Information about Norm (sociology)

In sociology, a norm, or social norm, is a rule that is socially enforced. Social sanctioning is what distinguishes norms from other cultural products or social constructions such as meaning and values. Norms and normlessness are thought to affect a wide variety of human behavior.

Overview

Social norms can also be viewed as statements that regulate behavior and act as informal social controls. They are usually based on some degree of consensus and are enforced through social sanctions. In order to explain the content of normative rules, three different models are identified:

• Focus on the actions of ego,
• Focus on ego's reactions to actions of alter, and
• Negotiation between ego and alter.

Focus on the actions of ego

According to Christine Horne, this model revolves around the wide-spread assumption that norms reflect existing patterns of action. "An individual may change his behavior, especially his social actions, either to protect his interests under new external conditions or simply to promote them more effectively under existing conditions" (Weber 1978). In other words, after an action is initially carried out it will be repeated as it is now associated with a sense of rightness.

Focus on ego’s reactions to actions of alter

This second model focuses on one’s concerns with the behavior of others. Rather than simply monitor one’s own behavior, this theory concentrates on the attention paid to the actions of another individual; the norms emerge in response to externalities produced by the behaviors of others (Coleman 1990). Actions that result in beneficial or positive outcomes will gain approval, and those that warrant disappointing or negative outcomes will gain disapproval, thus molding an individual’s measured response to social situations (Horne).

Negotiations between ego and alter

The third and final model relies less on one’s own interpretation of what is socially acceptable and more on meanings produced through negotiation. Successful interactions amongst people occur usually if there are common understandings of shared situations, behaviors and roles; thus, people can “negotiate mutually agreed-upon understandings for their interaction to flow smoothly” (Horne).

Levels of enforcement

Levels of enforcement, in decreasing order:

• Violations of norms are punished with sanctions, possibly enforced by law.
• Violators of norms are considered eccentric or even deviant and are stigmatized.
• Alternative behaviors are not acknowledged. The norm is presumed, often to an extreme, in an attempt to avoid any challenge that might provoke stigma or sanction or even lead to redefinition of normative behavior. As a series of examples that are under tremendous contemporary pressure as norms evolve: the term "lover" once was presumed to denote a person of the opposite sex; a "mature" adult once was presumed to be or have been married; and a "couple" once was presumed to have or want children.

There are three kinds of norms:

Folkways

A society's web of cultural rituals, traditions and routines. Deviation is not usually considered a serious threat to social organization and is thus sanctioned less severely than moral deviation. Example: In certain households in the U.S., it is a folkway to say grace before eating Thanksgiving dinner. See Faux pas.

Mores

Moral judgments that define wrong and right behavior, the allowed and the disallowed, what is wanted and not wanted within a culture. The word is the plural of the Latin mor-, mos, which means "custom". A violation of mores is usually considered by society as a threat to social organization and harshly sanctioned. Examples: Drug use, sexual promiscuity, and extreme styles of dress.

"More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought."—Hyman G. Rickover

Laws

In highly organized societies, formalized and precisely delimited norms. The breaking of legal norms, or laws, invokes procedures and judgments through formal, legal institutions, such as police and the courts, set up to enforce them. These norms generally relate to individual violations of mores or to the adjustment of proprietary relationships.

Enforcement/Distribution of Norms

The existence of social norms is directly related to the enforcement of norms. Enforcement is vital when individual and group interests conflict, as it encourages people to act in a desired or appropriate way. Informal sanctioning by group members is the primary source of enforcement. Distribution focuses on the prediction of patterns across a group or several groups in order to explain how norms are accepted by group members as norms.

Heteronormativity

Main article: Heteronormativity

Heteronormativity is a system of norms dictating the range of socially acceptable sexual and gender identities. It is based around the notion that all people fall into two categories, male and female, and that there are essentialized notions of how these two sexes are expected to act.

Game-theoretical analysis of norms

A general formal framework that can be used to represent the essential elements of the social situation surrounding a norm is the repeated game of game theory.

A norm gives a person a rule of thumb for how they should behave. However, a rational person only acts according to the rule if only it is optimal for them. The situation can be described as follows. A norm gives an expectation of how other people act in a given situation (macro). A person acts optimally given the expectation (micro). In order for a norm to be stable, people's actions must reconstitute the expectation without change (micro-macro feedback loop). A set of such correct stable expectations is known as a Nash equilibrium. Thus, a stable norm must constitute a Nash equilibrium.

There exist various norms throughout the world. What accounts for the vast variety? From a game theoretical point of view, there are two explanans for this. One is the difference in games. Different parts of the world may give different environmental contexts and different people may have different values, which may result in a difference in games. The other is equilibrium selection not explicable by the game itself. Equilibrium selection is closely related to coordination. For a simple example, driving is common throughout the world, but in some countries people drive on the right and in other countries people drive on the left (see coordination game). A framework called comparative institutional analysis is proposed to deal with the game theoretical structural understanding of the variety of norms.

Example (gift exchange)

The Norm of Reciprocity:

In the western world, it is a custom to exchange gifts on various holidays. It is so deeply ingrained in the minds of people that many do not think of acting otherwise.

Now, suppose you become fed up with exchanging gifts. It is not necessarily easy to change your actions. Unilaterally changing your actions to stop giving gifts may give others the impression that you are a selfish person, and that impression is probably not in your interest. Notice, that your friends may be following the norm for the same reasons as you. If that is the case, you are wrongly coordinating due to the customary norm of gift exchange and are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma game. Coordination with communication may be necessary to get out of the prisoner's dilemma situation.

References

• Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press.
• Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Horne, Christine, 2001. Social Norms, ed. by Michael Hechter and Karl-Dieter Opp. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

See also

• breaching experiment
• convention (norm)
• counterculture
• heteronormativity
• intercultural competence
• norm (philosophy)
• normative
• peer pressure
• taboo

Further reading

• Cialdini, R., 2007, Descriptive Social Norms as Underappreciated Sources of Social Control. Psychometrika, vol. 72, no. 2, 263-268, http://www.socialnorms.org/Research/RecentArticles.php.
• McElreath, R., Boyd, R., & Richerson, P.J. (2003). Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers. Current Anthropology, 44(1): 122-129. Full text
• Quah, Stella R. and Sales, Arnaud, 2000, The International Handbook of Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 0-7169-5378-7.
• Schultz, P.W., Nolan, J. M., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., Griskevicius, V., 2007, The Constructive, Destructive, and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms. Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 5, 429-434, 2007. http://www.socialnorms.org/Research/RecentArticles.php.
• Stark, Rodney. 2007 Sociology, 10th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 0-495-09344-0.

External links

• Common Knowledge in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy