Theory, development, and interpretation of the CPI socialization scale

The socialization (So) scale of the California Psychological Inventory is based partly on a role-taking or perspective-taking theory of social deviance and partly on the pragmatics of differentiating between more socialized and less socialized individuals. The theory, history, and current applications of the scale are reviewed, relationships to other scales and measures are examined, and the validity of the scale in arraying 69 male and 40 female samples along a putative continuum of socialization is evaluated. Finally, from these findings and from analyses of observers' adjectival and Q-sort descriptions significantly related to the scale, an interpretive psychology of the measure is propounded.