Norms and Values: The Invisible Social Regulators

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Back in my high school days, a friend of mine asked me a simple question which shut down my thought process completely. The question was, ‘What is stopping us from punching the next person that says something?’ Paused for a while looking around the class for a logical answer. After several blinks off to space I responded values. The answer of values literally came out of the blue. For a well educated guess I was not too far off. Politically speaking norms are the reason we chose whether to do something or not, with a combination of values of course. Norms are defined as shared rules of conduct that specify what people ought or ought not do in specific settings. Everyday people violate many norms both knowingly and unknowingly. For example: …show more content…

In other world I could get a way of not wearing a shirt in certain situations. Even though it is not against the law, people in our society will still ask you to put on a shirt. I walked around Burns Hall with my nike fleece jacket but no shirt. Most people asked where was my shirt, others demanded me to put on a shirt. A few girls did not mind the fact that I did not have a shirt on. Later that night I wants Papa John 's and met up with my friends, Christina and Brianna. Christina looked at my shirtless torso and demanded for me to go back to the room and put on a shirt. Brianna on the other hand did not mind as much as some of these other girls did. She even went as far as to repeatedly poke at my abs, which got me thinking, what some view as norms differs from individual to individual. Mass media greatly shapes how our generation view certain aspects of our lives. There are plenty of commercial and advertisements that show guys shirtless. It its not a big deal until a woman is shown half clothed. With the exposure of advertisements, including males with no shirts sometimes no pants either just briefs, fathers become more worried that their daughter are more susceptible to mischief behaviors. Most fathers are overly protective of their daughters which is completely understandable, but the media does not help the worried fathers

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