Types Of Social Norms Research Articles

The influence of social norms and social consciousness on intention reconciliation

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Initial work with SPIRE examined the impact of environmental factors and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes in the context of one set of social norms governing collaboration. This paper extends those results by further studying the effect of environmental factors and the agents' level of social consciousness and by comparing the impact of two different types of social norms on agent behavior and outcomes. The results show that the choice of social norms influences the accuracy of the agents' responses to varying environmental factors, as well as the effectiveness of social consciousness and other aspects of agents' utility functions. In experiments using heterogeneous groups of agents, both sets of norms were susceptible to the free-rider effect. However, the gains of the less responsible agents were minimal, suggesting that agent designers would have little incentive to design agents that deviate from the standard level of responsibility to the group.

The role of social norms in a model of marriage and divorce

In the US, the rate of divorce has increased at an alarming rate since the 1960s. This paper presents a mechanism which gives rise to the emergence of multiple equilibria and a discrete jump in the rate of divorce in a simple search environment. We attempt to show that social norms influence the way each agent searches for a matching partner and hence the probability of divorce. In a low-divorce equilibrium, agents are willing to spend more cost in the search process. As a result, the act of divorce becomes a more accurate signal of unobservable characteristics of a divorced agent. This type of social norms is self-consistent in equilibrium as social stigma attached to divorce is relatively high and this forces agents to be more discreet in the search process. For exactly the opposite reason, a high-divorce equilibrium can also be supported where agents are willing to spend little cost in the search process. In the light of this logic, the rapid increase in the rate of divorce can be seen as a movement from a low-divorce to a high-divorce equilibrium, possibly triggered by a temporary shock.

The Worldization of Violence and Injustice

In this new 21st century, en route towards the worldization of society, a number of social issues of global scope are emerging, and some of them interfere with the institutionalization of democracy. These new global social issues express themselves in the world's societies, in articulate fashion but with specific variations: they are complex problems because several dimensions of social life have come to be harshly questioned, among them social ties among people. Accordingly, forms of violence acquire new dimensions and have spread throughout society. There is a multiplicity of types of social norms, a multiplicity of forms of violence presenting themselves to contemporary societies - ecological violence, social exclusion, violence between genders, racisms, school violence - and all come together in a process of disintegration of citizenship. The emergence of a concept of citizen security in the worldization perspective assumes the social construction of a democratic, non-violent, and multiculturalist police force, based on a return to the goal of policing as a contribution to governability imbued with concern for the emancipatory practices of the groups of citizens in their daily lives. It would then become possible to imagine the construction of a transnational or world citizenship, characterized by institutional creation and by the spread and communication of social, legal, police, and symbolic practices of an innovative nature and planetary scope.

Interpersonal expectations in the patient-physician relationship

Human relationships are complex, and the relationship between patient and physician is no exception. In different ways, two articles in this issue of the Journal address the nature and consequences of interpersonal expectations and social norms. In the first article, Farber et al. explore physicians' experience and response to boundary violations by patients.1 Professional boundaries constitute a particular type of social norm with legal and fiduciary ramifications. In the second article, Schmittdiel et al. examine the effect of physician gender on patient selection of physicians and satisfaction with care.2 The results of this study also touch on expectations of normative social behavior.

Activating and Aligning two Kinds of Norms in Persuasive Communications

Communicators often try to reduce undesirable behavior in an audience by warning that the behavior is alarmingly prevalent. However, in the process of pointing out the regrettable frequency of the unwanted action, such warnings may send a mixed motivational message to the audience by simultaneously engaging the action of two types of social norms: injunctive norms, which can suppress undesirable action by describing what most people disapprove, and descriptive norms, which can stimulate undesirable action by describing what most people do. In one study, individuals whose attention was drawn to the widespread littering of others littered more, not less, as a consequence.

The transsituational influence of social norms.

Three studies examined the behavioral implications of a conceptual distinction between 2 types of social norms: descriptive norms, which specify what is typically done in a given setting, and injunctive norms, which specify what is typically approved in society. Using the social norm against littering, injunctive norm salience procedures were more robust in their behavioral impact across situations than were descriptive norm salience procedures. Focusing Ss on the injunctive norm suppressed littering regardless of whether the environment was clean or littered (Study 1) and regardless of whether the environment in which Ss could litter was the same as or different from that in which the norm was evoked (Studied 2 and 3)