Breaking Social Norms

The norm that I broke is waving at strangers. Noninteraction with strangers is a social norm therefore I received mixed responses. Normal behavior toward unfamiliar individuals is no interaction or walking past. The most interaction between two people that don’t know each other is a quiet “excuse me” is they are in the way or bumped into. Commonly, children are taught not to speak to strangers because it’s impossible to know what people are capable of without knowing them first. Despite this, I feel that this experiment provided insight into others’ personalities due to their responses. Violation of this social norm was conducted by waving at random people. I set up sitting in a booth next to the window at a dining hall. This gave me the opportunity

This behavior was seen as friendly more than awkward to me. Since starting college at Georgia State University, I’ve become more outgoing and friendly than I’ve ever been in high school so this was easy to me. Now, whenever I think that I’m going to be in an awkward situation or I’m nervous about something, I jump in to whatever I’m worried about to the point where I don’t focus on worrying because I’m already committing the act. I feel that this was one of the easier norms to break because it was focused on being outgoing but there was also no requirement to actually speak to anyone or be close to people. There were no dangerous outcomes I could see resulting from breaking this norm. I believe that it’s easier for people who are not concerned with others’ perceptions of them to break certain norms such as eating standing up or walking around the city with no bra on than others who would rather break a norm similar to mine where people aren’t really judging you as much. I believe this all stems down to peoples’ personalities and what they’re comfortable with doing. I feel that this assignment taught me how relevant social norms are. I didn’t realize it but they’re everywhere in everything that people do. Personally, I didn’t feel social deviance when breaking this norm but I have before. Social deviance and social norms essentially are the guidelines for society because individuals follow social norms such as not interacting with strangers while experiencing social deviance if they think about or break said social