Normative clearsightedness: a general knowledge of social valuation

Abstract

The goal of this research was to develop the work of Py and Somat (1991) concerning normative clearsightedness. Although they were interested in the norm of internality, they defined normative clearsightedness as ‘the knowledge of the normative or counter-normative aspect of certain types of behaviour or certain types of judgements’. However, even though they placed the concept ‘normative clearsightedness’ within a broad normative perspective that goes beyond merely the norm of internality, it remains to be explored what this broad perspective consists of. In this study, we have turned towards the notion of individualism which testifies, just like the norm of internality, to a certain social desirability (Somat, Doisneau & Gouin, 1994, unpublished manuscript) in testing the generalizability of normative clearsightedness to other norms. The results obtained in this study demonstrate that normative clearsightedness is applicable to at least one norm other than the norm of internality. In fact, the normative clearsightedness of internal explanations seems to be associated with the normativity of individualistic beliefs. In other words, we find that subjects who are clearsighted with regard to internality are also clearsighted with regard to individualism. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.