Norms
Norms can be defined as sets of relations that define forms of communicating, feeling, acting, and thinking. They define what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said, felt, done, or thought. They are situational and relationally negotiated. Usually
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Norms
Introduction
Martina Cabra Institute of Psychology and Education, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Human lives are filled with social and personal expectations, rules, and prescriptions. Our deepest wishes, desires and anxieties are marked by social, cultural, and relational norms. We are scared to wish for someone’s company, do not dare to dream of a certain trip or get excited when imagining a radical change in our lives that we will never do. What we do is perceived, judged, and evaluated by others. A 4-year-old flying a kite, a woman speaking in public at the municipal council or a group of teenagers drinking in church can be sanctioned, frowned upon, or applauded. Judgments and evaluations based on socially shared norms leave traces in people’s lives; they mark us in more or less lasting ways. Yet, the way in which norms mark us is not determining: a young kid can drop out of medical school and form a punk band and an unhappy worker can stay at his job while secretly plan a revenge from his boss. From absolute rejection to strict compliance, people are not just evaluated or perceived, and they also find all sorts of ways to deal with these norms. Norms organize our social lives and define us, but we also have a part in defining them. They are shared and socially defined, but also psychologically reconstructed and internalized. People breach this gap in different ways and change what is expected, what is normal, or what is mandatory, moving the boundaries of the possible making thinkable the unthinkable.
Abstract
Norms can be defined as sets of relations that define forms of communicating, feeling, acting, and thinking. They define what is allowed and what is not allowed to be said, felt, done, or thought. They are situational and relationally negotiated. Usually described in terms of their functions (descriptive, constitutive, prescriptive), the term commonly designates prescriptive guides. Norms can be more or less explicit, more or less prescriptive, and be more or less opposed and resisted. Authors mostly agree on the fundamental character of norms for human life. Operating at a collective and a psychological level, they guide and constrain human lives. And although sometimes viewed as limiting possibilities rather than creating them, they can be seen as producing a certain set of possibilities and transformed through our engagement with them in our relations to others. Keywords
Social norms · Psychological norms · Development
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 V. P. Glăveanu (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_106-1
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In the literature on norms, there are many terms that resonate with the notion of norms: laws, rules, orders, customs, and prescriptions can be considered as referring to a similar phenomenon. Different disciplines have in their own way defined the terms more or less empirically, and more or less conceptually. To address the phenomenon which is of interest here, I define in
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