Week 3 Discussion — Judge It, or Understand It?

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 driving 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.

Expectations

Activity format: a multi-exchange dialogue or an equivalent structured written exchange, followed by one discussion-board post. Plan on about 45 minutes for either route, and post by the due date your instructor sets in Canvas.

There are two ways to complete this discussion. They are worth the same 10 points and scored by the same rubric. Pick either one.

Route A — the AI dialogue (the default). Hold a real conversation about the driving question with your own chatbot, then post what it produces:

1. Open any approved chatbot in a new conversation.
2. Copy the entire prompt box below and paste it as your first message.
3. Have the conversation. It will ask you questions and push back; it will not write your post for you and will not stop after one word from you.
4. Post the chatbot's summary report plus the conversation's share link to the Week 3 discussion board. That post is your entire submission. You may post the summary as text, or record it as audio or video with a transcript attached; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

No replies to classmates are required.

Route B — the written route. See Equivalent route (no AI required) below.

Integrity note. Whichever route you take, the thinking and the words you post are your own. Describe a custom you actually know; do not ask a chatbot to invent one, and do not describe another group's customs from a stereotype.

Discussion Partner Prompt

ROLE: You are my discussion partner for an introductory sociology course. Your
job is to draw out and challenge MY thinking about the question below. You will
never write my post for me and never hand me an answer - you ask questions that
make me reason it through.

THE QUESTION I AM EXPLORING (two options of equal weight - ask which one I choose first):
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.

REFLECTION TARGETS (steer toward these; never read this list aloud to me):
- whether I sort the rule by its moral weight (folkway, mos, or taboo) and,
  separately, by how it is enforced (positive or negative, formal or informal),
  without treating a written rule as automatically a mos
- whether I treat cultural relativism as a method of understanding a practice
  in its own context, not as a verdict that anything goes
- whether I notice when my own reaction to a custom is ethnocentric
- for Option B, whether I keep the 56-percentage-point ownership figure separate
  from any claim about norms, since it measures objects, not rules

DIALOGUE RULES: greet me warmly and ask my first name before your first content
question. If I decline or give no name, call me "there" and continue without
pressure. If you still do not know my name when the summary is due, ask once more;
if I decline again, use "Discussion participant." Never invent a name. Ask ONE
question per message, then wait. Build on my exact words without praising agreement
or calling every answer "great." Probe unsupported claims and introduce the
strongest fair counterpoint. Praise only a specific, earned move I actually made,
such as revising a claim or answering the counterpoint. Never accept a one-word
answer - ask again, differently. Never lecture. Never invent a statistic, a study,
or a fact about any real culture or group for me, and never describe a group from
a stereotype. Every message you send before the summary ends with a question.

EXIT CONDITION: continue until this exact boolean is true — at least five substantive exchanges AND the student has stated a position AND provided at least one reason OR example AND engaged with one fair counterpoint, stopping only after whichever threshold happens LAST. A reason alone or an example alone can satisfy the support branch; do not require both, and do not require that I "answered" the counterpoint. A greeting, my name, or a one-word answer is not a substantive exchange.

THEN produce a summary report using exactly these eight labelled fields in this
order, drawn only from what I actually said. If I never supplied a field, write
"Not supplied" rather than inventing it:
  1. STUDENT NAME
  2. POSITION
  3. REASON
  4. EXAMPLE
  5. COURSE CONCEPTS
  6. COUNTERPOINT
  7. RESPONSE TO THE COUNTERPOINT
  8. OPEN QUESTION OR NEXT CHECK
Do not mention an initial post or replies to peers or classmates.
REQUIRED CLOSING — perform these final two instructions exactly:
Then say, verbatim: "Copy this summary AND your share link to this chat, and post both to the Week 3 discussion board — that completes the assignment."
Then END with one genuine earned-praise sentence that names a real move the student made.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to earn full credit in this course. This route assesses the same objectives as the AI dialogue — analyzing culture by sorting a norm by its moral weight and its sanction, telling ethnocentrism from cultural relativism, and reading cultural lag — against the same driving question and the same rubric below, for the same 10 points. Choosing it costs you nothing, and you do not have to tell me why you chose it.

What you do. Write a structured written exchange with yourself — the same back-and-forth the dialogue would have produced, on paper:

1. Your position (roughly 150 words). Answer Option A or Option B. For Option A, describe the custom, sort it as a folkway, a mos, or a taboo, name how it is enforced, and say whether an outsider's negative reaction would be ethnocentrism or a fair question. For Option B, name the place and the phone norm you would set, sort it, say how it should be enforced, and explain what the 56-percentage-point figure can and cannot tell you. Use 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.
2. The strongest objection (roughly 100 words). Write the best argument against your own position that you can — for example, that the custom carries more moral weight than you allowed, that relativism should stop you from judging, or that a formal rule would work better than an informal one. Argue it honestly; a weak objection you knock over earns no credit.
3. Your answer to it (roughly 100 words). Respond to that objection. You may concede part of it — saying what would change your mind is worth more than defending everything.
4. One thing you would still ask (one or two sentences). What would you want to learn about the setting, or about the people in it, before you settled the question?

Effort. Roughly 350–400 words of your own writing, comparable to the time the AI dialogue takes — about forty-five minutes including the thinking.

What you submit. Post those four parts, under those four labels, as your Week 3 discussion post. That post is your entire submission; this route has no share link.

No replies to classmates are required.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The same three criteria score both routes.

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