UNIVERSAL NORMS - VARY WITH CULTURE

 

NORMS – AN OVERVIEW

Social norms are the behaviors and cues within a society or group. This sociological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit. Failure to follow the rules can result in severe punishments, including exclusion from the group." They have also been described as the "customary rules of behavior that coordinate our interactions with others."

The social norms indicate the established and approved ways of doing things, of dress, of speech and of appearance. These vary and evolve not only through time but also vary from one age group to another and between social classes and social groups. What is deemed to be acceptable dress, speech or behavior in one social group may not be accepted in another. The remarkably wide diversity of attitudes and behaviors from one culture to another indicates the extent to which we are the products of cultural norms.  Norms restrain and control us, but they also lubricate the social machinery. Social behavior occurs with greater ease when everyone knows what is both expected and accepted. Despite their distinct differences, cultures share some norms in common.  One apparently universal norm concerns how people of unequal status relate to one another.  The more formal way we communicate with strangers is the same way we communicate with superiors.  Moreover, increased intimacy is usually initiated by person with higher status. Other norms vary across cultures. 

WHAT ARE THE UNIVERSAL NORMS?

Although norms vary by culture and genders, we humans do hold some norms is common.  Best known is the taboo against incest; Parents are not to have sexual relations with their children, nor siblings with one another.  Although the taboo apparently is violated more often than psychologists once believed, the norm is still universal.  Every society disapproves of incest.

Roger Brown noticed another universal norm. Everywhere, people talk to higher-status people in the respectful way they often talk to strangers. And they talk to lower-status people in the more familiar, first name way they speak to friends.  Patients call their physician “Dr. So and So”; the physician often replies using their first name. Students and professors typically address o9ne another in a similar non-mutual way. Most languages have two forms of the English pronoun “you”: a respectful form and a familiar form (for example, Sie and due in German, vous and tu in French, usted an tu in Spanish, aap and tum in Pakistan).  People typically sue the familiar form with intimates and those they perceive as inferior (not only with close friends and family members but also in speaking to children and dogs).  A German child received a boost when strangers begin addressing the child as “Sie” instead of “du”.  Nouns, too, can express assumed social inequalities.  Among faculty studies by Rebecca Rubin, young female professors were far more likely that young male professors to have students call them by their first name.  Women tennis players will empathize” Sportscasters 53 percent of the time refer to them using only their first name: with men players this happens only 8 percent of the time.

This first aspect of Brown’s universal norm – that forms of address communicate not only social distance but also social status—correlates with a second aspect:  Advances in intimacy are usually suggested by the higher status person. In Europe, where most twosomes begin a relationship with the polite, formal “you” and may eventually progress to the more intimate “you,”  someone obviously has to initiate the increased intimacy.  Who do you suppose does so?  On some congenial occasion, the elder, or richer, or more distinguished of the two may say, “Why don’t we say du to one another.

This norm extends beyond language to every type of ad once in intimacy.  It is more acceptable to borrow a pen from or put a hand on the shoulder of one’s intimates and subordinates than to behave in such a casual way with strangers or superiors.  Similarly, the president of my college invites faculty to his home before they invite him to theirs.  In general, then, the higher status person is the pacesetter in the progression toward intimacy.

NORMS VARY WITH CULTURE

Some norms cross cultures, but many do not.  To someone from a relatively formal northern European culture, a person whose roots are in a expressive Mediterranean culture may seem “warm, charming, inefficient, and time wasting.”  To the Mediterranean person, the northern European may seem “efficient, cold, and over concerned with time”.  Latin American business executives who arrive late for a dinner engagement may be mystified by how obsessed their American counterparts are with punctuality.

 

Culture also vary in their norms for personal space, a sort of portable bubble or buffer zone that we like to maintain between ourselves and others.  As the situation changes, the bubble varies in size.   With strangers we maintain a fairly large personal space, keeping a distance of 4 feet or more between us.  On un-crowded buses, or in restrooms or libraries, we protect our space and respect others’ space.  We let friends come closer, often within 2 or 3 feet.

 

Individuals differ:  Some people prefer more personal space than others.  Adults maintain more distance those children.  Men keep more distance form one another than do women.  For reasons unknown, cultures near the equator prefer less space and more touching and hugging.  Thus the British and Scandinavians prefer more distance than the French and Arabs; Americans prefer more space than Latin Americans. 

 

To see the effect of encroaching on another’s personal space, play space invader.  Stand or sit but a foot or so from a friend and strike up a conversation.  Does the person fidget, look away, back off, show other signs of discomfort?  These are some signs of arousal noted by researchers.  One controversial experiment revealed that men require more time to begin urination and less time to complete the act when another man is standing at an adjacent urinal.

 

VARY WITH GENDER

There are many obvious dimensions of human diversity—height, weight, hair, color, to name just few.  But for people’s self-concepts and social relationships, the two dimensions that matter most, and that people first attune to, are race and, especially, sex. 

As it has perhaps, the sexes are nearly identical in many physical traits, such as age of sitting, teething, and walking. They also are alike in many psychological traits, such as overall vocabulary, intelligence, and happiness. But the occasional differences are what capture attention and make news. Women are twice s vulnerable to anxiety disorders an depression, though only one-third as vulnerable to alcoholism and suicide.  Women have a slightly better sense of smell. Thy more easily become re-aroused immediately after orgasm.  And they are much less likely to suffer hyperactivity or speech disorders as children and to display antisocial personalities as adults.

During the 1970’s, many scholars worried that studies of gender differences might reinforce stereotypes and that gender differences might be construed as women’s deficits.  Focusing attention on gender differences will provide “battle weapons against women” they warned.  And it’s true that explanations for differences usually focus on the group that’s seen as different.  In discussing the “gender gap”  in American presidential voting, commentators more often wonder why women  so often vote Democratic than why men so often vote Republican. People more often wonder what causes homosexuality than what causes heterosexuality. People ask why Asian-Americans so often excel in math and science, not whey other groups less often excel.  In each case, people define the standard by one group and wonder why the other is “different” From “different” it is but a short way to “deviant” or “sub-standard.”

Since the 1980’s scholars have felt freer to explore gender diversity.  Some argued that gender difference research has “furthered the cause of gender equality” by reducing overblown stereotypes and that we can accept and value gender diversity.  The two sexes, like two sides of a coin, can differ yet be equal.  Let’s consider, then, two dimensions of gender diversity in social norms.

GLOBAL MULTICULTURAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Within a global multicultural civil society, tolerance is constituted by both the recognition of cultural differences and group identities on the one hand and respect for universal moral norms on the other. A humanist morality and politics has to reconcile adequately universal norms and group values. This is possible if one understands moral diversity as an answer to the problem of social cooperation. As a result, the recognition of plurality is preserved without giving up an essential trait of all humanist morality which is the objective validity of universal norms. There is a general idea inherited from the enlightenment which is not confined to the European and especially French history in the eighteenth century, but which is common to all humanist periods of human thinking and social development in many cultures and in different periods of time: This is the idea of equality, and the related idea that there are certain rights, intrinsic values and duties which are not bound to special social relationships, memberships of certain groups, ethnicities or nations, and which together build a framework of moral constraints within which all morally acceptable behaviour is embedded. It is the fundamental assumption of genuine political conservatism that those universal norms do not exist. Certainly there are many modern conservatives who do not hold this assumption anymore, which was essential for Edmund Burke and other critics of the French enlightenment and the French revolution. However, those have given up an essential trait of conservative politics which justifies an understanding of this kind of "conservatism" as a form of liberalism combined with the empirical judgment that certain genuinely liberal values can be uphold only if the dynamics of change in society is limited.

Today a large part of political thought within the Left is also openly anti-universalist and partly even anti-humanist. Even moderate proponents of multiculturalism easily give up constitutive elements of normative humanism and seem to revitalize exactly those normative elements which have been constitutive for political conservatism. This new collectivist and anti-universalist tendency is - like orthodox Marxism has been in the past - a result of (and the response to) certain deficiencies of mainstream liberal thought.

This common normative framework, constitutive for interaction, is obviously compatible with different individual goals, values and subjective moralities. Compare this with our judgment not concerning moral questions but descriptive ones. To participate in successful communication presupposes a wide range of common assumptions. Different opinions about a certain subject matter can be identified only if there is enough consensus concerning other subject matters such that the dissenting parties can understand each other. This is true for empirical and moral disputes as well. There is a common element between moral disagreement and other disagreements regarding questions of rationality or scientific facts: The disagreement is a genuine one. A non genuine disagreement might arise if I prefer staying at home and my partner prefers going out. Then we realize that we have conflicting preferences in case we both  want to spend this day together. But if we begin to discuss how to solve this conflict, e. g. by referring  to a principle of fairness ("last time you decided, this time I should have the right to decide"), then we might reach an agreement by a more fundamental consensus regarding the rule which we want to apply. Otherwise we might go on disagreeing what to do, but then this disagreement has turned into a genuine one: One thinks it is fair that p and the other thinks it is fair that q, and p and q are incompatible.