We are all immersed in a sea of social norms, but they are sometimes tricky to observe with any clarity. They are often invisible to us and emerge only when they are not observed. Social norms are important to understand because they are both limiting of our freedom, such as gendered and racialized norms, and at the same time the very conditions of our agency. Social Goodness presents an original theory of the normativity or normative "oomph" of social role norms by developing an artisanal model for human social normativity. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the "stickiness" or persistence of social norms, and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation--to create new normative selves.
