Norms govern the behaviour of individuals and facilitate interaction to take place between them. They add some amount of regularity and predictability to our behaviour. They act as our guides. They help to mend our ways. More than that they regulate our daily life. No individual can ignore social norms without incurring the displeasure of others.
Norms are an indispensable part of our life. In our daily life we do a lot of work and interact with a number of people without much thinking. It is not possible for us to think over each and every act that we do. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once remarked,” the more things we can do without thinking, the better off we are “.
Thus, if we had to think about what we are going to do when we get up from our bed, go out of home, enter a hotel or a shop, get into a bus, enter a bank, or a government office, and meet a friend, a relative, a banker, a policeman, an advocate, a professor, etc., – we should be able to do only a few limited things in the course of a single day. Here the norms come to the help of the individual. They reduce the necessity for decision in mo6t of the situations in which he participates.
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Without the norms the individual would be faced with the burden of taking decisions at every moment. The following example reveals how norms can ease our daily work: Ex: A college going student gets up early in the morning, brushes his teeth and takes his bath, eats his breakfast, wears college going dress, rides the vehicle to the college, greets friends and wishes lecturers, attends to class-room lectures, makes reference study in library during free hours, plays cricket in ground with other friends, returns home early in the evening, studies his daily lessons during the night, and so on.
The hypothetical student may not find it difficult or problematic to do all these activities, because each of these activities is governed by norms. The student’s knowledge of these norms has eased his work.
Without social norms our social relations become haphazard, chaotic and even dangerous. Norms give order, stability, and predictability to social life. In the absence of norms, a state of ‘anomie’ would prevail as Durkheim spoke of it. Anomie is the contradiction of society. Where there are no norms, there is also no society.