I don't really know how many people are reading these blogs, or what my goal or endgame is. But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I really mean when I talk about SAT, and why I think this idea has the power to positively change how we view ourselves and the world. I don't really remember much of my childhood, except for bits of nostalgic flashbacks and recollections from old pictures and home movies, but I know that I was a happy kid, and I was loved by my family and liked by my close friends.
As a teenager, I wasn’t really popular and moving to a new city in middle school was a real culture shock. I went from being one of the only black kids in my grade to being surrounded by a few more black students who had their own subculture. My parents also split up during this time, and looking back, I can see how this period impacted my self-esteem and need for validation in very profound ways. Before that move in the sixth grade, my experience with black culture was limited to family and entertainment. At school, I adapted to the norms and values of the white majority. I listened to rap and hip-hop, watched BET, and thought I understood black culture, but I didn't really live it because it wasn’t accepted around me.
When we moved, black slang and stereotypes like wearing baggy clothes and durags were normal for black kids in the new school. I was surrounded by people who walked and talked like my cousins and the black characters I'd watched on TV. But I wasn’t one of them. I had already learned to code-switch—changing my language, behaviors, and personality depending on the situation. To fit in as the only black kid in my class, I had to act like those around me. I would get comments like "you're one of the good ones" or "you're not black, you're an oreo", which influenced how I saw myself. I generally felt I wasn’t black enough for black culture and yet I was too black for white culture.
Reflecting on this through the lens of social accreditation, I can now understand that my identity was being shaped by the need for social acceptance. In a mostly white environment, I learned to adopt behaviors and values that would help me fit in. This early adaptation was a survival tactic, a response to societal norms that dictated what was acceptable. Both my need for validation and fear of rejection were driving my actions, influencing how I presented myself and interacted with others.
In the new school, I mostly hung out with other kids who were regarded as outcasts and nerds, people who shared my feelings of not fitting in. I was impressionable and, although I wasn’t necessarily a bully, I won't lie, I didn’t hesitate to tease someone if it boosted my own social capital. I befriended edgier, punk kids—juggalos and emo cliques. I wasn't really rebellious or anything, but I did get into some trouble during these times, and I think I felt pressures to deviate from whatever expectations people had of me.
High school brought me even more changes. Moving to another neighborhood on the South end of town with a larger black population, I started forming new connections with people who looked like me over shared hobbies like video games, music, and basketball. We lived right down the street from the local rec center and I started to hang out there after school every day. For the first time, I felt accepted in a community I’d never felt part of before.
I still maintained friendships with white kids and to them, I was often seen as the black kid who wasn’t really black. This was during the '08-09 racial tensions with the Obama campaign. I remember one incident vividly: one morning, a group of kids vandalized the school with racist slurs and confederate flags. Sometime that week, I was sitting with a few of the country kids at lunch, who were not the most tolerant group. Yet, they were somehow cool with me. Our principal walked over and sat with us one day, amazed at my presence, and asked for advice on how to handle the racial tension at school. I realized the significance of the moment—I had become a chameleon, absorbing norms and behaviors to navigate various social groups.
I was constantly shifting between different social groups, adapting my behavior to fit in. This chameleon-like ability was a direct result of my need for social acceptance. Each group had its own set of norms and values, and I understand now that my ability to navigate these different landscapes was a testament to my adaptability. I remember thinking of the concept of "the Breakfast Club theory," as I began to learn about high school cafeteria cliques and social hierarchies, which would later become the groundwork for what I now call SAT.
By my senior year, I had many friends and was well-known but I still wouldn't say I was popular. I just tried harder to be accepted. I remember speaking at a senior luncheon about my experiences, saying I'd wished I had tried out for sports or made more effort to integrate into popular groups. Even getting a few tears from some peers and teachers. Graduating right after Obama’s election, it felt like the dawn of a new era for young Black Americans. I believed I could be president, or anything if I tried hard enough. However, I later realized the racial divide had turned into more of a cultural divide. It started to dawn on me that racist peers didn’t see me as necessarily genetically inferior but rather culturally superior to other African Americans. So to them, I was an acceptable black person because I had properly assimilated into white, mainstream culture. This perception dominated my self-image for many years.
College brought more confidence in my identity, but my need for validation persisted. My freshman year, I ran for president of my resident hall council, befriended as many people as possible, and immersed myself in the college party culture. I was also working in different restaurants, and my customer service roles broadened my understanding of social interactions and human nature. It helped me cultivate a strong sense of community because I spent a lot of my time with coworkers. But I remember always thinking "service begets servitude." And working in the service industry helped me understand how explicit and implicit forms of accreditation solidify into social hierarchies.
After college, I also moved into a housing co-op with some really cool roommates, and became more aware of social and global issues. This gave me a better understanding of how in-groups and out-groups are formed, based on explicit and implicit accreditations. Rather than accepting information passively, I became more encouraged to question, debate, and analyze the origins and implications of societal beliefs.
Reflecting on these years through SAT, I see how my journey of seeking validation evolved. College and post-college life brought me new opportunities for social accreditation, from leadership roles to community building. I also don't have a driver's license and because owning a car and being a driver is such a culturally ingrained norm, i've always felt guilty and ashamed of this lack of explicit accreditation.
The implicit feelings that come from imposed expectations of social norms can be extremely powerful in shaping who we are, and that's what's helped me understand SAT. But I had to realize that I'm not any less of a person because I lack a certain credential for driving and i'm not necessarily a better person for having a college degree. My different experiences taught me that social validation isn't just about fitting into predefined norms but also about creating and nurturing communities that reflect our shared values and foster some sense of mutual respect.
Despite living in this city for most of my life, it wasn't until this period that I was really aware of the benefits and strengths of my city's culture. Working at the restaurant, Wild Goats, I fell in love and met the person who is now my fiance, and we've built a lovely home together. I now work at the bookstore on the same campus that I graduated from, selling laptop computers and consumer electronics to students, staff and faculty. Working in retail has also opened my eyes into the effects of consumerism and the interconnectedness of the world through technological innovation, global supply chains and markets. In the past few years I've been really involved in learning more about the world through understanding sociology, technology, psychology, etc and through hundreds of books, podcasts, informational videos and other blogs.
And so my journey led me to here, blogging about the Theory of Social Accreditation, as a way to understand how societal norms, validations, and sanctions shape our collective experiences and individual psyches. I don't really think it's a very innovative or new concept. It's mostly just a framework for understanding other social theories, but it helps me process and prioritize issues needing attention amidst the mental states of languishing, loneliness, depression, stress, and anxiety, which are exacerbated by the constant streams of information and media that are centered around economic success, celebrity and influence culture.
I've been adopting a new worldview through building an awareness of accreditation processes because I see how much credentialism rules our society and how the institutions or accreditation bodies of previous generations, our churches, schools and governments, are fractured; incentivizing privatized gains and social losses, while new advances in digital technology are disrupting an already broken system that perpetuates growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell.
Everyone wants to blame someone else, whether it's corporations, politicians, billionaires, or celebrities. I see it everywhere. We don't have the time or temperance to try to break down these root causes so everyone just argues about abstract generalizations. It's the media, it's the government, it's big tech, it's big Pharma, it's big business, it's the Hollywood elites, it's the academic elites, it's the Russians, it's the Chinese, it's the right-wing, it's the left-wing...
It's so easy for us to blame these different groups that we label as others because it's a major part of how we develop and sustain our own identities. But when you start to understand the feedback loops that create and perpetuate the spectacle, you can really understand how these issues emerge and evolve over time, not because of some abstract idea but through genuine social interactions.
Our understanding of the world is often shaped by pessimistic, Machiavellian attitudes that everyone just rights off as being ‘realistic.’ We're born into an achievement-obsessed culture that perpetuates cycles of shame and abuse and teaches us to write it off as human nature. And now, social accreditation through digital media (social media for short) captures our attention, molds our perceptions, and influences our interactions with the world, creating unrealistic life expectations.
As I have said in each of these posts, I believe SAT offers us a framework to understand these dynamics. It shows how societal norms and validations drive our behavior, shape our identities, and impact our mental well-being. By understanding social accreditation mechanisms, I think that we can actually address the root causes of many social issues, from mental health struggles to systemic inequalities. It won't solve all the issues but I think it can help us diagnose, process, and prioritize what needs addressing most.
When we look at the interplay between social validation, normative influences, and individual cognition, SAT reveals how all of our collective agreements and societal norms construct what we consider to be ‘real’ or ‘true.’ This isn't to say that objective truth doesn't exist. It's just that our perception is always filtered through this social lens.
I like to think of it working much like a map.
Early maps reflected a cartographers’ knowledge, biases, and whatever the prevailing beliefs of their time was. As people explored more of the planet and technology advanced, maps became more accurate but still relied on the public's consensus about how to represent the world.
I remember first learning about the differences in the Mercator and Galls-Peters world map projections from an old episode of "West Wing." It blew my mind to learn that the mercator projections, which were what we saw in text books and posters in school, distorted the sizes of different continents so that a country like Greenland appeared to be larger than the entire continent of Africa.
Today, map-making is more accurate since it's reliant on satellite data and GPS technologies, but the representation of information is still subject to the same social conventions and standards. People make jokes about the absurdity of viewing north as "up" and south as "down" when we're floating around a rock in space, but the implications of map design influences more than how we navigate.
There's a specific joke from a Lewis Carroll novel, "Sylvie and Bruno" that always comes to my mind when I think about this analogy.
“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr. “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Lewis Carroll humorously touches on the idea that a perfect map, one that corresponds exactly to the scale of reality, would be as large and unwieldy as reality itself. The absurdity of a map on the scale of a mile to the mile highlights the impracticality of even attempting to create a perfect representation of reality. It's a never-ending project with little prospect of ever being finished.
But like Sylvie and Bruno, we are attracted to the idea of this grand map because it represents the distinct pleasure of imagining something so fundamentally detailed or comprehensive. This is just what brains do, creating a map of space-time, in realtime on scales that we can hardly fathom and as humans, we do it exceptionally well.
Maps don't just represent our reality; they construct it. They influence how we perceive and interact with physical space, just as social accreditation influences how individuals perceive themselves and others within a societal context. The feedback loop between the map (or accreditation) and reality shapes our behaviors and expectations. It's kind of like automaps in video games, they simulate the creation of an abstract map that unlocks and grows as the players explore and gather new knowledge about the game world.
Just as a map represents and constructs our understanding of geographical space, social accreditation constructs our understanding of social norms and values. Both maps and social accreditation systems are simplifications of reality designed to help us navigate complex environments. Whether it's to gain validation or avoid being sanctioned, when we choose to conform or deviate from social norms it's similar to us choosing or avoiding a certain path on a journey based on what we know from a map.
The reason why social accreditation theory works here is because it recognizes that the processes of validation and sanctioning are fundamental to how we construct reality. When our social attitudes, values, and norms evolve, so do our collective understandings and interpretations of the world. This can be especially seen in how religious beliefs spread or how new scientific theories gain acceptance or how social movements can reshape societal values and of course in how formal education standardizes social norms and knowledge.
As religious beliefs gain followers and acceptance, they become ingrained in our collective consciousness, shaping norms, values, and behaviors. The spread of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, for example, involved the validating and sanctioning of theological doctrines and scripture (explicit accreditation) and the shared beliefs and practices (implicit accreditation) by influential leaders and communities, which helped establish these religions as major global faiths.
Similarly, peer reviews and recognition by accreditation bodies are foundational processes for validating new theories in the scientific method. From Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the development and acceptance of any new theories have depended on both shared empirical evidence in published research (explicit accreditation) and the consensus of the scientific community (implicit accreditation).
Likewise, we see these same kind of social mechanisms impacting historical social movements. People who are marginalized or oppressed by the existing norms begin to rally, share their experiences, and challenge the status quo. Their challenges, whether in the form of protests, literature, or just shared experiences, feed back into the system. The Civil Rights Movement didn't just aim to overturn segregation laws (explicit accreditation) but also to challenge and change racial biases and prejudices (implicit accreditation).
We can also see this when we seriously look at our academic accreditation systems – the way we grade, evaluate, and classify student success. Thinking about education through the lens of SAT begs the question, are these systems genuinely reflective of student potential, or are they reinforcing certain societal norms and biases? I remember writing a paper in my last semester of college about the goals and purpose of education in our society. It ended with this:
"And so I ask this question: What do we believe is the true purpose of an education system in a democratic society, is it to create a generation of consumers to compete in a global market or do we truly wish to progress into becoming a more innovative and intelligent society? Does this purpose seek to promote a standardized or equalized education system and is it possible that we can change the way we think about education to fit this purpose?" (Me, 2013)
Now I understand that standardization is the answer and i'm more concerned with the question of how do academic successes and failures (explicit accreditations) influence students' self-worth, peer dynamics, and societal perceptions (implicit accreditations)? It's why I used "The Breakfast Club" as the primary example of this theory because to me, the movie perfectly illustrates how schooling isn't just about formal learning in classrooms.
We learn from each other's actions and behaviors, and we all influence the world through our choice to conform or deviate from what we think is normal. Recognizing the dynamics of social accreditation reinforces the concept of life-long learning. As societal norms and values evolve, there's always something new to understand, adapt to, and possibly challenge.
As I continue with these blog posts, I hope that understanding SAT can help others like me to recognize the continuous process of learning, unlearning, and relearning that happens through our societal interactions, media consumption, and personal experiences.
It's feedback loops all the way down!
Thanks for reading this!
If you like this blog, check out my entire series on the Social Accreditation Theory and let me know what you think of the idea.
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