Folkways in sociology are informal norms or customs that guide everyday behavior within a society. They are socially accepted but don’t carry the strong moral significance of mores.
Folkway is a sociological term. It names a socially approved, traditional standard of everyday behavior, a type of informal social norm.
William Graham Sumner coined the term. He introduced it in his 1906 book, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals.
Folkways guide people’s behavior in the same way laws do, but they are not codified as laws are. They are passed down from generation to generation and become part of our social heritage.
Folkways govern the small details of everyday life. They shape how people dress, eat, greet others, and use utensils at the dinner table (Sumner, 2017).
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Folkways are informal, low-stakes customs of everyday life, such as table manners, dress, and greetings, whose violation draws mild disapproval, not moral condemnation.
- Unplanned Origin: Sumner argued folkways are never consciously designed; they form through the unplanned trial and error of a group meeting its everyday practical needs.
- Mild Sanctions: A folkway violation is read as a technical or aesthetic failure, not a moral one, so it draws informal correction rather than serious punishment.
- Becoming a More: A folkway can be promoted into a more once a group attaches a judgment of welfare or wrongdoing to it, as with indoor smoking.
- Patterns of Change: Folkways change through four patterns: secularisation, diffusion, assimilation, and persistence.
- Modern Evidence: Recent research shows folkways can form and decay far faster than Sumner’s generational timescale. Netiquette emerged within a single generation, and pandemic-era distancing habits weakened faster than they later recovered.
While folkways are not laws, violating them can result in sanctions from others. Sanctions can be either positive or negative. Positive sanctions reward people for conforming to a folkway.
Meanwhile, negative sanctions punish us for violating a folkway. For example, if someone wears a suit to a job interview, they may receive positive sanctions in the form of compliments from the interviewer and a perception of professionalism.
On the other hand, someone who comes to the interview in ripped jeans and a t-shirt may receive negative sanctions. They might be told they are not dressed appropriately for the occasion, and rejected as a result.
Why the difference is so mild is worth explaining.
Folkway sanctions stay this mild because no judgment of right, wrong, or group welfare is attached to the custom itself. Observers read a violation as a technical or aesthetic failure, such as bad taste, rather than a moral one. Appearance is not morality.
This is why the interviewer judges ripped jeans as unprofessional rather than immoral. A candidate who lied under oath in the same interview would be judged in far harsher, moralised terms, even though both are norm violations.
How Folkways Form
William Graham Sumner did not just define folkways; his 1906 book traces the same underlying process across food, labour, marriage, and dozens of other areas of life.
Two of his own ideas explain far more than the everyday examples above suggest.
Unplanned Formation and Societal Selection
Sumner argued that folkways are never consciously designed. Early groups faced recurring needs, such as finding food or raising children, and kept whatever worked. As Sumner put it, these customs are “consequences which were never conscious, and never foreseen or intended” (Sumner, 1906).
Sumner called the next step societal selection. Because folkways emerge through trial and error, the ones that persist simply worked well enough for the group that held them. Folkways that hindered a group’s survival tended to fade or lose out to a rival group’s more effective customs.
The logic borrows directly from nineteenth-century biological selection, applied to custom instead of genes. The parallel is deliberate.
Folkways also feel a pull toward fitting together, favouring customs that support each other over ones that clash with everything else a group does.
From Folkway to More
Sumner’s most important move treats the folkway/more boundary as a process, not a fixed label. In his own words, “when the elements of truth and right are developed into doctrines of welfare, the folkways are raised to another plane… Then we call them the mores” (Sumner, 1906).
The custom itself does not change; what changes is whether the group has attached a judgment that breaking it threatens the group’s welfare or sense of right and wrong.
Indoor smoking shows this shift clearly. For most of the 1900s, smoking indoors near others was just habit, kept mild by folkway-level etiquette. As the health evidence against secondhand smoke spread, the same behaviour was reframed as a threat to others, and many places banned it within a generation.
The numbers are striking. A thirty-year US survey tracked over 1.4 million respondents from 1992-2022. Anti-smoking norms tracked the decline in smoking almost exactly (r = -0.88). Residents of the strongest-norm states were 26% less likely to smoke than those in the weakest-norm states (Strong et al., 2026).
Sumner’s own theory did not anticipate this pace of change.
Folkway Patterns
There are four main patterns of folkways:
- Secularization: the process by which folkways become less important and lose their hold over people’s behavior.
- Diffusion: the process by which folkways spread from one group to another.
- Assimilation: the process by which folkways are adopted by a new group of people.
- Persistence: the process by which folkways resist change and remain unchanged over time.
Examples of Folkways
Receiving gifts
The act of giving and receiving gifts has a long history, and there are many different customs associated with it. In some cultures, gifts are given to mark important occasions, such as births, weddings, and holidays. In other cultures or contexts, gifts are given to show appreciation or gratitude.
Folkways also govern gift-opening customs. In American and British cultures, people are expected to open a gift on receiving it and thank the giver. Many Arab cultures view immediate opening as rude instead.
- Aim: Caplow (1984) tested whether Americans’ unwritten Christmas gift-giving rules are actually followed with any consistency. He also asked whether such an important custom could be enforced with no visible mechanism at all.
- Method: As part of a community study of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), his team interviewed a random sample of adult residents in 1979. They asked how each person had celebrated the previous Christmas.
- Results: Gifts were reliably wrapped, exchanged reciprocally, and meant to surprise the recipient. Gift value was also consistently scaled to how close the giver and receiver were, all without anyone negotiating it explicitly.
- Conclusion: Caplow concluded that Christmas gift-giving reinforces relationships people value but experience as socially insecure. Its unwritten rules do enforcement work that would otherwise need a formal authority.
This is a rare case of a folkway system studied directly in the field rather than described from casual observation. A single American city in 1979, though, cannot show how far its specific rules travel to other cultures or eras.
Covering one”s mouth when they cough or sneeze
The act of covering one”s mouth is a way to be polite and prevent the spread of germs. There are also folkways concerning how people may react to coughing or sneezing.
For example, people may say “bless you” as a polite gesture when witnessing a sneeze.
Alcoholic Consumption Customs
Generally, in Anglophonic cultures, alcoholic beverages are most acceptably consumed during the evening. Still, in other cultures, drinking wine or beer at lunchtime may be typical, or unacceptable altogether.
Not Spitting on The Sidewalk
Spitting on the sidewalk, in most cultures, is seen as impolite and unsanitary. Folkways typically dictate that one should expectorate in an appropriate receptacle, such as a waste bin, and not in public spaces where others have to see or step in it.
This folkway has become a law in Singapore, which legally banned the act of spitting on the sidewalk (Austin, 1987).
Critical Evaluation
Sumner’s own explanation for why folkways survive is narrower than it first looks. A folkway persists only because it worked well enough for the group that held it. Nothing more is claimed.
This is a more contingent claim than later functionalist theories make. It explains why one custom outcompetes another, not why society needs customs of some kind at all.
Folkways can also look more neutral than they are. Because a folkway carries no attached moral judgment, it is easy to treat it as simply “how things are done.” But that framing can hide something that disadvantages one group over another.
A professional dress-code folkway can quietly disadvantage a job candidate who cannot afford clothing that matches the expected style. It can disadvantage cultural dress too. What looks like a neutral matter of taste becomes a real, unevenly distributed barrier.
The evidence below makes this concrete.
Contemporary Research
- Aim: Vriens, Andrighetto, and Tummolini (2024) tested how social norms around physical distancing changed as COVID-19 risk rose and fell. They also asked whether a weakened norm recovers as fast as it declined.
- Method: The team surveyed 1,977 Rome residents over ten survey waves, from June 2021 to February 2022. Participants reported how much distance people actually kept, and how much distance they thought people should keep, in supermarket queues.
- Results: As risk fell, expectations of distancing weakened accordingly. When risk rose again, those expectations did not recover as fast, revealing a lag between how quickly the norm eroded and how quickly it returned.
- Conclusion: An informal, folkway-like norm does track real-world risk, but it recovers from weakening more slowly than it declined in the first place.
This is some of the strongest available evidence for how quickly a folkway-like norm can actually change. It tracks the same population’s expectations against real local health data across ten separate survey waves. The pattern is stark.
Its main limitation is that it covers a single city in a single country. The exact asymmetry it found may not generalise to other places, or to folkways governing different areas of life.
This fills a real gap in Sumner’s own theory. He explained why a folkway persists, but said little about how fast persistence can break down once conditions shift.
References
Austin, W. T. (1987). Crime and custom in an orderly society: The Singapore prototype. Criminology, 25 (2), 279-294.
Caplow, T. (1984). Rule enforcement without visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown. American Journal of Sociology, 89(6), 1306–1323. https://doi.org/10.1086/228017
Lemert, E. M. (1942). The folkways and social control. American Sociological Review, 7 (3), 394-399.
Strong, D. R., Pierce, J. P., Messer, K., Dang, B., McMenamin, S., Stone, M. D., & Trinidad, D. R. (2026). Social norms and the decline in US cigarette smoking: Evidence from 30 years of US representative surveys. BMJ Public Health, 4(2), e002389. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjph-2024-002389
Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways: A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals. Ginn & Company.
Sumner, W. G. (2017). Folkways and mores. In The sociology of law (pp. 50-54). Routledge.
Sumner, W. G. (2019). Folkways: A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals. Good Press.
Vriens, E., Andrighetto, G., & Tummolini, L. (2024). Risk, sanctions and norm change: The formation and decay of social distancing norms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1897), 20230035. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0035
