1. Abstract
The Socialization Scale (commonly designated as the So scale), originally conceptualized by Harrison G. Gough and Donald R. Peterson in 1952 and systematically refined by Gough in 1960, stands as one of the most extensively validated and empirically grounded psychometric instruments in personality assessment and criminology. Designed to measure an individual’s degree of social maturity, normative integrity, and capacity to internalize societal customs, rules, and behavioral proscriptions, the instrument positions respondents along a developmental socialization continuum extending from highly asocial, delinquent, or psychopathic behavior to pro-social, conscientiously rule-abiding adjustment. Grounded theoretically in George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism and sociological role-taking theory, the scale operationalizes the psychological capacity to view oneself objectively from the perspective of the generalized other. The instrument underwent rigorous empirical criterion-keying across diverse populations, starting from an initial pool of over 200 items administered to high school students, non-delinquent disciplinary problems, first-time juvenile offenders, and institutionalized recidivists. The resulting shortened 54-item self-report questionnaire utilizes a dichotomous True/False response format that captures core psychosocial dimensions including perceived family stability, school disciplinary history, interpersonal trust, sense of alienation, and empathetic perspective-taking. Across dozens of cross-cultural, longitudinal, and clinical investigations, the Socialization Scale has demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging between .75 and .85), notable test-retest stability (coefficients between .78 and .88), robust factor structures, and unmatched predictive validity in distinguishing delinquent from non-delinquent cohorts across international borders, socioeconomic strata, and gender groups.
2. Keywords
Socialization Scale, Harrison G. Gough, California Psychological Inventory, Asocial Behavior, Delinquency Assessment, Role-Taking Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, Psychopathy, Criterion Keying, Personality Assessment, Antisocial Personality, Psychometrics
3. Authors
The foundational development of the Socialization Scale is attributed to Harrison G. Gough, Ph.D. (1921–2014), Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPSR, formerly IPAR). Dr. Gough is recognized internationally as the principal architect of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), the Adjective Check List (ACL), and the Personnel Reaction Blank (PRB). His empirical work focused predominantly on folk concepts—personality characteristics that arise naturally within universal human social interactions. Co-developer on the initial 1952 precursor instrument was Donald R. Peterson, Ph.D. (1923–2007), who was then affiliated with the University of Minnesota and later served as a distinguished professor and dean at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. Inquiries regarding archival validation data, CPI scale evolution, and historical manuals are maintained through the Institute of Personality and Social Research at UC Berkeley.
4. Purpose
The primary purpose of the Socialization Scale is to assess the degree to which an individual has internalized the moral values, normative demands, and behavioral controls of society. Developed during an era when psychiatric diagnosis relied heavily on psychoanalytic inference, Gough sought to construct an empirically keyed, objective metric that bypassed subjective clinical impressionism to position individuals reliably along a dimensional continuum of socialization. Rather than classifying individuals through pejorative diagnostic labels such as “sociopath,” “moral imbecile,” or “psychopath,” the scale serves as a continuous, dimensional gauge of social maturity, behavioral regulation, and rule adherence.
In clinical, correctional, and forensic contexts, the scale addresses the urgent operational demand for objective recidivism prediction, risk categorization, and differential intervention planning. High-risk correctional settings utilize the scale to distinguish between situational or first-time offenders and chronic, characterological recidivists. Because the scale identifies subtle manifestations of alienation, resentment of authority, and deficits in social perspective-taking, it enables clinicians to detect latent tendencies toward acting-out behavior even in individuals who present with charming, cooperative, or superficially well-adjusted outward demeanors.
In organizational, educational, and developmental psychology, the Socialization Scale is used to assess integrity, conscientiousness, reliability, and social dependability. It assists educational psychologists in identifying adolescents experiencing severe normative estrangement and disaffiliation before overt legal or academic disciplinary infractions manifest. In organizational assessment—particularly when integrated into the California Psychological Inventory—the scale identifies an individual’s inclination toward rule compliance, ethical decision-making, and constructive collaboration under conditions of interpersonal stress. The theoretical rationale rests on the principle that adequate socialization is an indispensable prerequisite for enduring interpersonal relationships, occupational stability, and self-governance within complex social institutions.
5. Psychological Construct
The psychological construct of socialization, as operationalized within Gough’s psychometric framework, represents the psychological outcome of human social development whereby individuals acquire the capacity to subordinate idiosyncratic impulses to collective standards of conduct. Socialization is conceptualized not as passive social conformity, but as an active, integrated personality process involving several interrelated cognitive, emotional, and behavioral sub-facets:
Role-Taking Capability and Empathic Decentering
At the center of the socialization construct is the cognitive capacity for role-taking—the ability to imaginatively project oneself into the perspective of another person and anticipate their psychological responses, expectations, and judgments. Individuals with high socialization scores possess fluid, accurate empathic decentering; they instinctively consider how their personal choices affect others and adjust their conduct accordingly. Conversely, low-scoring individuals exhibit a structural deficit in social perspective-taking, viewing human interactions through an egocentric lens that treats others merely as obstacles or instrumental objects to be manipulated.
Internalization of Norms and Generalized Social Controls
A second core dimension involves the depth to which external social sanctions have been converted into internal self-regulatory controls. The unsocialized individual obeys social prescriptions only when external supervision, surveillance, or immediate threats of punitive consequences are active. When such external barriers diminish, behavioral adherence collapses. In contrast, the thoroughly socialized individual has internalized the “generalized other,” maintaining behavioral consistency, honesty, and accountability across both public and unmonitored private situations.
Perceived Family Cohesion and Parental Warmth
Gough recognized that socialization originates within the primary family matrix. Items tapping this construct assess recollections of familial stability, parental justice, emotional support, and shared affection versus environments marked by parental discord, arbitrary discipline, emotional neglect, or overt rejection. Individuals who view their childhood home environment as stable, predictable, and fair consistently demonstrate higher socialization scores, reflecting the successful early attachment that facilitates normative internalization.
Interpersonal Trust versus Cynical Alienation
The socialization construct encompasses a broad dispositional stance toward human nature and institutional legitimacy. Socialized individuals demonstrate generalized trust, believing that legal, educational, and societal institutions are fundamentally benevolent, equitable, and necessary. Individuals on the asocial tail of the continuum manifest pervasive cynicism, chronic bitterness, feeling victimized, and attributing malevolent or exploitative motives to authority figures, peers, and society at large.
Behavioral Impulse Regulation and Delayed Gratification
Finally, socialization reflects the capacity to inhibit immediate impulse expression in pursuit of long-term social goals. Unsocialized individuals exhibit low distress tolerance, sensation-seeking, and impatience with institutional routines. Socialized individuals demonstrate the self-discipline necessary to tolerate temporary frustration, respect standard procedural rules, and pursue constructive, non-disruptive life trajectories.
6. Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the Socialization Scale is anchored in the classic sociological tradition of symbolic interactionism, primarily formulated by George Herbert Mead in his seminal work Mind, Self, and Society (1934). Mead proposed that the self is neither an innate biological entity nor a mere collection of conditioned reflexes; rather, it is a social structure that arises entirely through communication, language, and role-taking within social experience.
According to Mead, a mature human self emerges through two sequential developmental stages: the play stage and the game stage. In the play stage, the child assumes the discrete roles of specific significant others (e.g., parent, teacher, police officer) in an uncoordinated manner. In the game stage, the individual must simultaneously conceptualize the attitudes and expectations of all other participants in the social matrix. This coordinated system of social expectations coalesces into what Mead termed the generalized other. Successful socialization occurs when the generalized other is internalized as an inner conversational partner that evaluates, moderates, and guides personal impulses.
Harrison Gough synthesized Mead’s sociological concepts with empirical personality measurement, formulating an explicit role-taking theory of psychopathy and asocial behavior (Gough, 1948; Gough, 1960). Gough posited that asocial personalities, juvenile delinquents, and psychopaths suffer from a specific form of developmental role-taking deficiency. Because they cannot accurately anticipate how others view them, they fail to experience self-reflective emotional reactions—such as embarrassment, remorse, shame, or guilt—that normally inhibit destructive and exploitative behaviors. For the poorly socialized individual, social norms remain external, arbitrary barriers to gratification rather than integral elements of the self-concept.
Furthermore, Gough integrated elements of Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory and Robert K. Merton’s strain and anomie theory. Gough hypothesized that the socialization continuum represents a universal psychological dimension present across every culture: human beings everywhere must resolve the fundamental tension between individual biological drives and collective social order. The Socialization Scale was constructed to operationalize this universal continuum empirically, measuring the subtle cognitive and emotional markers of role-taking efficacy, institutional commitment, and moral internalization.
7. Validity
The Socialization Scale is widely recognized in psychometrics for its extensive empirical validation across diverse institutional, clinical, and cultural settings. Constructed using an empirical criterion-keying methodology comparable to that of the MMPI, items were selected based on their statistical ability to discriminate reliably between clearly defined social criterion groups.
Criterion and Predictive Validity
In Gough’s foundational studies (1960), the scale was administered to over 10,000 individuals across more than twenty distinct criterion cohorts. Mean scores exhibited a linear, stepwise descent precisely reflecting each group’s degree of institutional socialization:
- Exemplary citizens, high-achieving high school leaders, and respected civic professionals produced the highest mean scores (ranging from 41.0 to 44.5 out of 54).
- Standard, unselected public high school and college cohorts scored in the solid intermediate range (means between 36.5 and 39.0).
- Adolescents with recorded disciplinary problems, truancy, and behavioral infractions scored significantly lower (means between 30.0 and 32.5).
- Adjudicated first-time juvenile offenders scored lower still (means between 26.0 and 28.5).
- Institutionalized, multi-recidivist juvenile offenders and incarcerated adult penitentiary inmates produced the lowest mean scores across all samples (means between 21.0 and 24.5).
Analysis of variance confirmed between-group differences at extreme levels of statistical significance (F-ratios consistently exceeding p < .001). Moreover, the scale successfully achieved its developmental goal: significantly separating first-time juvenile offenders from chronic, multi-offense recidivists (p < .01), providing clear empirical evidence of predictive utility in correctional classification.
Cross-Cultural and Cross-National Validity
A striking psychometric quality of the Socialization Scale is its invariance across differing national and cultural environments. Research conducted by Gough and colleagues in diverse countries—including Japan, Taiwan, India, Italy, Israel, Mexico, and Sweden—demonstrated that despite marked differences in legal codes, linguistic structures, and socio-economic systems, the scale discriminated between delinquent and non-delinquent populations with comparable effect sizes (Cohen’s d ranging from 0.85 to 1.40). These findings provide empirical confirmation of Gough’s assertion that the underlying construct of socialization taps universal features of human group life.
Convergent and Discriminant Validity
The scale demonstrates robust convergent validity with theoretically aligned constructs. It correlates negatively and substantially with the Psychopathic Deviate (Pd) scale of the MMPI (correlations typically between r = -.55 and r = -.70) and with modern instruments measuring Hare’s psychopathy construct (PCL-R). Within the Five-Factor Model of personality, the Socialization Scale correlates strongly and positively with Conscientiousness (r = .50 to .62) and Agreeableness (r = .42 to .55), and correlates moderately negatively with Neuroticism (r = -.30 to -.40). Discriminant validity is supported by negligible correlations with general intelligence (IQ) tests (r values typically between .02 and .12), confirming that the scale measures characterological socialization rather than cognitive capability or intellectual sophistication.
8. Reliability
The psychometric stability and internal consistency of the Socialization Scale have been documented across numerous normative and forensic samples over several decades.
Internal Consistency
Because the scale was developed via empirical criterion keying rather than internal consistency maximization, its items encompass diverse content domains (e.g., family background, health attitudes, social beliefs, school adjustment). Despite this structural heterogeneity, the scale exhibits consistently acceptable to high internal consistency. In normative adult samples, Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely fall between .76 and .84. In adolescent samples, alpha values generally range from .74 to .82. In incarcerated forensic cohorts, where variance is occasionally restricted, alpha coefficients remain solid, typically between .72 and .79. Split-half reliability coefficients, corrected by the Spearman-Brown formula, range from .78 to .85 across published studies.
Test-Retest Stability
Longitudinal stability investigations highlight the scale’s sensitivity to enduring characterological traits rather than transient mood states:
- Over short-term retest intervals (1 to 4 weeks), Pearson correlation coefficients range between r = .85 and r = .91 in collegiate and high school populations.
- Over intermediate intervals (6 months to 1 year), stability coefficients remain high, falling between r = .78 and r = .84.
- In notable multi-year longitudinal studies spanning up to five years from late adolescence into young adulthood, the scale demonstrated substantial rank-order stability (coefficients between r = .62 and r = .71), indicating that an individual’s relative standing along the socialization continuum represents a durable personality configuration.
The standard error of measurement (SEM) for the 54-item raw score is approximately 2.3 to 2.7 points, indicating high measurement precision around diagnostic decision thresholds.
9. Factor Analysis
Although Harrison Gough originally constructed the Socialization Scale as an empirically keyed unidimensional continuum of social maturity, subsequent exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) have uncovered a reliable multidimensional latent structure beneath the total score.
Exploratory Factor Analyses
Pioneering factor-analytic investigations by Rosen and Schalling (1974), as well as subsequent large-scale analyses by Gough (1987) and contemporary psychometricians, consistently identify four to five primary orthogonal or slightly correlated latent factors:
- Factor 1: Familial Harmony and Cohesion. This factor accounts for 22% to 28% of the common variance and consists of items assessing positive parental relationships, emotional warmth, domestic stability, and the absence of traumatic domestic conflict during childhood.
- Factor 2: Normative Rule Adherence and School Adjustment. Accounting for 15% to 19% of the variance, this factor groups items reflecting historical compliance with school regulations, absence of truancy or expulsions, and acceptance of academic and legal authority.
- Factor 3: Interpersonal Trust vs. Alienation and Resentment. Explaining 12% to 16% of the variance, items loading on this dimension capture faith in human decency, feeling accepted by peers, and the absence of persecutory feelings or paranoid cynicism toward society.
- Factor 4: Empathy and Social Role Sensitivity. Accounting for 8% to 11% of the variance, this factor comprises items directly reflecting Mead’s construct of role-taking—consideration of others’ emotional states, sensitivity to social embarrassment, and capacity for self-criticism.
- Factor 5: Impulsivity and Sensation Seeking. Explaining approximately 6% to 9% of the variance, this dimension includes items measuring physical risk-taking, restlessness, intolerance of routine, and immediate behavioral expression.
Confirmatory Factor Analytic (CFA) Fit Indices
Modern structural equation modeling and CFA evaluations confirm that a hierarchical or bifactor structure best explains the empirical data: a broad, overarching General Socialization factor accounts for the high criterion validity, while distinct group factors capture the specific domains detailed above. Hierarchical CFA models in representative adult and adolescent samples consistently demonstrate acceptable fit to the empirical data:
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .042 to .051 (indicating close fit)
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .91 to .94
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .90 to .93
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .048 to .056
Factorial invariance testing across biological sex and cross-national samples demonstrates configural and metric invariance, confirming that the scale measures identical psychological constructs across demographic groups.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Test Type: Objective, self-report personality inventory; criterion-keyed rating scale.
- Target Population: Adolescents and adults (ages 13 years and older). Reading level required is approximately 4th to 5th grade.
- Administration Format: Individual or group paper-and-pencil administration, or computerized psychological assessment software.
- Item Count: 54 dichotomous items (in the standard shortened 1960 version, matching the California Psychological Inventory So scale). The original Gough & Peterson (1952) precursor contained 64 items.
- Response Format: Binary forced-choice (True / False).
- Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes when administered as an independent scale; 45 to 60 minutes when completed as part of the full 434-item California Psychological Inventory.
- Scoring Rules:
- Raw scores range from 0 to 54 points.
- Each item is keyed in either the True direction (indicative of high socialization) or the False direction (where disagreement indicates high socialization).
- One point is awarded for each response matching the keyed direction. Higher raw scores represent greater socialization, rule compliance, and interpersonal maturity.
- Raw scores are customarily converted into standard linear T-scores (Mean = 50, Standard Deviation = 10) based on appropriate demographic norm tables.
- Cutoff interpretation guidelines:
- T ≥ 60: Highly socialized, dependable, conscientious, strongly rule-abiding, perhaps conventional or overly cautious.
- 45 ≤ T ≤ 59: Normal, adaptive socialization. Balanced internalization of cultural standards with personal autonomy.
- 35 ≤ T ≤ 44: Borderline socialization. Elevated risk of disciplinary difficulties, authority friction, social dissatisfaction, and impulsivity.
- T ≤ 34: Marked asocial orientation. High probability of overt antisocial conduct, legal conflicts, severe alienation, and pronounced deficits in empathic role-taking.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The original development of the Socialization Scale began in 1952 with Gough and Peterson’s initial 64-item instrument, culminating in the refined 54-item scale published by Harrison Gough in 1960 in the Journal of Consulting Psychology. The 54 items of the Socialization Scale simultaneously constitute the official So (Socialization) scale of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI-434, CPI-260).
Licensing and Copyright Status: The full California Psychological Inventory and its constituent subscales are proprietary and copyrighted instruments owned and published by The Myers-Briggs Company (formerly Consulting Psychologists Press, CPP, Inc.). Commercial use, organizational assessment, individual clinical scoring, and reproduction of the complete test booklet require licensing fees and test purchase from the publisher. Qualified academic researchers and educators may obtain permission to administer the scale for non-commercial scientific investigations and teaching purposes through formal educational research licensing applications managed by the publisher. Gough’s original 1960 journal publication remains indexed in academic archives for scholarly reference.
12. References
- Gough, H. G. (1948). A sociological theory of psychopathy. American Journal of Sociology, 53(5), 359–366. https://doi.org/10.1086/220202
- Gough, H. G. (1960). Theory and measurement of socialization. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24(1), 23–30. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044749
- Gough, H. G. (1987). California Psychological Inventory administrator’s guide. Consulting Psychologists Press.
- Gough, H. G., & Peterson, D. R. (1952). The identification and measurement of predispositional factors in crime and delinquency. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16(3), 207–212. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054707
- Hare, R. D. (1985). Comparison of procedures for the assessment of psychopathy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 53(1), 7–16. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.53.1.7
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. University of Chicago Press.
- Megargee, E. I. (1972). The California Psychological Inventory handbook. Jossey-Bass.
- Rosen, A. S., & Schalling, D. (1974). On the validity of the California Psychological Inventory Socialization scale: A study of Swedish male juvenile delinquents. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(3), 461. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036662
- Sutherland, E. H., & Cressey, D. R. (1974). Criminology (9th ed.). J. B. Lippincott.