“Buddy the Elf, what’s your favorite color?” - Everybody has seen the very well know movie Elf. Its apart of every child's Christmas. The one thing that makes the movie so funny is the main character’s social abnormalities. He does things that most people would not even think about doing, such as sleeping in a display window, or screaming while running in a revolving door with disregard of how people would look at him. Breaking such social norms would give people a reason to make jokes and watch you with a disapproving eye. Being from an entirely different world, one of the many things that fascinated Buddy was this magical thing called an elevator. If you have seen the movie, then you know that he acts all excited and presses every button in the Empire State Building’s elevator and claims it looks like a christmas tree. The man that is with him in the elevator of course looks at him strangely, because as well all know, Buddy does not follow the social norm. Buddy’s example of breaking a social norm is what I did for this project. He didn’t know that in today society this would have been odd behavior, which is what makes the movie so great. So for about a half hour I decided to be adventurous and just have fun. Over Thanksgiving Break, I had scheduled a doctor's appointment. The hospital that I go to is not big, but its the only one around so I knew there would be a good amount of people around to see me humiliate myself. I dressed for the occasion! Green jacket, and red tights. Of course I could never look like Buddy the Elf, but I got pretty close. When I walked into the hospital lobby, I noticed that there wasn’t anybody around, so I figured I would just have to do it a couple time in order to get some pretty good results. I... ... middle of paper ... ... you see someone. But having a few laughs about what you just did because you looked ridiculous doing it, is all apart of life! I live by the motto that life is suppose to be fun. It shouldn’t be all serious and work. You need to have a little time for adventure as well. Some things can be a little strange, such as eating with your hands, but hopefully that person you are with has a good attitude about it and will just go along with it all. Social norms can be a good and bad thing. They are good, because the keep everything in line and makes sure that humans are acting accordingly in their daily activities. But they also can be bad because it puts pressure on everyone's perception of what freedom is and what is acceptable or not. Social norms will always have a controlling impact on the behavior of individuals, occasionally developing them into a new form of person.
Dr. Seuss's original fable is a simple story told with a great moral that criticizes the commercialization of Christmas. The original story features an “Ebenezer Scrooge” type creature that lives up the mountains outside "Whoville." The Grinch indulges himself in the annual ritual of spoiling everyone's festivities with a series of nasty pranks. This particular year however he plans to sabotage the holiday season by dressing as Santa Claus, clim...
Social norms rule, well, society. They rule how people act and look when they are in the face of public. One of these norms is to be polite and well-mannered. Some people manage to keep up their facade a lot easier than others. This is where that saying comes in, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” When people first glance at me, I’m sure they either see my Jekyll side or my Hyde side. People either read my body language, and see Hyde, or they judge me on appearance, taking in the Jekyll side. Every person in this world has the inner conflict between good and bad. Even me, an innocent, tiny, adorable girl.
The daunting task of violating a social norm, something that I could be ostracized and ridiculed for, I still chose to do. Social norms are the rules of behavior that are considered acceptable in a group or society. Doing weird things in public while surrounded by strangers is a recipe for disaster, especially for somebody like myself. I am awkward and have plenty of trouble talking to new people. Most of us are told not to talk to strangers when we are younger because there are all sorts of crazy people out there. There could not be a better way to break out of my shell and violate a social norm than to sit down and talk to total strangers while they eat.
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.
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
The decision about the place and outfit that would be worn to commit the norm violation. There I was wearing a bright green wig, green jeans, and a green t-shirt with yellow shoes. The plan was to take one walk around the entire mall to get the reactions in various sections of the mall. The reactions were different for each age type the seniors laughed in the most part or simply didn’t acknowledge what I was doing, the middle aged people would try not to look and seemed angry that their children had to be present at the type and the little kids laughed in the most part. Then I got the dreaded “It isn’t Halloween”, scream I just laughed and continued my course. Then I came across people my age some gave me dirty looks and others simply laughed and continued their shopping. This is an example of folkways as mentioned earlier, there is no strict rules in our daily lives enforcing dress code but dressing out of the norms make people feel uncomfortable and others may give you negative sanctions. This too could be a personal space violation by hurting people’s eyes by the brightness of my
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.
In “My Favorite Holiday Movie Involves a Giant Rabbit”, Boylan discusses her favorite Christmas movies and how their meanings have influenced her during the holidays. Through the use of allusions, metaphor, and imagery, Boylan argues that the holiday season is really about believing and practicing internal virtues to uplift oneself and one’s life. For example, Boylan makes several allusions to popular Christmas movies, like “The Snowman”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, and “It’s a Wonderful Life”. However, her most prominent allusion throughout the article is to “Harvey”, which “on the surface… is not a Christmas movie at all but the story of a man whose best friend is a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit”. At first, Boylan’s choice to reference
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.
Our society has programmed us in such a way that we create values that pertain to our unique culture and social life. Norm violations sometimes make people feel uncomfortable, ashamed or embarrassed whether they themselves are violating a norm or witnessing someone violate one. The reactions people have during committing a norm or viewing someone do so is what makes it a violation. The feelings and reactions themselves can be a type of sanction whether it is a positive sanction or negative sanction. Negative sanctions are described as, “expressions of approval given to people for upholding norms or expressions of disapproval for violating them” (Henslin, 2015, p.49).
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...
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
While breaking the three social norms there was one feeling that I felt was mutual throughout. Breaking those norms made me felt extremely out of place and rude. They made me feel that way because I knew what I was doing wasn 't socially right and people would get mad or be rude to me with their reactions. For the most part throughout my experiment, most people reacted the way I thought they would. You could tell that most people felt awkward or uncomfortable while I was breaking the norm. I faced a couple of difficulties through my assignment when it came to violating the social norms. While trying to break the movie theater norm, it was difficult for me to pick movies with different variety of people and movies that were a little older so less people would be attending them. I also had a little trouble when it came to answering the phone and waiting for the other person to talk first. The problem with this one was that I had to wait for people to actually call me which doesn 't happen that often in this day and age anymore. To conclude, these social norms forced people to be in uncomfortable situations and make a decision as to how they would react to
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
I bought a unicorn suit pajama and a random witch’s hat, that I didn’t wear. Then my friend and I went to the check out and we waltzed on over to the bathroom so I could change into my new outfit. As soon as I walked out of the bathroom I got weird looks. People were rather distracted by the way I was dressed. I had a cashier that I knew from high school, she’s in my grade, say something like, “Did you just change into that?” I said,