Norms & breaching

Joseph Reagle

Today’s question(s)

  1. What are norms?
  2. How do you reveal norms?
  3. How do you increase compliance with community rules?

Norms

Beep

Garfinkel: Common sense

Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as members’ methods for making those same activities … accountable… The reflexivity of that phenomenon is a singular feature of practical actions, of practical circumstances, of common sense knowledge of social structures, and of practical sociological reasoning. (Garfinkel 1967, p. vii)

Garfinkel: Reflexivity

indexicality
all statement are contextual; can ask “What do you mean?”
reflexivity
our sense of order is created through conversation; a situation is constituted through its description

Types

folkways
common behaviors and beliefs about casual interactions (e.g., polite and rude), can be appreciated as somewhat arbitrary
mores
norms with deep connotation of right and wrong; violation produces offense, even disgust

Garfinkel: Unnoticed

Just as commonly, one set of considerations are unexamined: the socially standardized and standardizing, “seen but unnoticed,” expected, background features of everyday scenes. (p. 36)

Garfinkel famously assigned his students social breaching experiments, including marking lines between boxes instead of within for tic-tac-toe.

  • Claire: seat and dinner table

Milgram: Residual rules

Scheff (1960) refers to this class of norms as “residual rules,” [and] isolates these rules on the basis of two criteria: (1) people must be in substantial agreement about them; and (2) they are not noticed until a violation occurs. These rules have been likened to the rules of grammar in that one can follow them without an explicit knowledge of their content and yet notice a violation immediately. (MilgramSabini 1978, p. 31)

Milgram: Unarticulated

The fact that these residual rules are usually unexpressed creates a serious obstacle to their study: We are virtually inarticulate about them. When compared with formal laws, for example… residual rules have been left unarticulated by the culture. (p. 31)

Milgram had his experimenters (1) ask able-bodied but seated riders, with no explanation, to give up their seats and (2) cutting ahead in lines of people waiting to purchase railroad tickets.

Are social breaches ethical research?

Goffman: Civil inattention

Goffman

the eyes of the looker may pass over the eyes of the other, but no “recognition” is typically allowed… civil inattention may take the special form of eyeing the other up to approximately eight feet, during which time sides of the street are apportioned by gesture, and then casting the eyes down as the other passes—a kind of dimming of lights… the slightest of interpersonal rituals, yet one that constantly regulates the social intercourse… (Goffman 1963, p. 84)

Subway reading

Goffman: Defensiveness

those who practice a particular involvement idiom are likely to sense that their rules for participating in gatherings are crucial for society’s well-being—that these rules are natural, inviolable, and fundamentally right. And these persons will need some means of defending themselves against the doubts that are cast on these rules by persons who break them. The greater the infringment, the greater will be the need for this compensative defense. (Goffman 1963, pp. 234-235)

Doing nothing

Is this a breach?

Breach vs prank

In pairs, find example of a breach and prank and distinguish the two.

Other breach confusions

Something is not likely to be a breach of social norm when:

  • a prank (gluing someone’s office phone shut)
  • a personal eccentricity (water bottle guy)
  • spans all cultures (not defecating in public)
  • Eve: multicultural communities
  • Taylor: online vs F2F
  • Erin: how do they emerge and change?

Online norms today?

How have they changed?

Kraut

QIC! Questions, Insights & Connections

  • I write numbers 21–33 on the board.
  • You write a related insight, question, or connection on the board.

Enhancing Compliance

Four things increase compliance: commitment to the community, legitimacy of the norms, the ability to save face, and expectations about rewards for compliance or sanctions for noncompliance. (Kraut et al. 2012, “Building successful online communities”, p. 150)

  1. In more cohesive groups to which members are more committed, members will be more likely to spontaneously comply with the norms.
  2. Community influence on rule making will increase compliance with the rules.
  3. Face-saving ways to correct norm-violations will increase compliance.
  • Annie: face-saving
  • Camille: face-saving and punishment

Rewards and Sanctions

  1. Telling search engines not to follow links will discourage spammers from posting links.

Identity 1

  1. Verified identities and pictures will reduce the incidence of norm violations.
  2. Reputation systems, which summarize the history of someone’s online behavior, help to encourage good behavior and deter norm violations.
  3. Prices, bonds, or bets that make undesirable actions more costly than desirable actions will reduce misbehavior.
    • Van Alstyne proposed an “attention bond” of people pay a tax to have you read their email; would work on the small scale, not on commercial spam (p. 157)
  • Sophia: reputation and eBay

Identity 2

  1. Increasing the benefits of participating with a long-term identifier will increase the community’s ability to sanction misbehavior.
  • Anonymity
    • deindividuation: “the individuals are not seen or paid attention to as individuals and do not feel that they stand out as individuals”; they are submerged in the group. (p. 155)
    • online, people are more willing to lie about themselves to potential romantic partners; 97% of vandalism to Wikipedia is done by anonymous editors (p. 155)

Sanctions

  1. Imposing costs for or preventing pseudonym switching increases the community’s ability to sanction misbehavior.
  2. Forcing newcomers to post bonds that may be forfeited if the newcomers misbehave or forcing newcomers’ sponsors to stake their own reputations increases the community’s ability to sanction misbehavior.
  3. Graduated sanctions increase the legitimacy and thus the effectiveness of sanctions.

Punishment

  1. Peer reporting or automatic detection of violations increases the deterrent effect of sanctions.

A mild but certain punishment is more effective in deterring misbehavior than a severe but uncertain punishment. (p. 162)

What circumstances might we see this??

  1. Increased community cohesion, graduated sanctions, explicit rules, identifiable perpetrators, formal sanctioning roles, and anti-retaliatory measures [do so too]

Conclusion

Wrap up

Write a multiple choice question using what we discussed today.

Review

Norms

What was your multiple choice question?

  • what is a norm?
  • why breach?
  • what was an example of a Garfinkel breach?
  • which experiment are you thinking of doing?