Social behaviour

We are social animals; we live with other people. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is born into a family and soon enmeshed in a set of relationships. The vast majority of people are born into some kind of community, where people severally come repeatedly into contact with each other, have obligations and relationships to each other, recognise each other as belonging to distinct social groups, such as families, neighbourhoods or nationalities. Little or nothing about us is unaffected by other human beings – social contact is our natural state. Life is full of situations where we know there are codes, norms, rules and expectations of behaviour. The lines may be blurred at times, but the norms that govern what one does in a supermarket are not the same as the ones that apply in a school classroom; the way that a person behaves in a music concert is not how the very same person behaves at work. Our behaviour is ‘socialised’. We may put the differences down to social behaviour, but in a sense, all our behaviour is social: we do personal and private things, like sleeping, eating or dressing, in ways that we have learned to do them.

The idea of the ‘social’ refers, in general terms, to the substantial range of norms, expectations and influences that people are subject to as part of the condition of living with and around other people. Watkins, a committed individualist, suggests that this is all subjective:

There is a case for saying that social phenomena are ‘inter-subjective’ – that they are constructed from shared views and conventions, formed over time by groups of people. There is none for saying that they are ‘created by personal attitudes’, as if the money in your bank account or the laws about speeding will change if only you furrow your eyebrows and think about them differently. Social ‘things’ – societal facts – have an existence distinct from the mind- set of any individual.