Social Norms Related Quotes

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the program manager from AARP had a brilliant idea: he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes. What was going on here? How could zero dollars be more attractive than $30? When money was mentioned, the lawyers used market norms and found the offer lacking, relative to their market salary. When no money was mentioned they used social norms and were willing to volunteer their time. Why didn’t they just accept the $30, thinking of themselves as volunteers who received $30? Because once market norms enter our considerations, the social norms depart.

I shake my head at my friend. “Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn.” Aibileen shakes her head. “I used to believe in em. I don’t anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain’t.

possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms.

Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is "the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful". Janeway call this the "ordered use of the power to disbelieve". She explains: It is true that one may not have a coherent self-definition to set against the status assigned by the established social mythology, and that is not necessary for dissent. By disbelieving, one will be led toward doubting prescribed codes of behaviour, and as one begins to act in ways that can deviate from the norm in any degree, it becomes clear that in fact there is not just one right way to handle or understand events. Women need to know that they can reject the powerful's definition of their reality --- that they can do so even if they are poor, exploited, or trapped in oppressive circumstances. They need to know that the exercise of this basic personal power is an act of resistance and strength. Many poor and exploited women, especially non-white women, would have been unable to develop positive self-concepts if they had not exercised their power to reject the powerful's definition of their reality. Much feminist thought reflects women's acceptance of the definition of femaleness put forth by the powerful. Even though women organizing and participating in feminist movement were in no way passive, unassertive, or unable to make decisions, they perpetuated the idea that these characteristics were typical female traits, a perspective that mirrored male supremacist interpretation of women's reality. They did not distinguish between the passive role many women assume in relation to male peers and/or male authority figures, and the assertive, even domineering, roles they assume in relation to one another, to children, or to those individuals, female or male, who have lower social status, who they see as inferiors, This is only one example of the way in which feminist activists did not break with the simplistic view of women's reality s it was defined by powerful me. If they had exercised the power to disbelieve, they would have insisted upon pointing out the complex nature of women's experience, deconstructing the notion that women are necessarily passive or unassertive.

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.

Ideas about the withering away of the family found strong parallels in the political commitment to the withering away of law. The great majority of jurists shared the view that under socialism, morality and limited norms would supercede law and the state in governing social relations. A classless society would have no need of law to regulate and coerce human behavior. In the words of the jurist M. Kozlovskii, "Law is born with the division of society into classes and it dies with the death of class society.

Shame, as an emotion, has a core meaning, in relating individuals to wider social groups and norms -- real or imagined.

Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.

All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others.

Our bodies are rich sources of evidence about sexual selection pressures because they are visible, measurable, easily comparable with those of other species, and relatively undistorted by human culture. In recent years much nonsense has been written by post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault about the "social construction of the body", as if human bodies were the incarnation of cultural norms rather than ancestral sexual preferences.

The autistic form of life does not conform to assumed social normativity and does not easily extend outward into the social, leading to a 'double empathy problem' between people of diverse dispositions, that is, both parties struggle to understand and relate to one another. Such differences in presentation can lead to dyspathic reactions and stigma, often leading to ill-fated attempts at normalisation and a continuing vicious cycle of psycho-emotional disablement.

By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...) Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.

Unfortunately, most researchers studying gating dynamics in children are, as with “schizophrenia,” focused on “normal” versus “abnormal” gating. And all children are expected to fit into the defined “normal” range of behavior. Sensory gating dynamics outside that culturally determined “norm” are defined as abnormal and researchers note that Individuals with these characteristics have been classified as having sensory processing deficits (SPD). Such behaviors disrupt an individual’s ability to achieve and maintain an optimal range of performance necessary to adapt to challenges in life. The manifestations of SPD may include distraction, impulsiveness, abnormal activity level, disorganization, anxiety, and emotional lability that produce deficient social participation, insufficient self-regulation and inadequate perceived competence.1 Those terms, if you look at them more closely, are exterior, “authority” generated terms; they relate directly to the paradigm in place in those authorities. They really don’t have much to say about the interior experience of the children so labeled.

Symbolic interactionists stress that to understand poverty we must focus on what poverty means to people. When people evaluate where they are in life, they compare themselves with others. In some rural areas, simple marginal living is the norm, and people living in these circumstances don’t feel poor. But in Leslie’s cosmopolitan circle, people can feel deprived if they cannot afford the latest upscale designer clothing from their favorite boutique. The meaning of poverty, then, is relative: What poverty is differs from group to group within the same society, as well as from culture to culture and from one era to the next.

Can we make any sort of objective judgment about the final result? Only if we make a comparison between our conclusions and the standards that are generally valid in the social milieu to which the individuals belong. Even then, we must take into account the mental equilibrium (or “sanity”) of the individual concerned. For the result cannot be a completely collective leveling out of the individual to adjust him to the “norms” of his society. This would amount to a most unnatural condition. A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.

Compared to the despotic societies that were the norm in Europe and Asia, Haudenosaunee was a libertarian dream. In the same sense, it was also a feminist dream: the Five Nations were largely governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law explicitly ordered council members to heed “the warnings of your women relatives.” Failure to do so would lead to their removal. The equality granted to women was not the kind envisioned by contemporary Western feminists—men and women were not treated as equivalent. Rather, the sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to the other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan.

Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

Because the family is our first and in many ways our most important social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture have forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people. Child abuse and incestuous sexual molestation, once thought to be rare deviations from the norm, apparently occur much more often than anyone had previously suspected. In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” It is clear that the family can make one very happy, or be an unbearable burden. Which one it will be depends, to a great extent, on how much psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and especially in each other’s goals.

I will show that this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes from labor, a veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population. One possible explanation of this is that the skills and productivity of these top managers rose suddenly in relation to those of other workers. Another explanation, which to me seems more plausible and turns out to be much more consistent with the evidence, is that these top managers by and large have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is very difficult to estimate in a large organization. This phenomenon is seen mainly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Britain, and it may be possible to explain it in terms of the history of social and fiscal norms in those two countries over the past century. The tendency is less marked in other wealthy countries (such as Japan, Germany, France, and other continental European states), but the trend is in the same direction. To expect that the phenomenon will attain the same proportions elsewhere as it has done in the United States would be risky until we have subjected it to a full analysis—which unfortunately is not that simple, given the limits of the available data.

Fifty judges from various districts were asked to set sentences for defendants in hypothetical cases summarized in identical pre-sentence reports. The basic finding was that “absence of consensus was the norm” and that the variations across punishments were “astounding.” A heroin dealer could be incarcerated for one to ten years, depending on the judge. Punishments for a bank robber ranged from five to eighteen years in prison. The study found that in an extortion case, sentences varied from a whopping twenty years imprisonment and a $65,000 fine to a mere three years imprisonment and no fine. Most startling of all, in sixteen of twenty cases, there was no unanimity on whether any incarceration was appropriate. This study was followed by a series of others, all of which found similarly shocking levels of noise. In 1977, for example, William Austin and Thomas Williams conducted a survey of forty-seven judges, asking them to respond to the same five cases, each involving low-level offenses. All the descriptions of the cases included summaries of the information used by judges in actual sentencing, such as the charge, the testimony, the previous criminal record (if any), social background, and evidence relating to character. The key finding was “substantial disparity.” In a case involving burglary, for example, the recommended sentences ranged from five years in prison to a mere thirty days (alongside a fine of $100). In a case involving possession of marijuana, some judges recommended prison terms; others recommended probation.

People are free. Well, they can't fly on their own . . . but pretty much whatever they can think up, they can make happen. When they're sleepy, they can sleep. They're free to start or quit whatever they're doing whenever they want. And the only reason they don't is because things like social norms, laws, traditions and sentiment get in the way. Running naked through the streets . . . conning old people . . . killing . . . everything’s possible if you ignore morality. That's why they insist on teaching you cooperation and ethics when you're young- But the world is set up to force people to fight, cheat and steal as a default. Trying to live with that contradiction is torture. But in so many places happiness and sorrow are traded like stocks on wall street. What will it take for everyone to be happy? Who knows? But if a kid could figure it out, war would've gone extinct long time ago. I'd hate to trust the entire thing to politicians. They're just old men who have to dance to public opinion. The world is the embodiment of human nature exposed . . . There's no way for everyone to be happy. Happiness is relative anyway . . . and people want it that way. Evil is relative too. In order to protect her, a mother can turn into a demon. And it gets held up as inspirational. People go to war to protect kin and country. It's the same thing. Even if you pretend to be good fundamentally everyone has some negative aspects. It's amazing that no one knows that. Why? People have become so adept at excuses and shifting the blame . . . that they never even consider the possibility that they're culpable for their own problems.

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

When money was mentioned, the lawyers used market norms and found the offer lacking, relative to their market salary. When no money was mentioned they used social norms and were willing to volunteer their time. Why didn't they just accept the $30, thinking of themselves as volunteers who received $30? Because once market norms enter our considerations, the social norms depart.

In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.

More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbalances. Those who developed heatstroke suffered permanent damage, such as loss of independent function and multisystem organ failures. Thousands of other stricken by heat-related illnesses were treated in emergency rooms.

We believe that the human capacity to live in larger scale forms of tribal social organization evolved through a coevolutionary ratchet generated by the interaction of genes and culture. Rudimentary cooperative institutions favored genotypes that were better able to live in more cooperative groups. Those individuals best able to avoid punishment and acquire the locally-relevant norms were more likely to survive. At first, such populations would have been only slightly more cooperative than typical nonhuman primates. However, genetic changes, leading to moral emotions like shame, and a capacity to learn and internalize local practices, would allow the cultural evolution of more sophisticated institutions that in turn enlarged the scale of cooperation. These successive rounds of coevolutionary change continued until eventually people were equipped with capacities for cooperation with distantly related people, emotional attachments to symbolically marked groups, and a willingness to punish others for transgression of group rules.

Online community, between people who have usually never met and share only select aspects of their lives, presumes inclusion and belonging through communicational modes that borrow from successful real-life intimacy. It prioritizes openness and transparency, encourages emotional response (albeit in a limited way through, for example, Facebook’s ever-powerful ‘like’ button), and claims to promote consensus. This rhetoric of openness and sharing—a presumption of egalitarian transparency—is inherent in the corporate mantra of Google (‘Do no evil’), Facebook (‘making the Web more social’), and Flickr-Yahoo (‘Share your pictures, watch the world’). Yet just as inner-city windows might present an illusion of togetherness in which isolation is actually the norm, this presumed openness of virtual communities hides the fact that inclusion in social media can be fickle and conditional; digital citizenship hides multiple power dynamics and relations,not all of which are explicitly stated. Whereas there has been some discussion of the meanings of digital citizenship (to mean the accepted norms of appropriate, responsible technology use), online ‘community’ is invoked as a given. The Professor of Media Studies at Utrecht University, José van Dijck, refers in her discussion of social media’s history to ‘community function’ and ‘community character’; ‘community collectivism’ and ‘community utilization’; and to ‘community’ itself as being innovative, organizational, self-selecting, and open. But community, like citizenship, carries an enormous functional, symbolic, and practical weight. What kinds of ‘community’ are being forged online, and how do they impact on self-esteem, a sense of belonging, and self-identity? How does online community differ from offline community, and how and why does loneliness result?

The perversion that is clinically characterized by consuming partners like objects, whom one chucks when one finds them inadequate, has arguably become the new norm of social relations.

every social problem is observed in relation to ‘norms’ which in fact never existed, people

Wikipedia: False consensus effect In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances”. In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population. This false consensus is significant because it increases self-esteem (overconfidence effect). It can be derived from a desire to conform and be liked by others in a social environment. This bias is especially prevalent in group settings where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. The false-consensus effect is not restricted to cases where people believe that their values are shared by the majority, but it still manifests as an overestimate of the extent of their belief. The false-consensus effect can be contrasted with pluralistic ignorance, an error in which people privately disapprove but publicly support what seems to be the majority view (regarding a norm or belief), when the majority in fact shares their (private) disapproval

Before all else, it is certain that the radical and ultimate cause of the evils which We deplore in modern society is the denial and rejection of a universal norm of morality as well for individual and social life as for international relations; We mean the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself, which has its foundation in God, Almighty Creator and Father of all, supreme and absolute Lawgiver, all-wise and just Judge of human actions. When God is hated, every basis of morality is undermined” (SP 28). Pius XII was already confronted with the beginnings of the problems with which we are familiar: the denial of God and moral relativism.

Each of the chapters in this book describes a force (emotions, relativity, social norms. etc.) that influences our behavior. And while these influences exert a lot of power over our behavior, our natural tendency is to vastly underestimate or completely ignore this power. These influences have an effect on us not because we lack knowledge, lack practice, or are weak-minded. On the contrary, they repeatedly affect experts as well as novices in systematic and predictable ways. The resulting mistakes are simply how we go about our lives, how we "do business." They are a part of us.

Advantage of Playing Educational Games: Kids Learn With Fun Kids Game play has mentally worth profit because games have been shown to enhance attention, focus, and interval. Games have motivational profit because they encourage associate progressive, instead of an entity theory of intelligence. Games have emotional profit as a result of they induce positive mood states; additionally, there's speculative proof that games might support children develop flexible feeling regulation. Games have social profit because gamers area unit able to translate the prosocial skills that they learn from co-playing or multiplayer gameplay to “peer and family relations outside the gambling atmosphere. DIFFERENT GAMES FOR DIFFERENT GOALS. But it’s a little ​twisted​ to say that Educational games are “good for kids.” Kids games are not like fruits and vegetables. Don’t think them as if they were know about vegetable and fruits name that help kids grow into healthy adults. Like all forms of media, it depends on the particular games and how they are used. Kids Learn With Fun Present Different games such as Learn Vehicles for Kids,1 to 100 Spelling learning,123 number for kids,Maths Practice,Puzzle Games,Real Birds Game,Toodle Alphabets Puzzle and many more available at : kidslearnwithfun dot com Play Kids Learn with Fun Game : Make your kid’s mind Creative. Educational Kids games that ​inspire​ creative expression, such as Maths Practice Game and Puzzle game, push kids to think outside the norm and consider ​different methods of explanation. Exploring and expanding creativity through such kids games can also help with nurturing self-​prize,self-love,self-habit​ and self-acceptance, and they inspire a greater connection between personality and activity. In the end,​ sticking with a kids game through it can help kids develop patience and maturity in 0 to 5 year age.

Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture-dependent. But while contract and self-interest are important sources of association, the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust. The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision. That is, an individual can decide to “invest” in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In other words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own. It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy. Another term that I will use widely throughout this book is spontaneous sociability, which constitutes a subset of social capital. In any modern society, organizations are being constantly created, destroyed, and modified. The most useful kind of social capital is often not the ability to work under the authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new associations and to cooperate within the terms of reference they establish. This type of group, spawned by industrial society’s complex division of labor and yet based on shared values rather than contract, falls under the general rubric of what Durkheim labeled “organic solidarity.”7 Spontaneous sociability, moreover, refers to that wide range of intermediate communities distinct from the family or those deliberately established by governments. Governments often have to step in to promote community when there is a deficit of spontaneous sociability. But state intervention poses distinct risks, since it can all too easily undermine the spontaneous communities established in civil society.

The violence of many Viking raids must not obscure the fact that the Vikings also enjoyed peaceful relations with the world around them, based on accepted norms for social behaviour and on special agreements.

Low self-monitors are pretty much the opposite. Their feelings and actions are “controlled by inner attitudes, dispositions, and values, rather than to be molded and shaped to fit the situation.”7 Even when low self-monitors do figure out what others expect, even when they do “get it,” they will have trouble producing the “right” response in sincere and convincing ways. For better and for worse, low self-monitors are relatively unfettered by social norms. These mavericks and social misfits can drive bosses and coworkers crazy, but they increase the range of what is thought, noticed, talked about, and done in a company. High self-monitors tend to be yes-men (and -women), who can’t stop themselves from telling others what they want to hear. Low self-monitors can’t stop themselves from saying and doing what they think is right, because they don’t notice—or don’t care about—pressures to follow the herd.

In his Guide of the Perplexed, he sets out his intensely rationalistic view of the Torah: ‘The law as a whole aims at two things–the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.’ The first consists in developing the human intellect, the second in improving men’s political relations with each other. The Law does this by setting down true opinions, which raise the intellect, and by producing norms to govern human behaviour. The two interact. The more stable and peaceful we make our society, the more time and energy men have for improving their minds, so that in turn they have the intellectual capacity to effect further social improvements. So it goes on–a virtuous circle, instead of the vicious circle of societies which have no law.

showed a group of two- and three-year-olds a new game. A puppet then appeared and performed the game incorrectly. Almost all the children protested the puppet’s actions and many explicitly objected, telling the puppet how the game should be played. “Social norms—even of this relatively trivial type—can only be created by creatures who engage in shared intentionality and collective beliefs,” Tomasello writes, “and they play an enormously important role in maintaining the shared values of human cultural groups.” 7

L'autonomie, dont on peut faire un principe de l'action individuelle et collective, appelle quelques précisions. Le terme désigne littéralement le fait de se donner à soi-même ses propres normes, ou encore de s'organiser par soi-même. […] On peut voir alors qu'il existe une ample gamme allant des autonomies *intégrées*, dont les normes se distinguent faiblement de celles auxquelles elles ses soustraient (hormis par le fait d'en contrôler par soi-même l'application), jusqu'aux autonomies *antagonistes*, dont les règles marquent un fort écart par rapport à celles qu'elles récusent. On peut aussi distinguer des autonomies *inconséquentes*, qui refusent une domination imposée de l'extérieur pour mieux affirmer des rapports de domination à l'intérieur, et des autonomies *conséquentes*, qui excluent l'imposition venue de l'extérieur pour mieux écarter les formes de domination qui pourraient exister en leur sein. On peut enfin opposer des autonomies *fermées*, voire ségrégationnistes, fondées sur une logique identitaire qui instaure une frontière ontologique entre la collectivité autonome et le monde environnant, et des autonomies *ouvertes*, qui considèrent les relations avec les autres collectivités comme une condition de leur propre existence sociale. On ne peut donc juger d'une expérience d'autonomie sans se demander : autonomie par rapport à quoi ? autonomie pour quoi, pour quel projet social ? (p. 75-76)

Over the course of the last three decades, however, barriers to power have weakened at a very fast pace. They are now more easily undermined, overwhelmed, and circumvented. As our discussion of domestic and international politics, business, war, religion, and other areas will show, the causes underlying this phenomenon are related not only to demographic and economic transformations and the spread of information technologies but also to political changes and profound shifts in expectations, values, and social norms. Such

Among primitive peoples we often find that closely connected groups living under exactly similar conditions develop sharply differentiated fashions, by means of which each group establishes uniformity within, as well as difference without the prescribed set. On the other hand, there exists a wide-spread predilection for importing fashions from without, and such foreign fashions assume a greater value within the circle, simply because they did not originate there. [...] Because of their external origin, these imported fashions create a special and significant form of socialization, which arises through mutual relation to a point without the circle. It sometimes appears as though social elements, just like the axes of vision, converge best at a point that is not too near. The currency, or more precisely the medium of exchange among primitive races, often consists of objects that are brought in from without. [...] Paris modes are frequently created with the sole intention of setting a fashion elsewhere. This motive of foreignness, which fashion employs in its socializing endeavors, is restricted to higher civilization, because novelty, which foreign origin guarantees in extreme form, is often regarded by primitive races as an evil. [...] The savage is afraid of strange appearances; the difficulties and dangers that beset his career cause him to scent danger in anything new which he does not understand and which he cannot assign to a familiar category. Civilization, however, transforms this affectation into its very opposite. Whatever is exceptional, bizarre, or conspicuous, or whatever departs from the customary norm, exercises a peculiar charm upon the man of culture, entirely independent of its material justification. The removal of the feelings of insecurity with reference to all things new was accomplished by the progress of civilization.

Index: Pew Religious Restrictions12 Monitors: Levels of social hostility and religious restrictions Method: Rating India 2014 rating Social hostility: 9.0 Religious restrictions: 5.0 India 2020 rating Social hostility: 9.6 Religious restrictions: 5.9 Result: India fell by 0.6 in social hostility and by 0.9 points in religious restrictions. Reasons cited: India was in the top 10 in each of the following categories: Countries with high levels of social hostilities related to religious norms Countries with high levels of inter-religious tension and violence Countries with high levels of religious violence by organised groups Countries with high levels of individual and social group harassment ‘Among twenty-five most populous countries, Egypt, India, Russia, Pakistan and Indonesia had the highest overall levels of both government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion.

starting with how it encourages mothers to view their children as antagonists, how it allows men to view women as always sexually available without any marital commitment or promise of stability required, and how it allows employers and society as a whole to treat the male body as the norm and female fertility as a problem to be solved—rather than a reality to structure social relations around.

situation is precarious if it is unstable, insecure and revocable. In social modernity, work provided the foundation for societal integration and stability, and a secure job with protection from dismissal was the norm.46 Yet the sphere of stability is visibly shrinking. In the wake of regressive modernization, we have the ‘institutionalization of precarity’.47 The main cause of the transition to a society of downward mobility does not lie simply in the growth of social inequality, but rather in the deterioration of labour relations.

Number of Ingroups If only one ingroup is present, it dominates social life. It provides the only source of norms, identity, and social support. Collectivists may have relatively few ingroups, but they identify very strongly with them. The ingroups of collectivists provide social insurance, protection, and a relaxing atmosphere. The presence of many ingroups encourages individualism. For example, the separation of church and state in the United States automatically creates more than one ingroup and is a premise upon which multiculturalism and democracy are based. It is also the foundation for social movements because each ingroup can potentially become a social movement. Multiple ingroups are especially important in large urban centers, where the social controls of small ingroups are often weak. The social structures of these communities are loose, and several of the factors we have discussed converge to put more emphasis on personal responsibility and less on norms. With more ingroups and looseness there is an increase in social diversity, tolerance for deviance, and multiculturalism. Thus the factors that make cultures loose and allow many choices favor individualism. Conversely, collectivism is maximal in tight cultures, where there are few choices.

view instagram story highlights anonymously Instagram Story Highlights are a feature that enables users to compile and display their past stories in a lasting and well-organized manner. Unlike regular Instagram stories that vanish after 24 hours, story highlights remain on a user's profile indefinitely, making them accessible to their followers and profile visitors. The inclination to view Instagram story highlights discreetly arises from various motivations, such as curiosity or the desire to consume someone's content without revealing your identity or notifying them. However, it's crucial to grasp that Instagram, like most social media platforms, places a significant emphasis on safeguarding user privacy and has implemented policies to uphold it. Here is an extensive approach on how to view Instagram story highlights while adhering to privacy norms and Instagram's policies: 1. Access Instagram: Begin by launching the Instagram application on your mobile device. 1. Search for the User: Utilize the search functionality to locate the Instagram profile of the individual whose story highlights you wish to peruse. You can perform a search using their username or full name. To view Instagram highlights, you can view from the page of the dj downloader website. 2. Visit the Profile: After locating the user's profile, tap on their profile picture or username to access their profile page. 3. Access Highlights: Provided that the user has assembled story highlights, you will observe circular icons featuring their profile picture and titles or categories, positioned above their regular posts. Typically, these icons are located beneath their bio section. 4. Select a Highlight: Tap on the specific highlight that intrigues you. Each highlight encompasses a collection of related stories. 5. Review the Stories: The chosen story highlight will commence playing, enabling you to navigate through the individual stories within that highlight. While the above guidelines empower you to explore story highlights in a manner that respects both privacy and Instagram's policies, it is imperative to address additional facets: 1. Respect for Privacy: Always demonstrate respect for the user's privacy and content. Refrain from attempting to employ third-party tools or methods to view stories anonymously. Instagram expressly prohibits such activities, which could lead to the suspension or restriction of your Instagram account. 2. Ethical Conduct: Employ Instagram in an ethical manner. Uphold principles of honesty and transparency in your interactions with other users on the platform, contributing to a positive online community. 3. Evolving Policies: Be aware that Instagram's guidelines and features may evolve over time. Staying abreast of these modifications and adapting your usage accordingly is vital. 4. User Consent: Keep in mind that the content shared on Instagram is subject to the user's consent. If someone has chosen to make their story highlights public, they have voluntarily shared that content with a broader audience. In summary, while there may be a desire to discreetly view Instagram story highlights, it is pivotal to do so in a manner that upholds the platform's policies and respects the privacy of fellow users. By adhering to the steps delineated above, you can explore highlights in a compliant and considerate manner, contributing to a positive and ethical online environment for all users.

Apes do evidently understand what others are doing, and they can prudently do the same, in which sense they "cooperate"—for their own reasons. But they lack the ability to symbolically par­ticipate in others' existence and thus communalize their own. [...] "Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that peo­ple are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the inter­est of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. [...] Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our clos­est living relatives." {Jensen, Call, and To masello 2007, 107; see also Jensen et al. 2006) So much, then, for the dismal economic science—whose future is not bright either, inasmuch as chimpanzees are disappearing.

we should also be open to understanding that a similarly named structure may share relatively little with another – whether in its practices, its social norms, its rules, its function or administration. These differences are not to be feared but to be understood and welcomed as opportunities to see the world from another perspective, from outside ourselves. For a space is not only about its name and form but also about the community it houses and the notions of connection and belonging that it inspires – notions we can all relate to and which enrich us collectively. Meanwhile, women’s access remains contentious, with many spaces not admitting women at all, contrary to the Prophet’s practice, or else providing wholly inadequate facilities for them. Other ‘marginal’ groups such as elderly and disabled people can also struggle to have their needs met. At a time of compartmentalization of groups of varied orientations, it would seem that spaces of worship have failed to escape the wrath of

thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to ‘norms’ which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves ‘deprived’ of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all.

The Sophists start by postulating that there are no limits to what education can accomplish and they maintain, in contrast to the old mystical belief in breeding, that ‘virtue’ can be taught. Western culture, which is based on self-consciousness, self-observation and self-criticism, has its origin in their idea of education. They initiated the history of Western rationalism, with its criticism of dogmas, myths, traditions and conventions. They are the discoverers of historical relativity—the recognition that scientific truths, ethical standards and religious creeds are all historically conditioned. They are the first to realize that all norms and standards, whether in science, law, morality, mythology or art, are creations of human minds and hands. They discover the relativity of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil. They recognize the pragmatic motives underlying human valuations, and thus pave the way for all subsequent endeavour in the field of humanistic enlightenment. It is to be noted that their rationalism and relativism are connected with the same trend of economy and the same general impulse towards free competition and moneymaking as gave rise to the Renaissance emancipation of science, the enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the materialism of the nineteenth. Their experience of ancient capitalism aroused the same reactions in them as the experience of modern capitalism does in their successors.

Not merely is the art of the second half of the fifth century influenced by the same experience which formed the ideas of the Sophists; a spiritual movement such as theirs, with its stimulating humanism, was bound to have a direct effect upon the outlook of the poets and artists. When we come to the fourth century there is no branch of art in which their influence cannot be traced. Nowhere is the new spirit more striking than in the new type of athlete which, with Praxiteles and Lysippus, now supplants the manly ideal of Polycletus. Their Hermes and Apoxyomenos have nothing of the heroic, of aristocratic austerity and disdain about them; they give the impression of being dancers rather than athletes. Their intellectuality is expressed not merely in their heads; their whole appearance emphasizes that ephemeral quality of all that is human which the Sophists had pointed out and stressed. Their whole being is dynamically charged and full of latent force and movement. When you try to look at them they will not allow you to rest in any one position, for the sculptor has discarded all thought of principal view-points; on the contrary, these works underline the incompleteness and momentariness of each ephemeral aspect to such a degree as to force the spectator to be altering his position constantly until he has been round the whole figure. He is thus made aware of the relativity of each single aspect, just as the Sophists became aware that every truth, every norm and every standard has a perspective element and alters as the view-point alters. Art now frees itself from the last fetters of the geometrical; the very last traces of frontality now disappear. The Apoxyomenos is completely absorbed in himself, leads his own life and takes no notice of the spectator. The individualism and relativism of the Sophists, the illusionism and subjectivity of contemporary art, alike express the spirit of economic liberalism and democracy—the spiritual condition of people who reject the old aristocratic attitude towards life, with all its gravity and magnificence, because they think they owe everything to themselves and nothing to their ancestors, and who give vent to all their emotions and passions with complete lack of restraint because so whole-heartedly convinced that man is the measure of all things.

Social psychology can degenerate into a means of governing and an apparatus of conservation as soon as it posits as natural existing social relations, as normal the integration of the individual into these relations, and explains the difficulties it encounters through the failings of a private order. It is then that all revolt is neurosis and that the social engineers work to make the subjugated accept their condition, to transform, in the service of the 'normal,' the energies freed by social disintegration into a force of conservatism. At this point we see the appearance of a new form of propaganda, a 'propaganda through truth.' A false democracy begins to emerge, a 'statistical democracy,' which is to say the seductive dictatorship of the 'normal,' the superficial, and the conventional. Objectivity becomes the most profound of ruses. The oppressor assures for himself a certain complicity on the part of the oppressed by making them accept an image of themselves that, even if it is flattering, maintains them in their difference. Social consciousness does not demand that we eliminate psychology, but that we go further than it, in the direction that should be its own. If Americans seek in psychoanalysis the means to satisfy a fascination with the 'normal,' that is not the fault of psychoanalysis, which has done more than any other research to go beyond the notion of a statistical norm. Against a superficial psychoanalysis, we can have recourse only to true psychoanalysis.

The first step in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency. Strip out excess layers of administration and halt nonessential operations—sell them off, close them down, spin them off, or outsource the services. Coordinating committees and a myriad of complex initiatives need to be disbanded. The simpler structure will begin to illuminate obsolete units, inefficiency, and simple bad behavior that was hidden from sight by complex overlays of administration and self-interest. After the first round of simplification, it may be necessary to fragment the operating units. This will be the case when units do not need to work in close coordination—when they are basically separable. Such fragmentation breaks political coalitions, cuts the comfort of cross-subsidies, and exposes a larger number of smaller units to leadership’s scrutiny of their operations and performance. After this round of fragmentation, and more simplification, it is necessary to perform a triage. Some units will be closed, some will be repaired, and some will form the nuclei of a new structure. The triage must be based on both performance and culture—you cannot afford to have a high-performing unit with a terrible culture infect the others. The “repair” third of the triaged units must then be put through individual transformation and renewal maneuvers. Changing a unit’s culture means changing its members’ work norms and work-related values. These norms are established, held, and enforced daily by small social groups that take their cue from the group’s high-status member—the alpha. In general, to change the group’s norms, the alpha member must be replaced by someone who expresses different norms and values. All this is speeded along if a challenging goal is set. The purpose of the challenge is not performance per se, but building new work habits and routines within the unit. Once the bulk of operating units are working well, it may then be time to install a new overlay of coordinating mechanisms, reversing some of the fragmentation that was used to break inertia.

Cicioni suggests, as we will here, that rather than being a stimulus for social change, participating in fandom, including writing fanfiction, provides a safety valve for the stress women feel in their daily lives and relationships. Fandom is not only, as is often theorized, about subversive and societal change-but also about pleasurable and individual change, with challenges to existing norms and power relations more a byproduct than the source of fans' motivation and satisfaction.

Of course, not all norms are beneficial, and groups do indeed regularly develop arbitrary norms as well as those that favor powerful constituencies, like old men. Sometimes groups even develop maladaptive norms that are harmful to both individuals and their communities. However, social norms are put to the test when groups with different norms compete. Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict, as Buckley experienced, but it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration. These and related forms of intergroup competition create a countervailing force that can favor group-beneficial norms over other cultural evolutionary pushes and pulls.

It is difficult to underplay how significant this point is. If in practice we make truth narrative-driven and relative rather than theistic and absolute, we lose truth. If we lose truth—true truth, normative and norming truth derived from the meaning of biblical texts—then we lose the superstructure of the Gospel and the Christian faith.

concept of factual knowledge is similar to Aristotle’s theoretical wisdom. It involves a deep understanding of human nature, lifelong development, social norms and their implications, variations in developmental processes and outcomes, interpersonal and intergenerational relations, and identity issues.