Social Norms Short Quotes

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.

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.

He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.

As a young man I started searching for my own identity by looking into family, friends and inside Myself. My mother always taught us to live free even when confined, meaning “never let anyone break you down physically or mentally.” Since my living environment was so heavily impacted with violence and illegal activity I found myself adapting to social norms that later in my adult life would negatively affect me. For example, certain physical reactions that were acceptable, as a child would give you a reputation on the street as tough guy, don’t mess with him. The same mentality later in life, as a man would label you as a predator of some sort and a woman abuser. It was hard to understand the true value of a man and all his worth and everything he is capable of achieving, when you’re surrounded by pimps, hustlers and con men that all may make more money than the men with trade jobs and have more of an appealing lifestyle for the short- term progress.

Male power and patriarchy are clearly part of the picture. Men historically created the workplace rules and influenced social norms that overlooked sexual harassment. An evolutionary perspective highlights an underlying sexual psychology that influences these male-biased practices. Studies by psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues, for example, explored the unconscious links between power and sex.25 One study found that men experienced an unconscious association between the concepts of power and sex, but this occurred only for men who scored high on a “likelihood to sexually harass” scale. In these men’s minds, concepts like “authority” and “boss” were automatically linked with concepts like “foreplay,” “bed,” and “date.” Their second study primed men to think about power and subsequently asked them to rate the attractiveness of a female confederate in the room who the men believed was just another study participant. Again, only men scoring high in likelihood to sexually harass viewed the woman as especially attractive and expressed a desire to get to know her. In short, power and sex are linked, but primarily in the minds of a subset of men. This may explain why only a minority of men in positions of power over women sexually harass them; many men with power do not.

I have observed an analogy between a force field equilibrium and resistance to change in organizations. Let us imagine change to be a coiled spring in a field of opposing forces, such that some forces support change and others resist it. By increasing supporting forces such as supervisory pressure, prospects of career growth and monetary benefits or decreasing the resisting forces such as group norms, social rewards and work avoidance, the situation can be directed towards the desired result - but for a short time only, and that too only to a certain extent. After a while the resisting forces push back with greater force as they are compressed even more tightly. Therefore, a better approach would be to decrease the resisting force in such a manner that there is no concomitant increase in the supporting forces. In this way, less energy will be needed to bring about and maintain change. The result of the forces i mentioned above, is motive.

To cooperate, people must not only trust one another to do so, they also have to coordinate on a social norm that everyone understands. That is why it’s a lot easier to destroy a society than to build it.

In treating their employees… companies must understand their implied long-term commitment. If employees promise to work harder to achieve an important deadline… they must get something similar in return. Something like support when they are sick or a chance to hold on to their jobs when the market moves… The current obsession with short-term profits, outsourcing and draconian cost-cutting threatens to undermine it all. Companies cannot have it both ways. The cuts to employee’s benefits… are likely to come at the expense of the social exchange, and thus effect workers’ productivity. As companies tilt the board and employees slide from social norms to market norms, can we blame them for jumping ship when a better offer appears?

During my first days at Smith, I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong. The word "offensive" was almost always included in the reasoning. Within a few short weeks, members of my freshman class had quickly assimilated to this new way of non-thinking. They could soon detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their "mistake." I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas. I learned, along with every other student, to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something "offensive." That is the social norm here. Reports from around the country are remarkable similar: students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong post, or coming to the defense of someone whom they know to be innocent, out of fear that they themselves will be called out by a mob on social media.

After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.” The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong:

As followers of Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul exhorts us to be attuned to these lies and false cultural presuppositions: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ” (Colossians 2:8). We must no longer “conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Romans 12:2). In short, we are called to think and act differently—not in accord with the accepted norms, attitudes, and behaviors of our surrounding culture, but in accordance with reality as presented in God’s Word.

Here is how a student at Smith College describes her induction into its call-out culture in the fall of 2014: During my first days at Smith, I witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other that their opinion was wrong. The word “offensive” was almost always included in the reasoning. Within a few short weeks, members of my freshman class had quickly assimilated to this new way of non-thinking. They could soon detect a politically incorrect view and call the person out on their “mistake.” I began to voice my opinion less often to avoid being berated and judged by a community that claims to represent the free expression of ideas. I learned, along with every other student, to walk on eggshells for fear that I may say something “offensive.” That is the social norm here.

Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.” The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day,

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.

Why is this disengagement epidemic becoming the new norm? A few reasons I have witnessed in speaking with companies across the country include . . . • Information overload • Distractions • Stress/overwhelmed • Apathy/detachment • Short attention span • Fear, worry, anxiety • Rapidly changing technology • Entitlement • Poor leadership • Preoccupation • Social media • Interruptions • Multitasking • Budget cuts • Exhaustion • Boredom • Conflict • Social insecurity • Lack of longevity These challenges not only create separation and work dysfunction, but we are seeing it happen in relationships and personal interactions.

All humans discount the future. We would rather have a million dollars today than in 30 years from now. We’d rather a flimsy bridge today, rather than a sturdy, durable bridge 5 years from now. We’d rather eat all the fish in the waters tonight, than to go a little hungry and leave fish for others in the future. To delay instant gratification requires cultural training. To be convinced of the value of investing into the future requires a kind of wisdom, knowledge, patience and trust that is gained from history, elders, and system thinking. It requires collective action and collaboration on a large and long scale. It requires civilization. Civilization is a system of trust, both in the goodness of humans today, but also in the ingenuity of humans in the future. It’s a way for humans to trust the future. Civilization is a social machine accumulated over many generations and is constantly being tested by new events. American society over emphasizes the individual's self-interest, and over-relies on the marketplace to solve social problems, and so coddles the short term. Modern Americanism tends to ignore the government which can take the long view because it is inefficient. But the calculus of efficiency is shifted when taking the long view. Storing adequate supplies for a population that are only used in an emergency is inefficient in the short term and this inefficiency is not something companies can afford to do. That short-term inefficiency, however, makes total sense in the long view because it is highly efficient over time. Investing into a communal project that may not pay off until you are long gone is not a natural reflex of modern Americans, whether liberal or conservative. The antidote to this natural focus on the short term is education and a shift in norms. As we continue to civilize ourselves, we can appreciate the gifts of past long-term work, and the need in our fast-moving world today to pay the gifts forward by investing into work that will likely pay off in future generations.

It is said that the situation is considerably better in early infancy, and that in the first six months of life an extensive injury to the dominant hemisphere may compel the normally secondary hemisphere to take its place; so that the patient appears far more nearly normal than he would be had the injury occurred at a later stage. This is quite in accordance with the general great flexibility shown by the nervous system in the early weeks of life, and the great rigidity which it rapidly develops later. It is possible that, short of such serious injuries, handedness is reasonably flexible in the very young child. However, long before the child is of school age, the natural handedness and cerebral dominance are established for life. It used to be thought that left-handedness was a serious social disadvantage. With most tools, school desks, and sports equipment primarily made for the right-handed, it certainly is to some extent. In the past, moreover, it was viewed with some of the superstitious disapproval that has attached to so many minor variations from the human norm, such as birthmarks or red hair. From a combination of motives, many people have attempted and even succeeded, in changing the external handedness of their children by education, though of course they could not change its physiological basis in hemispheric dominance. It was then found that in very many cases these hemispheric changelings suffered from stuttering and other defects of speech, reading, and writing, to the extent of seriously wounding their prospects in life and their hopes for a normal career. We now see at least one possible explanation for the phenomenon. With the education of the secondary hand, there has been a partial education of that part of the secondary hemisphere which deals with skilled motions, such as writing. Since, however, these motions are carried out in the closest possible association with reading, speech, and other activities which are inseparably connected with the dominant hemisphere, the neuron chains involved in processes of the sort must cross over from hemisphere to hemisphere and back; and in a process of any complication, they must do this again and again. Now, the direct connectors between the hemispheres—the cerebral commissures—in a brain as large as that of man are so few in number that they are of very little use, and the interhemispheric traffic must go by roundabout routes through the brain stem, which we know very imperfectly but which are certainly long, scanty, and subject to interruption. As a consequence, the processes associated with speech and writing are very likely to be involved in a traffic jam, and stuttering is the most natural thing in the world.

measures of truth fall short. God’s Way doesn’t always make sense; it is incoherent by rationalistic standards. Like Jesus, God’s truth is sometimes inappropriate by human social standards. And the truth of the cross bears pragmatic problems. But underneath all our judgments regarding the characteristics of truth and the norms we determine it by (i.e., appropriateness, coherence, pragmatism), there is a deeper Truth that preaching bears witness to, a Presence279 that all words ultimately fail to do justice, a Presence that suddenly lights up our fragmented sermons’ testimonies so that the gift of God’s grace overtakes us with the glory of redemption.

We agree that, in the short and medium run, values are very powerful. But in the longer run, material forces shape both institutions and values. Changes in production technology, in our argument, drive the emergence and demise of patriarchy by giving and then taking away a productivity advantage to male labor. Competition over resources in societies with labor-intensive agriculture creates patriarchal family institutions.12 Social norms are principally a result rather than a cause of patriarchy: families socialize their children in ways that help them navigate the strategic environment they will face.

anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality),

It’s also possible to revise the rules of globalization to reduce the amount of damage done by speculative private finance and to expand the role of transparent social investment. We could provide a lot more debt relief, as well as imposing a Tobin tax (see Chapter 3) on short-term financial transactions. Though the West has less economic influence than it once did, the markets of Europe and North America are still the world’s largest, which gives the West immense power to influence the rules for the global economy as a whole. Those rules were once used to promote balanced domestic social contracts. Lately, they have been used to enrich the already rich, often in concert with the repression of labor in the third world, and at the expense of decent labor standards in the West as well. The point is not that Japan, South Korea, China, and other emergent economies are doing something fundamentally wrong or inefficient by having industrial policies, subsidies, and managed trade strategies to promote their own economic growth. This is precisely what the West did at earlier stages of its own development. The point, rather, is that the system needs more realistic rules and norms, so that there is a fairer balance of benefits. That means balance between developing and developed countries, balance between capital and labor, and balance between market norms and social standards. Today, both the global trading system and US trade policy are promoting imbalance.

Predictably irrational 1) the importance of having something for FREE when selling something. 2) the price we hear effects what we’re willing to pay. Known as arbitrary coherence. The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: Although initial prices can be "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds, they will shape not only present prices but also future ones (thus making them "coherent"). Eg new tv on market we kook for an anchor price. Released at £1200. That’s the anchor 3) when we own something we over value it. The seller feels all the things they could do with it. The buyer feels what they could do with the money. 4) experiences are shaped by our expectations. Coke Pepsi test. Or example if we have heard a movie is good we will enjoy it more. 5) social norms and market norms. 6 ) most people are dishonest. Get people thinking about honesty. When people thought about the 10 commandments. 7) acknowledge your weakness and set your deadlines. Also set yourself short term awards when reaching long term goals. 8) try not to keep your options open. The Chinese war where he burned the boats so they couldn’t retreat. If you have your options open on two things close one of them so you can fully focus on one.

Where those jobs are in short supply, the desire of women to have active careers forces them to sacrifice family by having fewer children. The only effective way to deal with this problem, we argue, is for the state to create or subsidize jobs that are highly flexible in terms of hours and career interruptions. This conclusion reserves a large role for government intervention, a role we suggest is warranted and indeed required to address the large distributional consequences of social norms that underwrite the traditional sexual division of labor.