Journal of Psychological Abnormalities

The Unique Section on Social Norms and Behavioral Development Begins with an Introduction

Nate Cohn^{* *}Correspondence: Nate Cohn, Editorial Office, Journal of Psychological Abnormalities, Belgium, Email:

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INTRODUCTION

This special section's objective is to provide an overview of studies on social norms and behavioral development. Norms reflect the general agreement on what constitutes proper and acceptable behavior in a specific context. Norms are social truths that emerge from people's attitudes and behavior’s, but they also influence people's attitudes, decisions, and behaviors. Norms come from common agreement about what is proper or normal in a specific social context, but they also shape, constrain, and steer conduct.

There are several approaches to define classroom norms. The first distinction is between prescriptive or injunctive norms, which pertain to students' beliefs of how they should behave, and descriptive norms, which refer to students' actual behavior’s. A second distinction can be established between what is important for all classmates and what is important for a subset of norm setters, particularly popular peers. A third distinction is between social norms, which are measured at the meso- or macro-level, and perceived norms, which are measured at the micro-level. This review is organized around these distinct metrics of social norms.

A longitudinal study of Colombian adolescents sought to determine whether violence leads to subsequent victimization. The person-group dissimilarity or social "misfit" model was elaborated upon in this multilevel study, which explored the effects of different types of peer group norms on group sanction when people departed from the norm. A multi-method design was adopted in the study, which combined self-reports with peer-nomination methods. There was no evidence for a gender-based misfit effect of hostility (based on same-sex classroom prescriptive norms).

The peer group norm mismatch effect was discovered for both the proximal and distal prescriptive norms. The social sanction of aggressiveness through later victimization varied depending on whether the behavior was appropriate among friends or classmates. These effects varied depending on the sort of aggressiveness. The focus on special education classrooms was a strength of a descriptive norm research in this special area. The persongroup dissimilarity model was also used in this multilevel study, which examined the moderating effect of the descriptive classroom norm for problem behaviours on the association between individual problem behaviors (referring to externalizing, internalizing, and attentionhyperactivity problems) and social status using cross-sectional analyses at four time points (referring to acceptance, rejection, and perceived popularity). A multi-method strategy combining teacher reports and peer nominations was used to fill a gap in the research on our understanding of how behavioral norms influence social status in special education classes. The data give some indication that the correlations between the problem behavior’s evaluated and social status vary according to socioeconomic status.

Another multilevel study that used the person-group dissimilarity model sought to investigate the role of norms in the influence of friendship on physical, relational, and general aggressiveness. The classroom norm was defined in this multilevel longitudinal study as the degree to which the three types of violence relate to social preference. This norm salience was computed individually for males and girls. Friends' relational aggression was more likely to predict increases in girls' relational aggressiveness in classrooms with a positive relationship between relational aggression and social preference, especially for very aggressive girls.

These findings imply that highly relationally aggressive girls may have abilities that allow them to adjust to the social milieu in which they and their friends engage. In contrast, when norm salience was neutral or unfavorable, the influence of male friends' general aggression was greater, implying that boys who associate with aggressive friends may be more susceptible to aggressive friends' influence in general, and especially in the context of potential peer rejection. There was no evidence of a moderating effect of norm salience on friends' influence on physical aggressiveness socialization. These findings imply that treatments aiming at decreasing the norm salience of aggressiveness may be beneficial only in some subgroups of violent youth. Another norm salience study in this special part looked at the relationships between peer status and victim- and bully-oriented defense. The classroom norm was defined in this cross-sectional multilevel study as the degree to which bullying is related to perceived popularity or likeability. The data demonstrate that in classes where bullies were unpopular, popularity was more strongly connected with bully-oriented defense than in classrooms where bullies were popular. Both types of defending were more widespread in classrooms where bullies were more rejected, and the favorable connections of likeability and popularity with victim-oriented defending were stronger.

In this special part, a cross-sectional social network study looked at whether classroom norms played a role in the link between liking and defending. Students who like or are liked by their classmates are more likely to defend, while students who detest or are disliked by their peers are less likely to defend. According to the concept of power imbalance, it was expected that these effects would be weaker in classrooms where bullies wield more power (i.e., where the popularity norm is stronger), because the power of popular bullies may be greater than the individual like or dislike relationships in a group. This study found no consistent evidence that group bullying norms moderate these associations. The study of social norms has sparked considerable interest in peer relations research, focusing on group-level processes, frequently characterized in terms of the classroom, that generate and sustain shared meanings that influence adolescent behavioral and social social adjustment. The contributions to this special section encourage debate on the future of norms research and suggest numerous avenues for future research, with the hope that a better understanding of how social norms affect social development will better inform peer relations research and norm-based interventions.