“Are They Crazy?”

Dreaming of Perchten

For a beginning, imagine this situation: A neighbor of yours has been planning to buy a car. The plan has occupied their mind for months, and they have talked about it each time you have met on the street. Being polite neighbors, you often have short chats. For the last weeks, a used but well-looking car has caught your neighbor’s attention. They have contacted the seller, they have tried the car out, and yesterday they were supposed to sign the contract. Today you run into them again and polite as you are, you inquire about their purchase. “So you’re the happy car-owner now?” you ask. But to your surprise, you see your neighbor shaking head. No, they say, I did not even go there. Meeting your surprised look, they feel compelled to offer an explanation.

Now imagine two scenarios. (a) In one case, the neighbor tells that on the night before, he dreamt of a Percht who recommended not to buy the car because not only was the seller a crook, but the car was in fact inhabited by evil spirits. This requires some explanation: Perchten (plural) are demonic, often dreadful characters of Austro-Bavarian lore that are thought to rule in the cold nights of January. Assuming that you, the reader, are not extremely well versed with Austro-Bavarian lore, you are taken aback by your neighbor’s story, and you may even question your neighbor’s sanity.

(b) In the second scenario, your neighbor tells that they talked with friends about the brands of cars that are popular among their acquaintances and that their chosen car is not among them. Consequently, they postponed the whole thing.

How do you react? “I understand,” you will think in scenario (b), and you are unlikely to harbor second thoughts because you are well acquainted with the phenomena of peer-pressure, the prospect of potentially losing status with your friends, and “descriptive norms,” particularly in car brands.

How does situation (a) differ from (b)? The superficial difference is the lack of an accepted grounding of “getting recommendations while dreaming particularly about evil spirits” and, second of a Percht, a personage you did not know before and, hence, did not understand your neighbor’s account.

Grounding a Norm

The contributions assembled in this special issue consider communication “grounding” to clarify the meaning of a word or set of words akin to the communicators subscribing to the same lexical entry of a word. But there is more to it: Words are not only embedded in a context of pragmatic uses but in a network of meanings, everyday theories, and series of actions. In other words, a word is not understood without knowing the socially constructed representation of an issue against which the word has a “metric” and meaning (Wagner, Hansen, & Kronberger, 2014). This applies to norms as well (Staerkle, Clemence, & Spini, 2011).

We argue that the force of descriptive norms on influencing behavior depends on the shared grounding of the frame, supporting ideas and everyday theories, which is the comprehensive representational field by which a norm is being defined. Consider the example of “being influenced by a Percht in a dream”: Agreeing to this idea means not only to know the literal meaning of a Percht—like checking a dictionary—(as alluded by Gao, Qiu, Chiu, & Yang, 2015), but at least also to know what the background folklore is, why they appear in the cold nights of January, and that in dreams one can “receive” advice from others. This latter part has a long tradition in several religious mythologies and was reconstructed in Freud’s well-known “Traumdeutung” (Freud, 1900). So, in a way, accepting your neighbor’s surprising account presupposes a well-developed representation of European culture. Without this background, the neighbor just appears “crazy.”

In case (b), your neighbor offers an explanation that refers to the norm of conformism and status. Such practices are part of everyday knowledge in our societies. This account appeals to conformism and has a place in a culture where conformism is valued. There are, however, also cultures where nonconformism is valued. By being conformist in such a culture, your neighbor would violate the overarching norm of nonconformism, a conundrum.

Hence, social norms only make sense against a background of a representation that embraces the respective behavior, and the explanation respectively justification of that behavior (cf. Moscovici, 2008; Wagner, 2015). The isolated norm does not make much sense outside of this contextual behavior–justification system and will even be unintelligible to the uninitiated, and it does not come into being “just so” (e.g., Morris & Liu, 2015). This goes as far as making conformism—which is implied in the norm–behavior link—itself a culturally relative norm (Hodges & Geyer, 2006; see also Moscovici & Nemeth, 1974).

Transmission and Change

Processes of language acquisition by children do not only imprint children with the language spoken in their surroundings but also convey the deep characteristics of local culture (e.g., Howarth, 2002; Lloyd & Duveen, 1992; Tomasello, 2003). Later in a child’s life, parents may utilize their instrumental knowledge and convey “useful” norms to their offspring (Tam, 2015). Also, novel developments and particularly cross-cultural channels of culture diffusion will enrich people’s repertoire of norms to a certain degree (Howarth, Wagner, Magnusson, & Sammut, 2014). However, two points require mention: First, to a large part, norms are not arbitrary but are built upon deep-seated biological necessities, most if which can be twisted only to a certain degree: These are all norms that derive from humankind’s eusociality (e.g., Crespi & Yanega, 1995) such as norms allowing group structures, overlapping generations, brood care, and a division of labor into reproductive and nonreproductive sections.

Second, diffusion of cultural artifacts and consequent norms by electronic mass media has an impact on dominant norms in societies, and shapes cultural preferences (e.g., Fiske, 1987; Hartley, 1996; Zafar, Mirza, & Syed Qamar, 2013). The spread of scientific literacy in everyday life, for example, brings new representations that supersede old knowledge. This does not mean in most cases that the old representations and behavioral norms disappear, but that their claim on validity changes, and the new and old attain different situational values, which is called cognitive polyphasia (Provencher, 2011; Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Themel, 2000). In one of our studies, for example, we show that traditional cultural thinking about mental illness is not replaced by Western psychiatric knowledge when the latter is attained through education. Instead, both can be used in fitting circumstances and situations: Traditional explanations appear in the context of family conversations, whereas scientific psychiatric discourse is used with strangers and in the public (Wagner, Duveen, Themel, & Verma, 1999).

Outlook

We think that the social-psychological investigation of norms, values, and everyday knowledge needs to consider the place of norms in overarching social representations. Only as expressions of social representations these notions attain cultural meaning and shared understanding that include the possibility to interact and co-construct local worlds (Wagner, 2015).