20 Facts About Social norms

Social norms are shared standards of acceptable behavior by groups.

The effects of norms can be determined by a logic of appropriateness and logic of consequences; the former entails that actors follow norms because it is socially appropriate, and the latter entails that actors follow norms because of cost-benefit calculations.

Norms are robust to various degrees: some Social norms are often violated whereas other Social norms are so deeply internalized that norm violations are infrequent.

Evidence for the existence of Social norms can be detected in the patterns of behavior within groups, as well as the articulation of Social norms in group discourse.

Scholars debate whether social norms are individual constructs or collective constructs.

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Rules and Social norms are not necessarily distinct phenomena: both are standards of conduct that can have varying levels of specificity and formality.

Not necessarily laws set in writing, informal Social norms represent generally accepted and widely sanctioned routines that people follow in everyday life.

Groups internalize Social norms by accepting them as reasonable and proper standards for behavior within the group.

Social norms have a way of maintaining order and organizing groups.

Social norms allow an individual to assess what behaviors the group deems important to its existence or survival, since they represent a codification of belief; groups generally do not punish members or create norms over actions which they care little about.

Social norms argues that, in a small community or neighborhood, many rules and disputes can be settled without a central governing body simply by the interactions within these communities.

In sociology, Social norms are seen as rules that bind an individual's actions to a specific sanction in one of two forms: a punishment or a reward.

For Coleman, Social norms start out as goal oriented actions by actors on the micro level.

Descriptive Social norms depict what happens, while injunctive Social norms describe what should happen.

Prescriptive Social norms are unwritten rules that are understood and followed by society and indicate what we should do.

Subjective Social norms are determined by beliefs about the extent to which important others want a person to perform a behavior.

Social norms influences are conceptualized in terms of the pressure that people perceive from important others to perform, or not to perform, a behavior.

Social Psychologist Icek Azjen theorized that subjective norms are determined by the strength of a given normative belief and further weighted by the significance of a social referent, as represented in the following equation: SN ? Snimi, where is a normative belief and is the motivation to comply with said belief.

The return potential model and game theory provide a slightly more economic conceptualization of Social norms, suggesting individuals can calculate the cost or benefit behind possible behavioral outcomes.

Social norms will be implemented if the actions of that specific norm come into agreement by the support of the Nash equilibrium in the majority of the game theoretical approaches.