Norms, rules, and laws are used to regulate the behavior of individuals and groups. This process, known associal control, can be either informal, as in the exercise of control through customs, norms, and expectations, or formal, as in the exercise of control through laws or other official regulations.
Informal social control relies on public or peer opinion to ensure compliane to the dominant values and norms in a society. This can happen through customs, norms, and mores.Informal social control involves the internalization of normative standards for conduct via agents of socialization, such as the family, religion, school, and the mass media.Edward Ross, in particular, argued that informal controls such as belief systems exert more influence than their formal counterparts such as government laws (Ross, 1901).
Informal social control relies on public or peer opinion to ensure compliane to the dominant values and norms in a society. This can happen through customs, norms, and mores.
Informal social control involves the internalization of normative standards for conduct via agents of socialization, such as the family, religion, school, and the mass media.
Edward Ross, in particular, argued that informal controls such as belief systems exert more influence than their formal counterparts such as government laws (Ross, 1901).
What do Informal Social Control Measures Seek to Accomplish in Society?
Informal social control measures can readily supplement and sometimes even eliminate the need for certain formal control measures.
Norms
Normsshape attitudes, afford guidelines for actions and establish boundaries for behavior. Moreover, norms regulate character, engender societal cohesion, and aid individuals in striving toward cultural goals.
Conversely, the violation of norms may elicit disapprobation, ridicule, or even ostracization. For instance, while the Klu Klux Klan is legally permitted in the United States, norms pervading many academic, cultural, and religious institutions barely countenance any association with it or any espousal of its racist and antisemitic propaganda.
Consequently, we see the potency of a norm condemning certain viewpoints being promoted through informal means even in the absence of any equivalent formal counterparts.
Values
Valuescomprise culturally constructed goals, presented as legitimate objects for attainment to a diverse array of individuals in a society.
Such goals are accorded varying degrees of significance based on their relevance to a particular culture’s most cherished ideals.
These values are communicated to individuals, commencing at a tender age, as dreams worth pursuing.
Ancient Sparta offers an example of a society that explicitly upheld the value of military preeminence (Plutarch, 1859).
Sparta’s granting of headstones only to a select victorious, the poetry of Tyrtaeus glorifying military prowess, and the agoges that molded 7-year-old boys into warriors barely elude attention.
Mores
Moresare considered folkways that have evolved into ethical principles whose violation may invite severe disapprobation.
Mores are deemed essential to a society’s cohesion, and comprise strong value judgments deeply rooted in community life. They are accorded a greater certainty of rectitude than folkways.
For example, in American society, skipping one’s turn in line may be a breach of a folkway, while bestiality may elicit condemnation as a violation of mores.
According to natural law philosophers like John Finnis, such mores embody objectively true and binding moral codes rather than merely evolved folkways (Finnis, 1979).
Customs
The prospect of social censure its breach might engender seems to preserve its vigor. The passage of time seems sufficiently potent to enervate its force and thrust it to desuetude.
Conversely, its triumph over the test of time might enshrine it into law. Consequently, William Blackstone’s legal exposition connects Anglo-Saxon customs to the common law on monarchical rights and obligations (Cecchinato, 2021).
Belief System
Intimate beliefs, regardless of their veracity, exert enormous influence on individual behavior. Beliefs concerning oneself, one’s mission in life, and the purpose of human existence can guide one’s mundane actions and life-altering decisions alike.
A multitude’s subscription to a uniform worldview may fundamentally govern the trajectory of an entire society. Distinct beliefs may compel conformity to different norms.
ThePygmalion effector the Rosenthal effect, for instance, amply illustrates how people can readily internalize via beliefs various optimistic labels they receive, especially from their superiors, and improve their performance in the relevant tasks to conform to those labels.
Ideology
Ideology encompasses comprehensive worldviews which dictate what is appropriate or not in a certain society. Regardless of whether an ideology governs the law of a land, it can be a potent driver of its adherents’ conduct.
The corruption that pervaded certain former Soviet nations in the aftermath of the Cold War, in many ways, testifies to an ideology that exalted political connections over individual entrepreneurship.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), too, demonstrates how radical ideologies, herein a combination of Salafi jihadism, Takfirism, and Wahabism, can inspire and sanction atrocities against those holding different religious beliefs (Bunzel, 2015).
Religion
Religion generally includes proscriptions, prescriptions, counsels, customs, rituals, and philosophical and theological beliefs concerning both temporal and extratemporal rewards and punishments.
These readily constitute a binding code of conduct for the members of a religious tradition to the extent such members accept it.
For instance, Max Weber’s sociological study of the relationship between the Protestant work ethic and thespirit of capitalismshows a possible causal connection between the Calvinist view on predestination and many Protestants’ financial success, stemming from the view that wealth signifies elect, that could have conduced to the rise of the capitalist system (Weber, 1958).
Family
The family antecedes the state and constitutes the initial regulator of many an individual’s conduct.Families socialize their membersand prescribe rules for their behavior.
The adverse consequences, ranging from spanking to curfews, which attend insubordination, may discourage children from breaking broader social norms as adults.
Moreover, the prospect of rewards, ranging from hugs to allowances, may inspire children to please others with their conduct.
The family plays a vital role, although perhaps in subtle ways, in the inculcation of values such as fairness, honesty, teamwork, and empathy, in their members commencing at infancy.
Additionally, the family significantly influences the passage of cultural and religious norms as well.
The Pesach Haggadah, on the Jewish Passover, affords a striking example of how families can become mechanisms for the conveyance of religious customs and cultural rituals via crucial conversations at significant celebrations.
School
After the family, educational institutions play the most significant role in grooming young children into responsible citizens.
This is achievedhidden curriculumand PSHE lessons. This helps to build social solidarity as it teaches students the core values of society.
Joseph Stalin’s use of the Soviet school system to propagate communist ideology and produce docile subjects out of millions of Russians for his mammoth bureaucracy shows how schools can be employed to uphold ideologically inspired norms (Lauglo, 1988).
Workplace: Employee Deviance
Consequently, workplace deviance in the form of cyberloafing, coworker-backstabbing, peculation, and mediocre performance has acquired increased salience.
Additionally, inviting the input of even low-level employees in crafting organizational mission statements has proven to be an effectively utilized means of discouraging deviance.
Finally, listening and responding to employees’ complaints and concerns may improve an employer’s credibility and in the long run, enable him/her to significantly shape the behavior of his/her subordinates.
Community: Crime Prevention
Communities play a vital role in deterring deviance. Whileformal controlssuch as police surveillance and penal sanctions are not insignificant, community norms strive to discourage deviance and crime employing more subtle and intangible methods.
At the same time, the fear of ridicule and ostracization may dissuade them from crime even when they are inclined toward it, in the possible absence of other legitimate professional opportunities.
According to this proposition, living virtuously and assisting the unfortunate might procure one a noble birth in the hereafter, while a wicked and depraved lifestyle would result in being reincarnated into a miserable existence as a cockroach or a pig.
Consequently, in Indian, Nepalese and Sri Lankan societies wherein such beliefs hold sway, even without any legal coercion, many people may honor their parents, care for the poor, take care of their children, and respect other people’s property.
Mass Media
Mass media can shape the behavior of entire societies in both manifest and subtle ways. Visual stimuli are exceedingly potent, and the portrayal of scenes on the screen to propagate certain agendas may readily elicit the assent of viewers.
Moreover, the mere exposure to certain ideas consistently over a long time might engender conduct conforming to such propositions. Regular consumers of mass media, gradually might be convinced that what is morally acceptable is what they are seeing or hearing in the media.
For instance, the attention that the news bestows upon crime, and perhaps, the severe punishments attending criminals, may dissuade many from delinquent adventures.
Surveillance and Social Control
Modern society and technology has reached the point where our lives are quite transparent and there is a lack of privacy. Our every move, is monitored but it has become so routine that we no longer notice it or consider it consciously.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault distinguished between external surveillance, also known as panopticon, and internalized surveillance which he described as panopticism.
In the latter instance, the observer is internalized to an extent that turns the observed into the observer—as though a prisoner is metamorphosed into his/her own jailer.
This concept which Foucault borrows from Jeremy Bentham, holds that the transition from panopticon to panopticism involves an inducement, in an inmate’s consciousness, of the notion of being permanently visible to secure an automated functioning of domination.
Foucault contends that such a scheme establishes the permanence of the effects of external surveillance, even if the actual exercise thereof is discontinuous.
Such an exertion of authority, he argues, renders the actual exercise of formal social control unnecessary. Some people’s propensity to use recycling bins, refrain from jaywalking, and heed parking regulations, is an example (Foucault, 1977).
FAQs
Religion demonstrates how the same norm could be either an informal or a formal means, depending on context. In Saudi Arabia, a Muslim who abandons Islam formally incurs the death penalty from the state.
In the United States, however, this same act would never result in such state-authorized punishment, although it may elicit the ‘informal’ consequence of ostracization from one’s family.
Families, schools, religious communities, and many voluntary associations can play a vital role in preserving social order. For instance, the family where one first learns what is appropriate to say or do may restrain one from verbally or physically assaulting others out of anger.
Religious prescriptions and counsel for peaceful coexistence can inspire non-aggressive behavior even among those one disagrees with.
Schools that inculcate civic virtues and voluntary associations that promote political engagement may constructively channel frustrations with the status quo into civil dialogue and peaceful protests for changes in government policy.
Formal social control generally employs fear, via the threat of imprisonment or capital punishment, to procure compliance with laws prohibiting felonies. These, however, unlike informal social controls, seldom provide rational arguments for why individuals ought to refrain from deviance.
Moreover, they cannot guarantee that all criminals will always be caught and punished. Conversely, families teach children that gaining the support and love of others requires that one treat others with respect and care.
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Saul McLeod, PhD
BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Charlotte NickersonResearch Assistant at Harvard UniversityUndergraduate at Harvard UniversityCharlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.
Charlotte NickersonResearch Assistant at Harvard UniversityUndergraduate at Harvard University
Charlotte Nickerson
Research Assistant at Harvard University
Undergraduate at Harvard University
Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.
