustment is an effort made by an individual to cope with standards, values and needs of a society in order to be accepted. It can be defined as a psychological process.
It involves coping with new standard and value. In the technical language of psychology "getting along with the members of society as best one can" is called adjustment.
Nature of Social Adjustment:
As Plato says 'Man is a social animal.' We live in a society and form opinion about others and others have opinions about us. We try to behave according to the norms of the society so that we can adjust with others. But it is not an easy talk because the personality of each individual is a unique organization.
This organization has to make special efforts to adjust with other unique organization which well society. Social adjustment is the direction, we, the teacher try to instill adjustment skill in our students: Teacher should emphasise on the adjustment of the student in the school. They should help the student scope with the existing situations of the school. They should contribute to improving the social environment of the school.
Psychologists use the term adjustment of varying conditions of social and interpersonal relation in the society. Thus adjustment can be called the reaction to the demands and pressures of the social environment imposed upon the individual.
Perception and Social Adjustment:
There is need of impractical perception for social adjustment. The processes of behaviour e.g. learning, maturation, sensation, perception and motivation contribute to the process of adjustment.
The way we interact with people depends, to a great extent, upon how we perceive them and how we interpret their behaviour. The perceptions about people-what we think, what they like-influence the way we respond to them.
Our social perceptions of others are initially based on the information we obtain about them-in some instances the attribution inference we make about the cause for their behaviour. It is of course, important to have accurate knowledge of others before deciding on the kind of possible interaction with them.
Impression Formation and Social Adjustment:
Impression formation is the process by which information about others is converted into more or less enduring cognition or thoughts about them. When we first meet someone, we usually have access to information how the person looks and where he or she works and what he or she says.
There facts form the basic cognitive framework by which we understand others and try to adjust with them.
Other Processes in Social Adjustment:
There are certain other processes which we can use for social adjustment as under:
(i) Stress and Adaptation:
Environmental factors which make it hard for an individual to live are called stress. The stress is experienced as irritation as discomfort. At a slightly more advanced level stress is explained as the anticipation of harm.
In human beings certain kind of stresses produces anxiety. Anxiety some times produces defensive response. Defenses are generally regarded as poor methods of adjustment.
(ii) Social Influence:
The process of social influence contains two critical elements. These are as under:
(a) Someone's intervention
(b) Inducing change in other person.
The phenomena of influence, which also includes imitation conformity and obedience, always contain an agent which has caused a change in the focal person (FP).
Influence situations can be differentiated by noticing the different characteristics of agent and of the behaviour that makes up the intervention.
The following five concepts help us understand the process of social influence, better.
1. Social Facilitation:
In a group situation the presence of others would always influence performance and thus the efforts to bring changes in performance of an individual are called social facilitation. The presence of others increases an individual's arousal level which in turn, enhances performance of well learned responses.
For example, a well trained singer would, according to this theory i.e. social facilitation, performs better when others are present bulla beginning would make more mistakes when giving a recital in front of others than when practicing at home.
Imitation involves change in focal person's behaviour that matches as copies others' behaviour. Student imitates the behaviour of social personalities for getting the recognition.
3. Compliance to Others:
Human being as a social being has to adjust himself in the social environment in his daily life, he commands others and works according to his one or other's rules and regulations.
In a family every member is dependent 'on each other. Sometimes even parents obey the rules of their children. This type of situation influences them to adjust in social environment.
4. Conformity to Norms:
Conformity is the situation wherein individuals change their behaviour so that they may become more similar to those of the other members of the group.
Obedience is the situation wherein the agent has legitimate light to influence the focal person and the focal person has the obligation to obey.