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.
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 3 types 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 pasMores
Moral judgements 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, extreme styles of dress.
Laws
In highly organized societies, formalised and precisely delimited norms. The breaking of legal norms, or laws, invokes procedures and judgements 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. Examples: Rape, theft, lying under oath.
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 she should behave. However, a
rational person only acts according to the rule if only it is optimal for her. 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 account for the vast variety? From 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 simplest example, the game of choosing which side of the road you drive is common throughout the world, but in some countries you coordinate to drive on the right side and in other countries you coordinate on the left side (see
coordination game). A framework called
comparative institutional analysis is proposed to deal with the game theoretical structural understanding of the variety of norms.
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
prisoners' dilemma game. Coordination with communication may be necessary to get out of the prisoners' dilemma situation.
*
counterculture*
normative*
norm (philosophy)*
peer pressure*
taboo*
Common Knowledge in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
