6.1.3: How Norms Make Social Life Possible

 Norms make social life possible by making behavior predictable

No human group can exist without norms: Norms make social life possible by making behavior predictable. 

What would life be like if you could not predict what others would do?

 Imagine for a moment that you have gone to a store to purchase milk:

Suppose the clerk says, “I won’t sell you any milk.

 We’re overstocked with soda, and I’m not going to sell anyone milk until our soda inventory is reduced.”

 You don’t like it, but you decide to buy a case of soda. 

At the checkout, the clerk says, “I hope you don’t mind, but there’s a $5 service charge on every fifteenth customer.” 

You, of course, are the fifteenth. 

Just as you start to leave, another clerk stops you and says, “We’re not working anymore.

 We decided to have a party.” Suddenly a CD begins to blast, and everyone in the store starts to dance. 

“Oh, good, you’ve brought the soda,” says a different clerk, who takes your package and passes sodas all around. 

Life is not like this, of course. You can depend on grocery clerks to sell you milk.

 You can also depend on paying the same price as everyone else and not being forced to attend a party in a store. 

Why can you depend on this? Because we live in a world of norms that govern the behavior of both store clerks and ourselves. 

We are socialized to follow norms, to play the basic roles that society assigns to us. 

Violating background assumptions is a common form of deviance. 

Although we have no explicit rule that says, “Do not put snakes through your nose,” we all know that it exists (perhaps as a subcategory of “Don’t do strange things in public”). 

Is this act also deviant for this man in Chennai, India? Credit: Babu/Reuters Without norms, we would have social chaos.

Without norms, we would have social chaos. Norms lay out the basic guidelines for how we should play our roles and interact with others. In short, norms bring about social order, a group’s customary social arrangements. Our lives are based on these arrangements, which is why deviance often is perceived as threatening: Deviance undermines predictability, the foundation of social life. 

Consequently, human groups developed a system of social control—formal and informal means of enforcing norms. At the center of social control are sanctions.