Account Strategies for the Violation of Social Norms: Integration and Extension of Sociological and Social Psychological Typologies

Abstract

Social norms supply people with standards of behaviour. They influence the decisions we make about how to dress for dinner parties, about how we solve conflicts or even about whether or not we should give up our seat on the bus for an elderly lady. If we decide to commit a normcontradicting behaviour, we feel the force of social sanctions, exercised either directly against us by social agents who disapprove of our behaviour, or indirectly through threats to our socially dependent sense of self-esteem. The latter form of sanction should be regarded as perhaps the more important if one is personally committed to the norm in question. For example, if you decide to stay in your seat while the elderly lady is at the mercy of the shaking bus, your own—shared—social norm about the need to help others would be violated and you would feel discomfort. A more direct kind of social intervention could be observed if you entered an expensive restaurant in swimming trunks or if you hit a police officer who blames you for a traffic offence. Since everybody is breaking specific norms all the time in daily life, humans have developed techniques to cope with the negative effects of norm violation. Communication sciences, sociology and psychology have described such coping mechanisms using interrelated concepts, mostly revolving around the account term. Accounts in this sense have been defined as “statements made to explain untoward behaviour and bridge the gap between actions and expectations” (Scott & Lyman, 1968; p. 46). In addition, specified concepts like the storytelling approach (e.g. Harvey, Weber & Orbuch, 1990), or Peter Schönbach's (1990) work on interpersonal account episodes have developed using the account term. Other theoretical traditions (e.g. Sykes & Matza, 1957; Goffman, 1971; Schwartz, 1977; Weiner, Amirkhan, Folkes & Verette, 1987) have not used the term but deal with exactly the same topic: the buffering of negative psychological and social effects caused by social norm violation. This article offers both an integrated approach to, and an extension of, the different sociological and psychological methods of categorizing account strategies. Hence a selective overview of account- and account-like concepts and typologies will at first be given, followed by the presentation of an integrative meta-taxonomy, the ways model. As stated in the introduction, social control of norm-relevant behaviour works in a more or less direct way. The social agent can be the actor herself who shares a specific social norm and has integrated it into her self-concept. Alternatively (or additionally) the advocate of the social norm can be located outside the person as an opponent who is present in the critical situation. Accounts should be given in both kinds of “social” situation. The classic account concept was presented by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman in 1968, and explicitly dealt with interpersonal talk. This work has been taken up by a number of social scientists and has generated a wide variety of research and extended theorization (see for an overview Durkin, 2000; Lyman, 2000). Schönbach (1990) for example proposed a dynamic model of interpersonal account-giving. According to this author an account episode consists of a norm violation committed by the actor (failure event), followed by an opponent's reproach, an account put forward by the accused actor and a last phase, the evaluation of the account's validity by the opponent. If this evaluation leaves the opponent unsatisfied, a further account will most likely be demanded. This model of account negotiation has inspired a considerable amount of research aiming to identify the proposed internal structure of these phases, and to investigate the conflict escalation mechanisms involved in normative disputes (for an overview Cody & McLaughlin, 1990; Schönbach, 1998). Following Schönbach, conflict escalation is deemed likely when the accused actor uses accounts that damage the opponent's sense of control and self-esteem. Hence, the central task of an actor accused by an external opponent of norm violation is to undermine the opponent's reproach without at the same time undermining the opponent. Such mutual face-saving (e.g. Ting-Toomey, 1994) aims to mitigate interpersonal conflict. Accounts do not only work through interpersonal interaction but also occur through intrapersonal “dialogue”. Lyman (2000) puts forward this notion by stating that accounts “might be uttered aloud, set down as written statements, or remain unvocalized within the account giver's inner arcana of unspoken thoughts” (p. 8). Accordingly, account giving can be viewed as a cognitive script that derives from an equivalent social script (Schank & Ableson, 1977), one that obliges an account be given when an actor is accused of norm violation. It applies when an actor intends to execute, or has already executed, a specific behaviour that contradicts an internalized social norm salient to the particular situation. Although the actor rarely doubts the sense of validity promulgated by an internal account, specific internal or external cues or the presence of counter arguments can lead to an internal negotiation of the account's appropriateness. This notion leads to an integrated situational model of account giving, based on Schönbach's account episode model, but extended by prebehavioural account negotiation as well as by the possibility of an internal opponent (Fritsche, 2002a; Figure 1). Schönbach's (1990) conceptualisation of the account episode, extended for intrapersonal and prebehavioural account giving. Account giving serves numerous functions such as guilt-defense (Bybee, Zigler, Berliner & Mersca, 1996), the preservation and restoration of positive self-image (Snyder, Higgins & Stucky, 1983), self-esteem (Weiner, 1985) and personal control (Schönbach, 1990). Used in social interactions, account giving serves as a means of self-presentation (McLaughlin, Cody, Dickson & Manusov, 1992; Buttny, 1993), of avoiding punishment (Itoi, Ohbuchi & Fukuno, 1996) and of conflict-settlement (Cody & McLaughlin, 1990; Schönbach, 1998). Furthermore accounting enables individuals to break social norms that they are committed to, especially when the accounts are given in the run-up to a critical behaviour in response to norminconsistent intentions (Sykes & Matza, 1957; Fritsche, 2002b). From the perspective of social control, the latter function of account giving is particularly interesting in the way it reflects on the roles intra- and interindividual accounts play in the implementation of specific social norms in everyday behaviour. In 1957, the sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza published an article that initialized a considerable body of research under the rubric of neutralization theory. This theory, developed primarily within the context of delinquency research, has also been generalized outwards to help with the explanation of any normcontradicting behaviour (e.g. Opp, 1974). Neutralization theory assumes that people break rules not because they do not share the underlying norms, but rather because they are able to situationally neutralize these norms by accounting for their normcontradictive intentions. For instance, one can transfer this idea to an examination of a social norm like ‘pro-environmental behaviour’ (Schahn, Dinger & Bohner, 1995), since in many countries pro-environmental attitudes are widely spread and are socially desirable standards of conduct (e.g. European Commission, 1999; Schahn, Damian, Schurig & Füchsle, 2000). Now, imagine the senior lady from our bus, introduced in the first section, who—in spite of increasing infirmity—does not want to give up her flight to her beloved holiday destination on the Canary Islands. Asked by a social scientist if she is in favour of protecting the environment she states that she is, and also that she agrees with the need to restrict the levels of air traffic. But the next day she enters a travel agency and books a flight to the Canary Islands. According to Sykes & Matza (1957), the process that must have taken place in between her response to the social scientist and her purchase of the plane ticket can be described as the neutralization of social “disapproval1 flowing from internalized norms and conforming others in the social environment” (p. 666). This theory states that people neutralize social norms by learning specific techniques of neutralization: for example “It is by learning these techniques that the juvenile becomes delinquent, rather than by learning moral imperatives, values or attitudes standing in direct contradiction to those of the dominant society.” (p. 667). The idea that account giving moderates the norm-behaviour relationship is also explicated in Shalom Schwartz's norm activation model (Schwartz, 1977; Schwartz & Howard, 1981). According to this model it is possible for actors to omit helping behaviour, despite pro-helping intentions (subjective norm), by using account-like “defenses” to revise cognitions that would otherwise lead to moral obligations. However, the trick of prebehavioural accounting is to break norms without fundamentally undermining them. Through this discursive technique it is not only possible for people to reconcile actual intentions and behaviours with intersituational norms but also to maintain and conserve those social norms. Hence, societies with high levels of account giving activities should contain highly stable systems of normative beliefs and moral commandments. Despite different conceptualizations of account giving's place in the action sequence (both pre- as well as postbehavioural accounts) and its locus of expression (expressed either internally or in social interaction), there should generally be a comparable internal structure. Nevertheless, different theoretical traditions of account research have developed independent typologies. The most common and basic distinction in the literature on account giving is made between justifications and excuses (Austin, 1961; Scott & Lyman, 1968). Using an excuse means that an actor denies her volitional connection to the criticized behaviour without doubting the behaviour's normcontradictive character2. In contrast to this, using a justification means that an actor questions the falseness of the behaviour but does not dispute her own involvement3. Schönbach (1980) extended this fundamental distinction between justifications and excuses by adding the categories concession and refusal. In the case of concession the actor confesses or admits to the failure in question, whereas refusal“includes such lines of defence as denial that the act in question was in fact committed, and refusal to grant the other party the right of reproach” (Cody & McLaughlin, 1990, p. 230). Schönbach (1990) ranks the account categories in order of escalating defensiveness from concessions, to excuses, to justifications and up to refusals, which should be the most defensive or aggravating strategy in interpersonal conflict (see also Holtgraves, 1989). The past decades have also seen social science researchers developing a number of smaller scale typologies (e.g. Sykes & Matza, 1957; Scott & Lyman, 1968; Prus, 1975; Harré, 1977; Borkin & Reinhart, 1978; Tedeschi & Reiss, 1981; Schlenker & Darby, 1981; Cody & McLaughlin, 1988; Schahn, 1993). In accordance with Tedeschi & Reiss (1981), it is argued here that the number of possible account giving micro-strategies should theoretically be unlimited because account giving is a flexible cognitive and liguistic device that can be adapted to a broad range of different situations. This is why applying existing research on accounts to new fields of inquiry will often bring new micro-strategies to light. The oldest typology of modal range stems from Sykes & Matza (1957) work, and even nowadays this constitutes the core of neutralization theory. The authors mention “five major types” (p. 667) of neutralization, namely denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and appeal to higher loyalties. It has to be kept in mind that this list was developed with reference to the acts of juvenile criminals. In the course of his further development of neutralization research, Minor (1981) supplemented this compilation with defense of necessity and the metaphor of the ledger (which refers to the assertion that the rule-breaker “has a sufficient supply of good to his credit [and] can [therefore] indulge in some evil without feeling guilty”, p. 298). Neutralization theory has been applied to a variety of normcontradicting behaviours but research still relies on this set of five or seven techniques. Only Schahn et al. (1995), who investigated how “environmentally harmful behaviours” are neutralized in everyday life, adapted and extended this collection of techniques to fit their topic. They excluded the techniques denial of the victim and appeal to higher loyalties and added the following types of accounting (see also Schahn 1993): reference to lack of knowledge, reference to laziness, reference to helplessness of the individual and refusal to take responsibility for the future (“Nach mir die Sintflut”). An empirical analysis of the typology's sufficiency with respect to environmentally harmful behaviour (Fritsche & Mayrhofer, 2002) revealed a need for definitory refinement and explication in order to differentiate between the account giving strategies. It also suggested a need for three further account categories: Promised reform, acceptance of guilt (see also Linneweber & Haberstroh, 1996) and reference to the sins of others4. Such collections of account giving strategies leave behind them a sense of empirical arbitrariness. This is due not only to their contextual specifity (as mentioned above, lists of account strategies differ considerably between different contexts of norm-violating behaviour) but also to the lack of meta theoretical assumptions connecting the categories to and amongst each other. If the aim of an investigation is to describe the range of possible accounts given in a specific situation in as finely-grained a manner as possible, nothing is wrong with micro coding. But as soon as we try to identify the dynamics of account giving inherent to all contexts, the of micro we need a meta that the of accounts in an and theoretically way. 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