Social norms are shared expectations about appropriate behavior in given situations. They range from folkways (informal, weakly enforced customs like table manners) to mores (strongly held moral norms) to taboos (absolute prohibitions). Values are the broader principles—freedom, loyalty, equality—that underlie and justify norms. Sanctions, both positive (rewards) and negative (punishments), enforce norms and can be formal (laws, institutional rules) or informal (gossip, ostracism, praise). Understanding how norms vary by context, culture, and social position is foundational to analyzing conformity and deviance.
Conduct a 'norm-breaking' experiment (standing the wrong way in an elevator, maintaining unusual eye contact) and observe reactions. Compare formal and informal sanctions for the same behavior in different social contexts.
From your study of socialization, you know that humans are not born with a blueprint for appropriate behavior — they acquire it through interaction with family, peers, schools, and media. From your study of culture and society, you know that culture is the system of meanings, symbols, and practices that a group shares. Social norms are the behavioral layer of culture: the specific shared expectations about how one ought to act in a given situation. They are not descriptions of what people actually do (that would be a statistical average) but prescriptions of what they *should* do — backed by social pressure, approval, and sanctions.
The most useful way to think about norms is as a hierarchy of constraint and moral weight. Folkways are informal customs governing everyday behavior — how close you stand to someone in conversation, whether you make eye contact, how you greet a stranger. Violating a folkway produces mild social discomfort or disapproval rather than outrage: if you eat with your hands at a formal dinner, people will think you rude, not evil. Mores (pronounced "more-ays") are norms with genuine moral force — lying, cheating, sexual behavior, treatment of vulnerable people. Violating a more produces moral condemnation rather than mere social awkwardness, because mores are felt to protect important social values. Taboos are the strongest category: absolute prohibitions whose violation is experienced as a kind of pollution or profound wrongness — incest, cannibalism, desecration of the dead. The reactions they provoke are visceral, not calculated.
Values sit above norms in the conceptual hierarchy — they are the broad principles (freedom, loyalty, justice, family, achievement) that norms operationalize. The relationship between them is not perfectly consistent, which is where a great deal of social tension lives. American culture endorses equality as a value while historically maintaining and still practicing discriminatory norms. This gap between espoused values and enacted norms is not hypocrisy in a simple psychological sense — it reflects the fact that abstract values and specific behavioral habits are maintained by different social mechanisms and can be out of sync for long periods.
Sanctions are the enforcement mechanism that gives norms their teeth. They can be formal — codified in law, institutional rules, or official procedures (a prison sentence, a traffic fine, academic expulsion) — or informal — delivered through the reactions of others in everyday life (gossip, ostracism, praise, disapproval, a raised eyebrow). Informal sanctions are often more powerful than formal ones for sustaining everyday norms, because they operate constantly and do not require institutional machinery. The experiment described in the learning advice — violating a minor norm and observing reactions — makes this visible: even a trivial deviation from expected behavior (standing the wrong way in an elevator) triggers discomfort and subtle corrective behavior in bystanders who never consciously registered that a norm was operating.
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