NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
... rds "boy" and ''man'' with respect to what they say about a person's role and stature in society. Similarly, use of the words "girl" and "woman" has been important to the women's movement. Not only are roles and statuses reflected in language, but language seems to shape a person's identity and sense of self. Language concepts can raise mental fences around the conceptions of self available to us and to others. The concept of "old" as applied to people in our society, for example, has generally implied that "old" people do not want or need sex, despite recent research showing that they desire and enjoy sexual relations of all kinds (Starr and Weiner, 1980).
And by excluding sex as part of the identity of an "old" person, older people and the people around them may not be able to address their sexual needs. The Sapir-Who hypothesis that language characteristics influence thought has been extensively criticized. Some argue that thought and culture shape language. Others hold that the iron grip of language over all our thought categories has not been demonstrated. However, people tend to see natural objects, such as colors, in the terms language provides.
An artist may have words for 14 shades of red and "see" them accordingly, whereas the Jan of New Guinea name and "see" the world only in terms of warm and cold color categories. Even social perceptions seem to be shaped by language, as research on teachers' expectations for "gifted" and "slow" learners suggests. In short, language does in some ways shape how we see the world and makes it difficult, although not impossible, to experience the world in alternative ways. Becoming aware of how language may limit U. S. is the first step toward breaking free of those limits.
Language also provides clues to what a culture considers important. Farmers have many words to describe various types of soil, reflecting its importance to them. Our culture has numerous slang words for money (including "bread, "dough, "jack, "simpletons, "kale, "greenbacks, "bucks, "bones, "wad, "shekels, " and "do-re-mi"), suggesting the importance of money in our culture. Language also identifies the members of a group. If you "know the language, " whether of football, electronics, or human physiology, you are a long way toward being "in" the group. If you do not know the language, you probably will not be accepted as part of the inner group and also may not know what is going on. (This applies to sociology as well.
You need to learn enough sociological "lingo" to pass the course you are taking. ) Finally, language can obscure as well as clarify. For example, the phrase "nuclear events" refers to accidents in nuclear power plants but plays down their importance and removes them from the realm of human responsibility. Norms Suppose you were taking a seminar with 20 other students and you circulated a list with each person's name and telephone number on it. Then assume that several members of the seminar began receiving obscene phone calls, apparently from someone in the class. How would you feel if you received a call? Probably you would feel outraged.
Your feelings would be intensified because the caller would be violating a social norm. Norms refer to shared rules about acceptable and unacceptable social behavior. In this case, the phone numbers were shared to advance the work of the seminar, not to aid obscene phone callers. All societies have norms, although their content differs from one society to the next.
In rural West Africa today, if a stranger knocks on the door in the middle of the night, the norm is to invite the person in and offer food and a place to sleep (if only on the floor). In New York this would not be the normative response to a midnight knock from a stranger. Norms provide guidelines about what is "acceptable" or appropriate behavior in a given situation. They go beyond suggesting what people might do, however, in that they also contain an aspect of what they ought to do. Quite often they come to believe that they should behave in a certain way. Probably most of us feel that we ought to avoid talking out loud to ourselves in a crowded public place.
Norms apply to more than behavior, however. Even emotions are saddled and bridled by norms, as Hochschild (1983) points out. We think to ourselves, "I ought to feel grateful for all they have done for me, " or "I shouldn't have felt so angry, " suggesting that we are comparing our feelings to a normative standard. These examples suggest that norms, like other features of culture, slip into people's minds in subtle ways. We may be unaware of how strongly norms weave together the fabric of social life. In an effort to unearth these normative threads, Harold Garfinkel had his students set out to disrupt the usual flow of social life.
He asked them to do such things as go home for dinner with their parents and act as though they were strangers visiting there for the first time: "Yes, thank you, Mrs. Jones, I would like to have some more lima beans. "Mr. Jones, how is your bowling team doing?" It took very little of this "bizarre" behavior for the parents to react: "What's wrong with you? Are you sick? Are you playing games with us? Why are you behaving this way?" Some became rather heated.
In another experiment, researchers Stanley Milgram and John Saint (1978) asked students to ride a crowded bus or subway during rush hour when there were no seats left. They were to approach a stranger and ask if they could please have his or her seat. This was such counter normative behavior that many students found they could not do it. They simply felt "too awkward. " It was easier for them to ask for the seat when they could give a reason: "I feel dizzy, " or "I just got out of the hospital. " Other passengers were more likely to give up their seats when presented with a "legitimate" reason. Otherwise, you can imagine the reactions the students received.
Part of their discomfort in asking undoubtedly arose from anticipating those reactions. And that discomfort is a clue to the existence of a social norm. Four kinds of norms can be identified, depending on the degree of conformity that is required. Folkways require less conformity; they are social customs to which people generally conform although they feel little pressure to do so.
We are expected to wear matching socks (if we wear socks), to wear clothes without holes in them, to speak when introduced to someone, to shake hands when someone offers a hand, and to eat at least some of what is offered U. S. when we are guests at dinner. Violations of folkways do not usually arouse moral outrage.
People who do not accept the social customs of the group may be considered odd or sloppy, but they are not likely to be arrested for their behavior. Mores, on the other hand, are strongly held social norms. Their violation arouses a sense of moral outrage. A naked baby on an American beach may be violating a folkway (to some), but a naked man on anything except a nude beach is violating mores and indeed is breaking the law in most communities. Violating mores excites strong public reaction and usually involves legal sanctions as well, since most are written into formal law. Laws are norms that have been formally enacted by a political body.
Preliterate societies do not usually have formal laws or lawyers, but they have strongly followed norms nevertheless. Laws may be enforced by the police, military, or some other state organization. A taboo is a strongly prohibited social practice. It is the strongest form of social norm. The most nearly universal rule in all known human cultures is the incest taboo -- the prohibition of sexual intercourse between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, and sometimes other relatives as well. The wide appearance of this taboo suggests that it may have developed early in human evolution.
Just because something is taboo, however, does not mean it never happens. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the incest taboo is violated fairly frequently (although no definitive statistics exist on how often incest occurs). The taboo nature of incest is evident in the fact that people do not practice it openly. Moreover, they are often embarrassed or ashamed to discuss what happened to them. The existence of such feelings signals the presence of a taboo behavior. Social norms are supported by sanctions.
A sanction is a reward or penalty directed at desired or undesired behavior. Negative sanctions include disapproving looks, negative gossip, social shunning, imprisonment, and the electric chair. Positive sanctions include prizes such as the Nobel award, praise, applause, esteem, financial rewards, and smiles. The effectiveness of a sanction depends on how the receiver feels about it and about the people giving it. Electrocution is fairly universal in its negative impact, whereas prizes may mean little or a great deal to the people winning them.
The type of sanction helps us to distinguish between folkways and mores. Violations of folkways usually receive only informal social sanctions, such as stares, snide remarks, or other signs of disapproval. Mores are usually backed up with formal sanctions. Taboos vary as to whether or not they have formal sanctions. Norms may be socially sanctioned, as in the case of norms about appropriate dress, or legally sanctioned, as in the ease of norms against beating up people and stealing their money. Norms are rooted social values.
Values Norms are concrete applications of values in everyday life. Values are strongly held general ideas people share about what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable. Values are more general than norms in that they do not prescribe specific behaviors for concrete situations. In fact, the same values may support a number of different -- or even competing -- norms. For example, parents who value their families may be torn between working hard in their occupations and spending more time at home.
Both behaviors may be normative expressions of the underlying value of commitment to their families. Examples of values generally held in our society include freedom, justice, and individualism. The normative counterparts to these more general values are freedom of speech, equal justice before the law, and the right to privacy. Religious or humanistic values helped concentration camp prisoners to resist their captors despite the best efforts of their captors to break down their social solidarity (Pawelczynska, 1979). A society's values are important to understand because they influence the content of both norms and laws. How can we tell what we, our neighbors, or other societies value?
Sociologist Robin Williams (1960) suggests a number of indicators of the choices people make that may point to their underlying values. Patterns of money expenditure, directions of interest (in literature, movies, music, and other arts), and direct statements all provide clues to what individuals, groups, or societies value. Some families, for example, spend their extra money on cars, boats, furniture, or clothing, whereas others may spend it on books, education, and concerts. These choices reflect different sets of cultural values.
To these can be added time allocation (how much time people spend on various activities) as another indicator of how highly they value the activities or the goals those activities represent. Value statements may reflect what people see as ideal, whereas time or money expenditures may be better indicators of their real values. In any given situation more than one value may be operating. A desire for efficiency in business clashes with a growing value on humanizing the work setting. You may value friendship and also value getting your schoolwork done. Often these values compete for one's time and attention.
Many societies experience tension and even conflict over competing values. Developing societies often experience conflict over preserving valued traditions and modernizing. Industrialized societies face conflicts between the values of equality and rewarding merit.
Free research essays on topics related to: norms, social life, sanctions, taboo, social norm
Research essay sample on Social Norm Social Life
