The Power of Cultural Norms: Navigating Society through Socialization

Name Institutional affiliations Date People live in a world where they are guided by beliefs and values they believe in or have come up with over time. Laws have been implemented and eventually became cultures, not forgetting about the beliefs in the superiority and origin of the earth. Culture could be defined along a wide range of perspectives depending on beliefs from different settings. What could be considered as culture in one region could not be so in a different setting depending on the food, music, clothes, religion, or even language. However, in the broader picture, culture could be termed as the way of life of a particular group of people. The way of life could be regarding behaviors, the accepted symbols in that particular community, beliefs they entrust in, and symbols and values acquired by a group of people through generations. There are a couple of ways through which societies put values, norms, and beliefs in a society. One such is through sanctions. Values are what dictate how people should live but not what they live. To this reaction, therefore, rewards and punishments are applied to make people do good and shun what is not considered to be morally right. Upholding the norms of a given society, they are rewarded, and failure to sue and punishment follows. In such cases, the sanctions act as social control, which aids in encouraging people in a given community to conform to certain cultural norms. A good example is when young people are expected to respect their elders by standing up for them in filled-up buses. The elderly, on the other hand, may reward them with good gestures and intentions. On the other hand, breaking norms in society may make one