Cultural Norms as Explanatory Constructs in Theories of Social Behavior

Abstract

The more and more rapid development of theoretically oriented sociology, social psychology and other sciences dealing with man’s social behavior and with the functioning of human societies puts at the social scientist’s disposal every day more numerous and also more reliable sets of scientific generalizations. These generalizations describe regularities of events within such spheres of phenomena as, e.g., ‘political behavior’, ‘perception of social phenomena’, ‘interactions in small groups’, as well as in other fields of the social behavior of men. The statements are usually formulated in a language much like the theoretical language employed in the natural sciences, and they have, as a rule, the form of an implicational relation between two sets of ‘qualitative’ phenomena, or the form of a functional relation between one or more independent quantitative variables on the one side and the quantitative dependent variable on the other. The relations that have been established are often of a statistical nature such as when one says that the occurrence of one phenomenon increases the probability of occurrence of another phenomenon, or that a positive correlation exists between two variables.