Custom is any cultural pattern that is well established through regular use. William Graham Sumner’s book Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906), is a sociological study of customs, morals, and social conventions. He gave a theoretical explanation of the origin, nature, and dynamics of these social and cultural patterns. Sumner starts from the evolutionary theory of human behavior and innate instincts. Through his animal ancestors, man inherited an instinctive ability to distinguish pain from pleasure, which enabled him to adopt, through trial and error, types of group behavior that gave a group a better chance of survival.

The four main types of innate instincts or motives for human action are: hunger, sexual desire, vanity, and fear. These motives form the basis of specific "interests" that people, in their lives, try to satisfy. Society creates patterns that regulate the right ways to meet these interests. These right ways of satisfying interests are "folkways". Folkways or social „customs“ include all established patterns of behavior, from the way of spending free time, to the most important moral rules. Customs work in an unconscious habitual way and are strengthened, over time, by tradition, habits, and religious sanctions. Sumner calls the process of developing and establishing customs a "ritual." Because people believe in the wisdom and usefulness of customs, it allows them to perform a huge number of daily activities without rational thinking about the purpose of each individual action. Sumner believes that if individuals were forced to always make a rational judgment about every action, the psychological burden would be unbearable.

When a particular correct pattern of behavior acquires the authority of fact (truth), in a particular society, then it becomes part of "mores". Mores are coercive and constraining social norms that include philosophical and ethical teachings, beliefs, codes, and standards of the good life. Social norms (mores) formulate rules and boundaries of behavior. Every individual is subject to the "legitimacy" of social conventions from birth. Mores regulate the social, political, and religious behaviors of people. Social conventions usually contain "taboos", forbidden behaviors that have been proven to be harmful by historical experience. Social norms coerce individuals, so a person who does not respect them is expelled from society. In this way, mores perform the function of social selection.

Different societies have different folkways of life, that is, different customs, rules, taboos, and conventions, so it is necessary to apply ethnographic research to determine specific customs for each particular society. Often people in a society are not even aware of all the customs in their society until they get to know societies that have different customs. Since social mores and customs are specific to each society, there is no absolute or universal morality. Social conventions also change over time in a particular society. Sumner believes that customs originate, develop, change, and die out, similar to living beings. Changes in social customs arise from an unconscious collective effort to adapt customs to changing circumstances and the interests of society.

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