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Why Rules Are Important To Social Beings - Lecture Notes

Rules play an important role in achieving harmony in society by making it clear what behaviors are acceptable and helping to avoid or limit conflicts. As social beings, humans have formed communities, villages, towns, and civilizations through subconsciously establishing rules to govern individual actions. Social norms are unwritten rules about appropriate behavior for different social groups that provide order and predictability. Conformity to social norms is important for society to function as they guide behavior and allow people to understand each other.

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116 views1 page

Why Rules Are Important To Social Beings - Lecture Notes

Rules play an important role in achieving harmony in society by making it clear what behaviors are acceptable and helping to avoid or limit conflicts. As social beings, humans have formed communities, villages, towns, and civilizations through subconsciously establishing rules to govern individual actions. Social norms are unwritten rules about appropriate behavior for different social groups that provide order and predictability. Conformity to social norms is important for society to function as they guide behavior and allow people to understand each other.

Uploaded by

Luna Kim
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lecture Notes

Within reasonable levels, rules play a critical role in achieving something close
to a harmonious society, so it is important as a social being. The presence of
a set of rules makes it clear to everyone what they can and cannot do. It
avoids or limits conflicts, and for the most part, allows for a peaceful
settlement between people with disagreements. All people are social beings,
this is the reason we have created communities, villages, towns, and
civilizations even before those words were invented. It would be impossible for
them to reach even a level of a village if the members did not subconsciously
form rules to govern all individual’s actions.  

Social Norms
Social Norms are unwritten rules about how to behave.  They provide us with an
expected idea of how to behave in a particular social group or culture.  For example, we
expect students to arrive to a lesson on time and complete their work.
The idea of norms provides a key to understanding social influence in general and
conformity in particular. Social norms are the accepted standards of behavior of social
groups.
These groups range from friendship and workgroups to nation-states.  behavior which
fulfills these norms is called conformity, and most of the time roles and norms are
powerful ways of understanding and predicting what people will do.
There are norms defining appropriate behavior for every social group. For example,
students, neighbors and patients in a hospital are all aware of the norms governing
behavior. And as the individual moves from one group to another, their behavior
changes accordingly.
Norms provide order in society. It is difficult to see how human society could operate
without social norms. Human beings need norms to guide and direct their behavior, to
provide order and predictability in social relationships and to make sense of and
understanding of each other’s actions. These are some of the reasons why most
people, most of the time, conform to social norms.

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