Week 3 Discussion — Judge It, or Understand It? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

Every group runs on rules its members barely notice until an outsider breaks one, or until a new gadget arrives faster than the rules for using it. This week you learned to sort those rules by moral weight, to ask how they are enforced, and to tell judging a custom from understanding it, so you can now argue about where a rule comes from and who gets to say it is right.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Describe a custom from a group you belong to (a family, a team, a workplace, a club, or an online community) that an outsider might find odd. Sort it as a folkway, a mos, or a taboo, and say how the group enforces it. Then take a position: if an outsider called the custom strange or wrong, would that reaction be ethnocentrism, or is there a fair standard by which the custom could still be questioned? Where, in your view, does understanding a practice end and judging it begin?

Option B: Pew Research Center reports that 35% of U.S. adults owned a smartphone in 2011 and 91% in 2025, a rise of 56 percentage points. Pick one place where phone use is still argued over (the dinner table, a workplace, a classroom, a place of worship, or a group chat) and take a position on what the norm there should be. Is it a folkway or should it carry the weight of a mos, and should it be enforced formally or informally? Use the idea of cultural lag, and say what the 56-point figure can and cannot tell you about the norm.

There is no single right answer. A family custom, a workplace rule, or a phone norm can each be argued well in more than one direction. Pick one you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, describe the custom and sort it as a folkway, a mos, or a taboo; for Option B, name the place and state in one clear sentence the phone norm you would set there.
• Say how the rule is or should be enforced: positive or negative, formal or informal.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (culture, society, norms, folkways, mores, taboo, sanction, formal sanction, informal sanction, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, cultural lag, material culture, nonmaterial culture) correctly.
• Give your reason, and name one limit of your own view: what an outsider might fairly question (Option A) or what the 56-percentage-point ownership figure cannot tell you about the norm (Option B).
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: question how a classmate sorted a norm, ask what the custom means inside the group before judging it, or argue for the other way of enforcing a phone rule. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B. In my workplace break room, people keep phones face down during the shared lunch. Nobody wrote that rule, and breaking it earns a joke, so it is a folkway with an informal sanction. I would keep it that way rather than make it a written policy, because a formal rule would turn a courtesy into a disciplinary matter. The ownership figure tells me phones spread fast, but it says nothing about which lunch norm is right; that part is cultural lag, and the figure cannot settle it.

Notice how it sorts the norm by moral weight and by sanction separately, keeps the ownership figure apart from the claim about norms, and takes a clear position. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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