Abstract

This essay is an introduction to a special issue centered on Cecilia Heyes’ article ‘Rethinking Norm Psychology’. This target article criticizes nativist accounts of the psychological processes dedicated to social norms and offers an alternative account of norm psychology as a cognitive gadget that is culturally evolved and socially learned. The essay sketches out the conceptual landscape around that article and locates within it some of the main points of the 14 short commentaries. These discussions focus especially on trying to clarify the central phenomena that a theory of norm psychology should seek to explain and examining Heyes model and its depiction of the interaction of implicit and explicit processes. They also consider Heyes' methodological proposal for how to best test hypotheses against each other and marshal evidence for claims about innateness. This introduction essay separates out social normativity from other forms of normativity. It also offers brief arguments that future work by norm psychologists should focus on further clarifying its relationship to a handful of nearby phenomena, including status psychology, social identity, and hierarchy; normalcy and the concept of normal, and the nuances of norm enforcement.