Abstract
Norms are central to social life. They help people select actions that benefit the community and facilitate behavior prediction and coordination. However, little is known about the cognitive properties of norms. Here we focus on norm activation, context specificity, and how those properties differ for the two major types of norms: prescriptions and prohibitions. In two studies, participants are exposed to a variety of contexts by way of scene images and either (a) freely generate norms that apply to the context or (b) decide whether each of a series of candidate norms applies to a given context. Across both studies, people showed high levels of context specificity and fast norm activation, and these properties were substantially stronger for prescriptions than for prohibitions.
Original language | English |
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Pages | 819-825 |
Number of pages | 7 |
State | Published - 2021 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021 - Virtual, Online, Austria Duration: 26 Jul 2021 → 29 Jul 2021 |
Conference
Conference | 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021 |
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Country/Territory | Austria |
City | Virtual, Online |
Period | 26/07/21 → 29/07/21 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021.All rights reserved.
Funding
This project was supported in part by a grant from the Office of Naval Research, No. N00014-14-l-0144 and from and from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), SIMPLEX 14-46-FP-097. The opinions expressed here are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ONR or DARPA.
Funders | Funder number |
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Office of Naval Research | N00014-14-l-0144 |
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency | SIMPLEX 14-46-FP-097 |
Keywords
- Social norms
- cognitive structure
- deontics
- moral norms
- negation
- network