Enculturation and Acculturation

People are not born knowing the norms, values, and behaviors of their society; they acquire them through experience. The sociocultural approach uses two related concepts to describe how culture becomes part of the individual: enculturation and acculturation. Understanding these processes explains both how children come to think and act like members of their birth culture and how people change when they move between cultures, an increasingly common experience in a globalized world.

Enculturation is the process by which a person learns the norms, values, and behaviors of their own culture, usually during childhood. It is how the culture we are born into gets inside our heads. Enculturation happens through many channels. Direct tuition occurs when caregivers and teachers explicitly instruct c