Breaching Social Norms

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Recommended: Social norms: the unwritten rules of culture within society

In this day and age we like to say that we thrive on being ourselves and embracing our individuality, while this may be true in my social experiment I found that more often than not we tend to keep to ourselves and follow the social norms of day to day life. Social norms are behaviors and cues most everyone learns throughout their lives. These norms teach us what is and is not acceptable. To fully understand and analyze how norms serve to regulate behavior in our social world, I decided to breach a social norm of my own. I chose to breach the social norm of clapping and cheering for people when they enter a room for no reason at all. I chose to breach this norm at Seven Springs Ski Resort in the main lodge. I breached this norm at all different hours of the day from nine o'clock in the morning until seven at night. Inside the main lodge families and friends sat at tables of four in open rooms with big windows that allowed you to watch the weather and slopes. It snowed steadily all day, the sky was overcast and it was about nine degrees outside. The people seemed to be either extremely annoyed by the weather conditions or pretty happy. Inside the main lodge different groups ate, rested, played cards or stood in a never dying line at a make-shift Starbucks kiosk. I witnessed people grow quickly aggravated with trying to walk in ski boots while others sat and laughed at their falls on the slopes and discussed the winter Olympics. My friends that came with me to slopes that day never knew about my experiment until our day was over but I believe they did help my experiment in many ways. I tried clapping for strangers on my own a handful of times but only ever got other families and groups to join in when my own friends would join in... ... middle of paper ... ...e unwritten rules of our society. My experiment with breaching social norms has revealed its importance in our society. These normative behaviors are so powerful because of our natural desire to conform to others behaviors. While social norms are learned behaviors our desire I believe is always there. All societies and cultures have normative behaviors. The human desire to conform is recognized as conformism, which helps to guarantee stability and limits within our society. People didn't chose to join in and clap, sing or chant with me because they were excited for that person or proud of them they did it because everyone around them was doing it. The power of conformity in our society is overwhelming in my opinion, but, I don't know if certain individuals in this culture would be able to function properly without these normative ques we all mostly seem to follow.

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