My target point for this survey was a 5-storeyed shopping mall located at the centre of my town. I visited the mall at around 4.00 PM, as it is always busy at this time of the day. The mall had four functioning glass walled elevators and each elevator had a maximum capacity limit of ten people. I decided to carry out my survey in all the elevators and the survey lasted for two hours. At the end of the survey, I had made five complete trips in each elevator and according to my partner’s record, the total number of observers were 200 people. I took my best friend, James Smith, as my partner. He was there to assist me in the observation of the public responses to my social norm violation. The population of the observers consisted of 111 Whites, 70 African Americans and 19 Asians. The observers consisted of 20% children, 65% middle-aged adults, 10% old aged people, and the rest were teenagers. It was a busy afternoon full of shoppers; however, there was a quiet mood in the elevators despite the significant number of occupants. My social norm violation entailed facing people while standing in every elevator. In each elevator I used, I exchanged short greetings with the people boarding it then stood while facing them. Additionally, I looked directly into their faces one at a time, but in a polite and respectful way. This was a violation of social norms at the shopping mall, as everybody with whom I shared the elevator seemed to be concerned about my behavior. Despite my outward confidence in the elevator, I was scared and really felt embarrassed. I was mortified because I looked out of place and my actions were seen as unusual. Some of the irritated looks that I got from the public made me feel even more embarrassed. On the other hand, I was scared since I had no idea of what could happen at any moment as a result of my actions. At one point, I nearly trembled at the thought of being slapped by a huge man whom I was staring at. I also knew that I could cause panic, especially to the children and this made me feel guilty. I have to admit that I enjoyed my survey due to the various kinds of responses I got from the observers. While my partner recorded some observations, I was able to witness almost all the reactions due to my close proximity to the target individuals.
I conducted my experiment earlier this week while at the new Chick-fil-a for roughly forty-five minutes. It was a busy lunch rush so many customers or employees didn't bother to notice me while they enjoyed their visit. There seemed to be a common theme amongst the employees and the store as well as the customer’s interactions with each other. Each person’s life is as deep and complex as my own and their actions represented interesting results.
Deviance is any behavior, belief, or condition that violates significant social norms in the society or group in which it occurs (Kendall, 2012). Our experiment will study the behavioral deviance of a social norm. Sociologists use symbolic interactionism to study face-to-face interactions. We are expected to follow these certain unwritten rules of behavior telling us the way that we should act in certain situations. The social norm or folkway I chose to break was that of invading an individual’s personal space. See Figure 1.0 showing the proximity generally utilized by Americans, according to Edward T.Hall. Personal space is the region surrounding a person, approximately 18 inches, which they regard as psychologically theirs. People value their personal space, and feel discomfort, anger, or anxiety when their personal space is encroached (Personal space, n.d.). We walked around to find the best scenario and individuals to interject our teammate in purposefully invading their comfort zone.
I chose to break a social norm by sitting/ laying on the floor of an aisle in a grocery store, engaging in deviant behavior, instead of shopping for groceries. Sitting on the floor of a grocery store is a case of deviant behavior because it goes against society by breaking the norm. Because the standard behavior of people in a grocery store is to walk and look around, with usually a basket or cart, shopping for desired items, the expected response of others would be feeling uncomfortable, awkward, and confused. Upon performing my act of social deviance, numerous people demonstrated the anticipated reaction. As people turned down the aisle, I occupied, conversations died down to whispers or stopped altogether. Of the people who questioned me on my
The social norm we will attempt to violate would be talking loudly, singing and dancing in public places. The social norm acts as an mechanism of social control because when the norm is being broken within a group of people they would most likely show a specific reaction and response to the behavior that we would be demonstrating.
To violate a social norm, i will be greeting strangers in a nontraditional way. This norm acts as a mechanism of social control by getting people to give an approved reaction to meeting strangers. It allows us to be friendly without getting too personal. Normally when we greet a stranger we say something along the lines of, “Hello, how are you?”, and the other person responds by saying something like, “Good, how about you?”. Instead I will respond by giving them some unusual greetings to break this social norm.
The social norm behavior violation that I engaged in was taking my dog, along with a stuffed animal dog on a walk around our neighborhood. I picked this particular social norm to violate because when walking my dog daily, many people ask to stop and pet my dog so I was curious how that would change if they saw me as well walking a stuffed animal. I also chose to violate this norm because every time I walk there are many people I encounter and I wanted to participate in something that involved many people to get a wide range of reactions.
When someone goes against something that everyone around expects he or she to act, it’s called norms violations. In other words, that person is doing something which is unacceptable to society or culture. In this sociology breaching experiment, I chose to violate a social norm in public areas – cutting a line without asking, so to observe what people acted and how they responded. I decided to go to Safeway and tried being a line cutter without asking anybody. If they asked me why I did it, I simply replied to them that I did not feel like either wanting to wait or getting in a line. By acknowledging that norms are quite essential in our society, I was aware that our society will have no foundation to stand if there is no norm. Cutting a line while others are queuing is a part of our social routine; even though I was kind of embarrassed, I got a chance to learn different kinds of
Society can be very diminishing and very hurtful. I say hurtful by the way many people criticize one another by the way we walk, talk, and act with others or even alone. As we grow older we fall into different categories such as community, religion, and the list goes on. In between all that there is certain norms and values to follow. There are certain types of norms and values we have to follow in our community to not get harassed. First, before I committed a norm violation and making an observation I had to be able to understand what values, norms, folkways, sanctions, and mores were. “Values are ideas of what is desirable in life. Values underlie our preferences, guide our choices, and indicate what we hold worthwhile in life” (Henslin,
I had thought I would get lot of reactions, but there were some folks who didn’t even see at me. Overall, more than half people reacted on me. From this experiment I learned a lot about social norms and society. Basically, I learned to know about the people perception towards violation of social norms; how social norms works and how much they play a role in everyone’s lives. I learned how people react toward people who don’t follow a social norms and break them. According to my view of analysis, these social norms and violation are created by people within a society, but there are some people who don’t ever care if someone violate their society social
The reactions of people when you break a social norm can vary quite drastically. Sometimes the reactions are quite large and other times they are rather subtle. The reactions typically vary based on what norm you break and how strong of a norm it is. In the case of invading people’s personal space, I did not receive and intense reactions. All of the reactions I received were subtle. Not ma...
We live our lives following a set of steps and the majority of the time we do not even notice we doing such things. We have learn through society how to dress, how to eat, what to do and when to do it. The problem is that, when one these things are not the way they are supposed to be, we immediately noticed there is something wrong. We understand that the person is not doing what is “right” in other word, that person is breaking a social norm. For the purpose of this paper, the social norm I decided to break was wearing my clothes the right way. In order to break the norm, I decided to wear my clothes inside out. The idea to wear my clothes inside out came about as a result of one my roommates accidently wearing her gym clothes inside out in a couple of occasions when we went to the gym. At least twice my roommate wore her gym pants inside out
I violated a social norm by refusing to “mirror” the nonverbal display of one of my best friends. Her name is Hailyn and we have been best friends since middle school. Because we go to the same church, I met her on Sunday and she told me that she needed to talk to me. She explained to me that she was asked out by a man that she has been dating for two weeks now. I already knew that she was dating this person and that she was interested in him. Yet, she was never in a committed relationship so she told me that she wants to go out on a few more dates with the person before deciding to actually go out with him. To violate the social norm, I responded to her without empathizing. I tried my best not to create any chameleon effect of any unconscious nodding or gasp. My responses were very simple and straight forward. When she told me that the man that she’s been dating, I literally told her, “good for you,” without any facial expressions. She seemed to be a bit disappointed by my reaction but she still went on and told me that she wants to date
My breaching experiment involved three social norms. These social norms forced people to be in an uncomfortable situation and make a decision as to how they should react to it. The first social norm I experimented with was sitting next to someone in an uncrowded movie theater. I chose this because of the awkwardness it caused. At all three of my trials, occurring from 1-9 pm, there were over fifty empty seats at Carmike on February 21st. The next social norm I analyzed was sitting in someone’s assigned seat. This was chosen because I felt it would be engrossing to observe the different reactions fellow high school students retaliated with, all being different races. At Liberty High School I took someone’s assigned seat five different times,
There are many different things that influence our behavior from internal influences to social norms. Social norms are explicit rules that govern how we behave in our society. Social norms influence our behavior more than any of us realize, but we all notice when a norm has been broken. Breaking a social norm is not an easy task and often leads us feeling uncomfortable whether we broke the norm ourselves or witnessed someone else breaking it. Sometimes however, you just have to break a norm to see what happens our professor gave us an assignment that is really easy, but also difficult to do because we have to break a norm in from of people. We had two choices, choice number one, facing people while standing in an elevator, and the other choice
Observation allows researchers to experience a specific aspect of social life and get a firsthand look at a trend, institution or behaviour. It promotes good communication skills, improves decision making and enhances awareness.