Culture of Legality and Transgression of Norms in University Youth

Abstract

This paper begins with an overview of the literature on legal, social and moral norms and their relationship with individual behaviours, and then discusses the culture of legality in a group of university students in Italy. In particular, this paper provides a reflection on the relationship that exists between social and legal norms and their mutual capacity to influence the behaviours of young people. We highlight the multidimensional nature of the underlying factors of conditionality, relativity and universality. We also discuss the existence of two types of social norms, general and generational and their differing capacities to affect behaviour. The research technique is a web survey on 3938 students from three Italian universities (Venezia, Bari, Salerno)