deviation from social norms evaluation

• For real world application

  One strength of deviation from social norms is its usefulness.

  Deviation from social norms is used in clinical practice. For example, the key defining characteristic of antisocial personality disorder is the failure to conform to culturally acceptable ethical behaviour i.e. recklessness, aggression, violating the rights of others and deceitfulness. These signs of the disorder are all deviations from social norms. Such norms also play a part in the diagnosis of schizoptypal personality disorder, where the term 'strange' is used to characterise the thinking, behaviour and appearance of people with the disorder.

  This shows that the deviation from social norms criterion has value in psychiatry.
• situational/ cultural relavatism

  One limitation of deviation from social norms is the variability between social norms in different cultures and even different situations.

  A person from one cultural group may label someone from another group as abnormal using their standards rather than the person's standards. For example, the experience of hearing voices is the norm in some cultures (as messages from ancestors) but would be seen as a sign of abnormality in most parts of the UK. Also, even within one cultural context social norms differ from one situation to another. Aggressive and deceitful behaviour in the context of family life is more socially unacceptable than in the context of corporate deal-making. This means that it is difficult to judge deviation from social norms across different situations and cultures.
• defining causes Human rights abuses

  Using deviation from social norms to define someone as abnormal carries the risk of unfair labelling and leaving them open to human rights abuses. Historically this has been the case where diagnoses like nymphomania (women's uncontrollable or excessive sexual desire) have been used to control women, or diagnoses like drapetomania (black slaves running away) were a way to control slaves and avoid debate.

  On the other hand it can be argued that we need to be able to use deviation from social norms to diagnose conditions such as antisocial personality disorder.