What Happens When Society Loses Social Norms? The Psychology of Anomie
This is part 2 in a multi-part series on the psychology of social norms. If you haven’t already, you can read part 1, here, on Sweden’s historic traffic switch.
When you visit a new country for the first time, it's helpful to know their general customs and social norms. When you meet someone for the first time, do you shake hands? Do you land a kiss on either cheek? Or do you bow in reverence?
These behavioral norms, though, aren’t just nice to have. As we saw in the case of H-Day, they are the very glue that holds society together. When we lose them, we don’t merely get confused about what to do in a social situation, we get something much worse: anomie.
Coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, anomie describes a state of complete normlessness, a society completely devoid of cohesion. When a society loses its norms, it descends into chaos. Anomie is society without its glue. H-Day is every day.
What is it like when a society loses its social norms, and how do these societal conditions arise? Let’s dive into the psychology of anomie.
Anomie: A Society without Social Norms
On the morning of H-Day, we catch a glimpse of what a normless experience may be like. This, however, was limited just to the roads, and was resolved in a matter of weeks when the new norms of driving were more broadly adopted. What would it be like to experience normlessness more broadly?
Consider the following description from Stanford’s Michele Gelfand, a leading scholar in the science of social norms. She describes such a state in her 2019 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers:
Imagine a world where people are always late. Trains, buses, and airplanes don’t abide by any fixed schedule. In conversations, people interrupt each other frequently, get handsy with new acquaintances, and never make eye contact. People wake up whenever they want and leave their houses with or without putting on clothes. At restaurants—which are open whenever—people demand food that isn’t on the menu, chew with their mouths open, belch frequently, and, without asking, eat off of strangers’ plates. Board a crowded elevator, and you’ll find people singing, shaking their wet umbrellas on each other, and facing the wrong direction. In schools, students talk on their phones throughout lectures, pull pranks on the teachers, and cheat openly on exams. On city streets, no one pays attention to stoplights, and people drive on both sides of the road. Pedestrians litter heedlessly, steal strangers’ bicycles off racks, and curse loudly. Sex isn’t reserved for private settings like bedrooms; it happens on public transportation, on park benches, and in movie theaters.This is a world without social norms—a world where people don’t have any socially agreed-upon standards of behavior. (p. 7)
Gelfand provides a compelling description of a normless state. And while this level of social chaos is rare, it’s not completely unprecedented either. When norms shift suddenly, we struggle to adjust.
Many readers will remember the social disorder in the early weeks of the pandemic. Greeting a friend, which was once natural and automatic, was now stressful and chaotic. Do we first bump? Shake hands? Touch elbows? Or do we avoid each other altogether? The pandemic turned our social conventions upside down.
We can expect global pandemics to disrupt daily life and to upend social norms. But perhaps the most dramatic, and informative example of social chaos comes from the origin of anomie itself, and from what Emile Durkheim experienced directly. By examining his core ideas, we gain key insights into how communities descend into normlessness.
Emile Durkheim and The Origins of Anomie
Durkheim conceived of the concept of anomie out of a generational concern. He lived through immense change and social upheaval as France quickly urbanized during the turn of the 20th century. It was during this period, that rural farmers migrated to cities in great numbers.
When Durkheim studied this young society, he found that it was plagued with social pathologies such as personal distress, depression, and suicide. People were drawn into the urban areas by the promises of greater economic opportunity, but once there, found that life not worth living.
The culprit, according to Durkheim’s analysis? What he described as anomie: a state of social normlessness in which individuals were adrift, unconnected to one another, and lonely.
Durkheim found this to be the root cause of these personal and social afflictions. Norms were absent from this young society because it grew too rapidly. The society was a mere collection of disparate people and families with no social ties to one another. When people move from a farm to a city, they can’t bring their norms with them.
Life back on the farm was simple. Everyone knew their role, and knew how to act. The organizing social unit was the family farm. But now thrust into an urban environment for the first time, the norms of behavior are much less clear. And when a very large portion of this new society is also confused about how to act, this confusion becomes much more widespread. This is why society descended into anomie. Instead of an interconnected community, society became atomized - just a bunch of separate individuals, each out for themself.
The psychology of anomie also helps explain the rise in loneliness and personal distress: Because we’re social creatures with a deep need for camaraderie and social connection, existing within anomie produces intense social isolation, profound loneliness, and high rates of suicide.
Anomie Beyond Durkheim
When France urbanized in the late 1900s, cities were morphed into normless states plagued by social chaos, personal distress, and loneliness. This isn’t a one-off historical event. We find a nearly identical pattern in South Korea during the 1970s, when they went through their own period of rapid urbanization and development.
Prior to this transition, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and the majority of its citizens lived in rural areas. Today, it’s one of the richest countries per capita in the region, and over 90% of Koreans live in urban areas.
While this quick period of development has brought economic prosperity, it has also come with great personal distress. For the past several decades, South Korea has consistently had one of the highest rates of both self-reported loneliness, as as well as suicide per capita in the world. An analysis of these social maladies points to a similar root cause: anomie.
Like the farmers in France, rural life in South Korea was defined by small, tight-knit family groups and well-defined norms. Farmlife for Koreas was defined by Confucianism, which for over two millennia, infused one’s daily tasks with meaning.
As Professor Uichol Kim, a social psychologist at South Korea’s Inha University, told the journalist Will Storr, “The focus was on cooperation and working together .. Generally speaking, it was a caring, sharing, and giving culture. But in an urban city, it’s very competitive and achievement-focused. You’re defined by your status, power, and wealth, which was not part of traditional culture.”
Similar to 20th-century France, this rapid urbanization fostered a society of atomized individuals with little cohesion or obligation to one another. As Kim distills, rapidly urbanizing South Korea is “a culture without roots”
Final Thoughts on the Psychology of Anomie
The vast majority of the time, life is rich with social convention. When we meet someone for the first time, we know if we should shake their right hand with ours. We know that when we enter an elevator, we should stand facing the front. And we know that if someone’s loved one passes away, we offer our condolences and dress in black at the funeral.
Our culture’s social norms are so commonplace, and are so deeply ingrained, that we take them for granted. Describing our social norms is the proverbial example of “the fish trying to describe water”. They feel as though they’re etched into the fabric of reality itself.
The ubiquity of social norms makes these rare instances of anomie conspicuous and shocking. As we’ve seen, these norms don’t just grease the wheels of social interactions - they’re the glue that holds society together. When we lose this glue, society becomes atomized; we lose our obligations to one another, and the social connectedness that sustains us as individuals. These rapid periods of urbanization were typified by anomie, and as a result, intense personal distress.
This transformation, however, wasn’t completely owed to urbanization itself. Instead, it was accelerated by the market dynamics within these growing economies. The largest economic factor? The labor market.
As people flocked to the cities, they went from generalists to specialists, from “jacks of all trades” to narrowly defined professionals. Why would specialization within the job market exacerbate normlessness? The answer has deep consequences, not only for understanding anomie, but for understanding the social chaos in the modern digital world.
We turn here next.
This is part 2 of a multi-part series on social norms, chaos and anomie.
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About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Psychology of Anomie and Normlessness
Storr, W. (June, 2017) Why Men Kill Themselves, Pacific Standard
Gelfand, M. (2019). Rule makers, rule breakers: Tight and loose cultures and the secret signals that direct our lives. Scribner.
