Compliance or Anomie:The Effect towards the Decision-making Behaviors from Social Norms as Reference Points

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (2) : 408-413.

PDF(5764 KB)
PDF(5764 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (2) : 408-413.

Compliance or Anomie:The Effect towards the Decision-making Behaviors from Social Norms as Reference Points

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Abstract

The human self-conditions and the situations are the key factors to the compliance or anomie behaviors towards the social norms under the big uncertainties of the overall social environment. Therefore, it is essential to identify the reference point by which people take as the reference for decision making while facing the social norms. The reference point refers to the underlying reference standard that individuals use to judge and evaluate the decision options. Usually, it could be the individual habitus or social norms and customs or the level of personal expectations or aspirations. Because of the universality and stability as features of the reference point, it might explain why the bias and irrational decision-making behaviors occur. In addition to the reference point used by individuals, there is another kind of reference point which emerged from the agreement between an individual and the group. In this paper, the social norm as the reference point refers to the norms used by people as the standards for decision-making and judgment in order to realize the group goals and keep the consistency of the group activities. The research on decision-making behaviors has gone through a process from unbounded rationality to bounded rationality. This paper emphasized the explanation mechanism of social norms under bounded rationality, namely, prospect theory, regret theory, equate-to-differentiate model, route and tri-reference point theory (TRP). The descriptive decision theories listed above give a sound explanation to the phenomena of the social anomie such as tax avoidance, status quo bias, medical trouble relations and the over medicalization. It can offset the insufficient explanation to the anomie made by the normative decision theories under the unbounded rationality. For example, it could use the prospect theory to explain the behavior of tax avoidance, because people consider tax avoidance as a reference point. In other words, paying taxes is equal to a loss. To avoid the pain of loss, people tend to escape of taxation. According to the route, tax refund will encourage people to pay taxes,it is because the psychological feeling of tax refund is stronger than the psychological feeling of taxation. These theories also help us to guide the individual to comply with social norms. Hence the reference point plays an important role on solving the symptom of anomie. Besides, there are some other factors that cause the compliance and anomie behaviors of individual, namely, attention, need for cognitive closure, mood, cultural differences and behaviors of others. However, researches are rarely made on taking the social norm as reference point nowadays and future in-depth researches of reference point are expected to focus on the following aspects. First of all, it is the transformation between research ideas and paradigms. Secondly, in-depth exploration of the multiple reference points mechanism and influence factors. Thirdly, researchers will expand the scope and objects of study like the cross-culture and the internet anomie. It is expected these researches might provide much more scientific and rational explanations to the compliance and anomie behaviors towards social norms during the transformation period.

Key words

reference point / decision-making behavior / social norms / anomie

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Compliance or Anomie:The Effect towards the Decision-making Behaviors from Social Norms as Reference Points[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2015, 38(2): 408-413
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