Scripts and Social Norms
Why Domestic Violence?
Cristina Bicchieri
BeLab
Penn SoNG
University of Pennsylvania
In this presentation I argue that…
• Violence is often an angry reaction to violated expectation(s)
• These expectations come from well-established scripts of how things
are (and should be) in the world
• Scripts include shared social norms
• Changing violent behavior requires the ability to diagnose social
norms and change the scripts (sets of expectations) that support
them
2
Violence: An angry reaction
• Drivers have expectations about how others should drive
• When those expectations that they consider common and legitimate are
violated
• It is common to react angrily
3
Where do expectations come from?
• Schemata and scripts
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Social schemata are shared
“Who is a good girl?”
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Schemata and scripts
• We also have specific schemata for
events or sequences of actions.
• A good waiter should…?
• A good wife should…?
•These event schemata are
known as scripts.
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A “Good Wife” Script
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Norms, scripts, and schemata
•“A good wife is expected to take care of
her husband, obey him, have children,
take care of them…”
•A violation of the script elicits a causal
attribution: “she is rebellious,
disrespectful, or mean.”
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Norms, scripts, and schemata
• Legitimate (normative) expectations have
been violated
• By violating the script, she violates a norm.
• Anger is seen as the appropriate emotion.
Punishment is “right”—it is the husband’s
duty
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Empirical expectations
• All men I know beat their wives if they …..
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Normative Expectations
I should…
other’s think…
I think…
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Violating the expectation
• In domestic violence, abuse
may be seen as a proper
response to violating common,
“legitimate” expectations
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Shared scripts include social norms. A social norm (Bicchieri 2006)
is a
rule of behavior
such that
on conditions that
they believe that
individuals prefer
to conform to it
• most people in their reference network
conform to it
[empirical expectations]
• most people in their reference network believe
they ought to conform to it
[normative expectations]
Can we measure norms?
• Consensus
• Perceived vs. objective
•Compliance
• Causal efficacy of social expectations
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What to measure
• Behavior
• Empirical
expectations
• Personal
normative
beliefs
What the
responder
does
What the
responder
believes she
should do
What the
responder
believes
others do
What the
responder
believes
others think
she should do
• Normative
expectations
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