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Since culture includes the ways in which things should be done, we say that culture is normative, which is another way of saying that it defines standard of conduct. For shaking hands, we extend the right hand. For scratching our heads we may use either hand as our culture has no norm for scratching the head.

The term ‘norm’ has two possible meanings. A statistical norm is a measure of what actually exists; a cultural norm is a concept of what is expected to exist. Sometimes, the statistical norm is termed as the real culture and cultural norm as the ‘ideal’ culture. Often people do not distinguish between the two norms.

The famous Kinsey studies attempted to find some statistical norms of sexual behaviour in the United States. The effort shocked many people who confused statistical with cultural norms. A statistical norm is a measure of actual conduct with no suggestion of approval or disapproval. A cultural norm is a set of behaviour expectations, a cultural image of how people are supposed to act.

A culture is an elaborate system of such norms standardised, expected ways of feeling and acting, which the members of a society generally acknowledge and follow. These norms are of various kinds and various degrees of compulsion, as seen in the following classification. Most of these concepts were developed by William Graham Sumner in his Folkways, published in 1906.

Folkways

Our social life is full of problems: how to wrest a living from nature, how to divide the fruits of toil or good fortune, how to relate ourselves agreeably to one another, and many others. And human beings seem to have tried every possible way of dealing with such problems. Different workable patterns have emerged in different societies.

A group may eat once, twice, or several times each day; they may eat standing, seated in chairs, or squatting on the ground; they may eat in groups, or each may eat separately; they may eat with their fingers, or by using some utensils like spoon or fork; they may start with wine and end with mutton, or start with mutton and end with wine. And so it goes for thousands of items of behaviour.

Each trait is selected from a number of possibilities, all of which are more or less workable. Through trial and error, sheer accident, or some unknown influence, a group arrives at one of these possibilities, repeats it, and accepts it as the normal way of meeting a particular need. It is transferred and passed on to succeeding generations and becomes one of the ways of the folk, hence a folkway.

Folkways, thus, are simply the customary, normal habitual ways a group does things. Shaking hands, doing pranam, eating with spoon and fork, wearing silk on some occasions and cotton on others, driving on the left side of the road, giving feasts at marriage or death ceremonies are some examples of our many Indian folkways.

New generations learn and internalize folkways partly by deliberate teaching but mainly by observing and taking part in life. Children are surrounded by folkways. Since they constantly see these ways of doing things, they come to believe them as the only real ways. For them customs of other groups appear as giant oddities and not practical, sensible ways of getting things done. Even in the most primitive society we can see hundreds of folkways; modern, industrialised societies have thousands.

Mores

Folkways are relative to each other: some are superior to others. If one uses the wrong fork for one’s salad it doesn’t matter much but if a woman chooses anyone but her husband to sire her child, many aspects of financial obligation, property inheritance rights, family relationships, and sentimental linkage become disrupted.

For convenience: (1) those which should be followed as a matter of good manners and polite behaviour and (2) those which must be followed because they are believed essential to group welfare. These ideas of right and wrong which attach to certain folkways are then called mores. By mores we mean those strong ideas of right and wrong which require certain acts and forbid others. (Mores is the plural of the Latin word more, but the singular form rarely appears in sociological literature).

It is normal for members of a society to share a sublime faith that violation of their more will bring disaster upon them. Outsiders, however, often see that at least some of the mores are irrational.

They may include food taboos which make cattle, hogs or horses unfit to eat; modesty taboos which forbid exposure of the face, the ankle, the wrist, the breast or whatever is considered “immodest”; language taboos which forbid misuse of certain sacred and obscene words; and many others.

Such taboos seem very important to those who believe in them, but may be entirely unknown in other cultures and may have no necessary connection with group welfare. It is not necessary that the act forbidden by the mores should actually be injurious. If people believe that the act is injurious, it is condemned by the mores. Mores are beliefs in the Tightness or wrongness of acts.

The irrationality of mores should not be exaggerated. Some mores are based upon a very genuine cause and effect relationship. For example random killings would threaten group survival and individual peace of mind, therefore every known society has condemned the killing of the fellow member of that society.

Almost all known societies have developed an incest taboo, disapproving of sexual intercourse between close blood relatives, presumably because they found that sexual competition within the families was too disruptive. All mores are basically ideas which approve of certain acts and forbid others in the belief that group welfare is being protected. Sometimes these beliefs are groundless, but sometimes they are fully justified.

Mores are not deliberately invented or thought up or worked out because someone decides they would be a good idea. They emerge gradually out of the customary practices of people, largely without conscious choice or intention. Mores arise from a group belief that a particular act seems to be harmful and must be forbidden or, conversely, that a particular act is so necessary that it must be required.

Originally, then, mores were practical group beliefs about group welfare. For example, suppose that, through some coincidence, several members of a tribe have nasty accidents after swimming in a certain pool, the tribe comes to believe that there is something dangerous about the pool. When all members of the tribe believe that people should stay away from the pool, the mores have defined an act as wrong.

Persons who swim in the pool thereafter are likely to expect misfortune will be interpreted as punishment and will reinforce these mores. Before long, their origin is forgotten and people think of a dip in this pool as being wrong in and of itself and not just because it seems to have been followed by misfortune.

In this way, mores, which originate are practical group beliefs about the affects of actions, are transformed into absolutes, into things which are right because they are right and wrong because they are wrong. In other words, mores become self-validating and self-perpetuating. They become sacred. To question them is indecent and to violate them is intolerable. Every society punishes those who violate its mores.

Mores are taught to the young not as a set of practical expedients but as a set of sacred absolutes. They must be internalized. To internalise means to learn or accept something so completely that it becomes an automatic unthinking part of our responses when fully internalized mores control behaviour by making it psychologically very difficult to commit the forbidden act.

For example, we refrain from eating our enemies not because of an intellectual decision that cannibalism is impractical or wasteful but because the idea of cannibalism is so repellent to use and the thought of eating human flesh is sickening. Mores function by making their violation emotionally impossible. In a society with a clearly defined and firmly implanted set of mores, there is very little personal misconduct.