Bad Cats and College Drinking

Cats are very cute.

But, as anyone with a cat knows, they can be wolfs in lambs clothing.

Unlike dogs, cats are virtually un-trainable, and have a reputation for being very egocentric and "stuck up". They like to be the authority on every matter, and, you as people, are just there willing slaves to feed them and pet them when they want it. I know this, because I have had cats my whole life.

However, my cat Bob sits when he is fed, comes when he is called, knows his name, and asks to go outside.
My friends that were here over their break got much entertainment from the fact that we had successfully trained a cat. Why is this so unusual? Why should this be a shocking realization? We know cats are relatively intelligent, so why is it so strange for one to be trained?

Because they have the reputation of being stubborn, and can not be trained. For cats, this attitude and reputation is there norm, and is accepted by society even though it is not necessarily true. This is a good representation of similar things that take place within the human species as well. We have these social norms that are what dictate what we do and how we should think, and then are rewarded or punished based off of the societies understanding of the action. For instance, the norm in Barrington Society is to graduate high school.. If you don't, the repercussion of that is the idea that you are unprepared for college, and can not get in. This is an actual social norm. There is a different type of norms however, and these are perceived norms. One example is that it is normal for a cat to be un-trainable- in actuality, people just assume that and therefore, don't try. Another is that college students drink- a lot. However, a study at SMU showed that students didn't drink nearly as much as their peers perseived.

see study here

Even though these "norms" dictate what we as a society perceive as normal, they can very easily be a misconception or simply not true. We judge people based on weather or not they follow these certain set of rules, when the rules are not actually rules, we just see them as such. So why do people care so much about following these rules? They supposedly make society function but doesn't that mean society functions of falsehood?