How to Do Things with Norms: Empirical and Normative Research on Extreme Beliefs and Social Identities

Many researchers feel some degree of unease when confronted with empirical work on normative concepts, issues, or phenomena. Concepts such as justice, legitimacy, and truth are social constructs, without definite boundaries or properties and influenced by the personal values of researchers, participants in experiments, and respondents in surveys. This has impeded progress in theoretical and empirical research. This chapter provides a stylized representation of how empirical researchers deal with normativity, consisting of three elements: (i) empirical research construes normative concepts as factual concepts (factualization); (ii) empirical research accesses normative concepts through subjective experiences of experimental subjects (subjectification); and (iii) empirical research involves simplifying normative concepts (simplification). Drawing from a diverse array of research, the authors present a number of examples of empirical work on normative concepts and provide concrete and actionable recommendations that can guide future empirical work, both in a general context and specifically concerning extremism and related subjects.