ABSTRACT
As we have already seen in the Introduction, proponents of the sociocognitive approach to social norms contend that the normativity of judgments follows more from the necessities of our social functioning than from human motivations. In other words, normativity is grounded in social prescriptions rather than in supposedly universal values. One of the implications of this view is that judgment normativity cannot result from the pure maturation of a spontaneous tendency. It seems instead to be the outcome of genuine social learning processes through which the learner (child or adult) learns to attribute value (or utility) to normative judgments. This chapter will be devoted to studies that support this point of view, but before beginning, a few important points need to be made.
