Q.Distinguish between the cognitive and normative aspects of culture, giving an example of each.

Culture's cognitive and normative dimensions are often confused with each other because both are non-material and both feel automatic once learned, but they refer to genuinely different things. The cognitive dimension concerns how a group processes and makes sense of what it perceives -- it is about meaning-making, not conduct. Instantly recognising your own phone's ring in a crowd of similar phones, or correctly reading a political cartoon that assumes shared background knowledge, are both cognitive acts: they are about interpreting information correctly, not about following a rule of behaviour.

The normative dimension, by contrast, is specifically about rules of conduct -- what a group considers acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. Not opening someone else's private letters, or observing particular rituals at a death in the family, are normative expectations: they tell you how to behave, not how to interpret a signal. Within the normative dimension itself, it is worth distinguishing norms from laws. Norms are mostly implicit and can vary by family, community or status group -- a household rule about curfew binds only that family. Laws, by contrast, are explicit rules set by the authority of the state, apply uniformly across the whole society regardless of which family or group a person belongs to, and carry defined penalties when violated, such as facing trial for theft.

The simplest way to keep the cognitive and normative dimensions distinct is to ask what kind of failure would occur if the shared understanding broke down: failing to recognise a culturally loaded cue (missing the point of a joke or a gesture) is a cognitive failure, while failing to follow an expected rule of behaviour (walking into someone's home uninvited, or opening their mail) is a normative one. Both are essential, learned parts of belonging to a culture, but they operate on different aspects of social life -- one on understanding, the other on conduct.