Social Norms, Social Boundaries and Inequality

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

Social norms, those informal understandings that guide our behavior in everyday life, are difficult to study scientifically because they are both challenging to define and to measure. Yet they regulate a large body of social behavior and also help to pattern social inequality. This project will advance our scientific understanding of inequality by developing a new approach that identifies social norms in written texts describing correct behaviors. The project will inductively derive the relationships between behaviors prescribed and proscribed in the texts and more measurable dimensions of inequality, such as social class. The project will also uncover the connections between those written norms and the social boundaries and exclusions that create inequality. The project will inform understanding regarding the pervasiveness of social inequality that has previously been resistant to scientific study and will provide evidence regarding how social norms change over time. The project will study social norms through analysis of an original digital corpus consisting of texts describing correct behaviors. The corpus includes more than 7 million words and 90,000 pages of text produced during the last 95 years. The research uses multiple methods including corpus linguistics analytic techniques of topic modeling, word embedding, word network mapping, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. These strategies will identify social norms, symbolic boundaries, techniques for the enforcement of norm compliance, and narratives of justification attaching moral values to social norms. Machine learning will be guided by and supplement traditional by-hand content analysis of texts from the same corpus. The project will also use archival research to place the research findings in their social and historical contexts. Through these methods, the research will produce a new approach to studying social norms and inequality. The results will fuel discussion of the cultural foundations of social inequality as well as shed light on how social norms generally both operate and evolve historically. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.