Funeral Social Norm

Within society there have been a set of unspoken guidelines/rules that people have felt the need to follow. These unspoken rules speculate what kinds of behaviors society says is appropriate and acceptable within a certain culture or group (Ferris and Stein [2016]). These rules have changed and evolved over time but they are still present and society blindly follows them. Often one does it not knowingly or does it “just cause”. These unspoken rules/guidelines are often referred to as norms and can be as simple as not talking in a library or facing towards the door of an elevator. No one person wrote it in stone that these things must be done, but people within society still do them. Another social norm that most western cultures partake in

While this may be true not all adhere to this social norm. While a funeral could be a sad moment, it is also a time when people come together and look back on all the memories that have occurred, which can make it seem a little bit enjoyable and help people find peace and closure. For the purpose of this assignment as well as being respectful to my friend, I chose to break the social norm of wearing black to a funeral. Being as close to my friend as I was, I knew that her favorite color was red and that she dreaded the color black. So instead of wearing a black dress I wore a red

Had one of us been an actual sister or cousin than maybe we wouldn’t have been told that wearing red was disrespectful. They may very well could have saw it as honoring her memory or our way of grieving her death, something other than disrespectful. Had we been a family member that type of behavior might have been expected. It is more understanding for someone in the family to be so upset that it effects their actions. The people who called us disrespectful saw it as we did not have the right to be that upset or the right to take that action of wearing a different color than everyone else because “we weren’t that close to her because we didn’t live