Norms

Norms are unwritten rules about how one should be, live and look.

They can be linked to stereotypes and then tend to be bad, for example that a girl should look a certain way just because she is a girl or that a person with a certain religion should exhibit certain behavior, but norms are also things like standing to the right on the escalator (a genuine thing people expect in Sweden) or not talking with food in your mouth. The case of the last two are not really a problem, and may even be positive.

However, far from all norms are positive. Often they make demands on how a person should look or behave in ways that can be considered negative and they can make the people who do not fit into the norm feel excluded.

What norms have in common is that it is the person who breaks the norm that is called into question, and not the norm itself. If we take the example of the escalator again. If a person stands on the left of the escalator, it is that person who is questioned as to why they are standing there. There would be very few who would question why we usually stand on the right in the escalator. In that particular case, it does no harm to stand on the right of the escalator, but for those who do not know the norm, it can be difficult to be treated rudely because they stood on the left. In many other cases, it can be directly problematic to be forced to follow a norm despite not wanting to.

Bias

Bias can be described as an assessment that can be perceived as objective even though it is based on personal (conscious and subconscious) opinions. An example of a kind of bias is the so-called confirmation bias, which is a form of selective thinking. This means that a person searches for or only chooses to take in information that confirms the opinions and beliefs they already possess. It is easier to believe in and adopt things you already believe in.

As an example of confirmation bias, we can talk about an example with a study on hyperactivity in children after they ate sugar. The study found that both parents of children who were given sugar and parents who believed their children were given sugar reported that their children were hyperactive, while parents of children who were not given sugar or believed their children were not given sugar when given it reported that the children were calm. The parents thus saw the children's behavior and interpreted it differently depending on whether they thought the children had ingested sugar or not. They believed that sugar would lead to hyperactivity and therefore saw such signs in their children when they ingested sugar.

Bias can interact with norms to the extent that if a person meets a norm once, then you think that person is according to the norm, when in fact they may be completely different the rest of the time.

A person who in some way breaks the norm (and thus belongs to a minority) also becomes in some way a representative for their entire minority. If a person who belongs to a minority does something that is perceived as bad, it is linked to the entire minority, i.e. that "people who belong to minority X are bad at Y". A person who belongs to the majority, on the other hand, is only judged for his own behavior, i.e. "person X is bad at Y".