Breaking Social Norms

In every aspect of society, there are social norms set in place. This is what is called socialization, which is essentially the process in which the individual learns to conform to the norms of society. As we get older, we learn the habits, skills, beliefs and standards of judgment in our society in order for us to fit into the "norm" that has been implemented. But what if you purposely violated a social norm? , my task was to break a social norm on campus and observe people's reactions. I decided that I would break two social norms just in case I didn’t receive a reaction from the first one. My first social norm was wearing another college's merchandise, an Ivy league one and the second one was talking loudly while eating with my mouth full.

So I decided to wear a Cornell University t-shirt around campus for three days. On the first day, I saw people giving me a side look or would make eye contact with me then quickly look away. The Next day was quite different, I was walking to class with a fellow classmate who was also doing this assignment and there was a couple sitting at the bench near the Humanities building. The girl said" I don’t know what's going on here, but I completely support it." My friend and I was laughing at this response, for me it threw me off guard because I was expecting a negative response towards us because we were "different" in a way. The last day was interesting, I was waiting on line at the Roost in Ridgeview Hall and I noticed there were a group of girls in front of me. One of the girl's noticed my shirt and started staring at me, so I stared right back. We had a five second stare down until she finally gave up, she whispered to her friends" Look at Ms. Ivy league over there." And one of her friends looked back at me and said "she's probably here for a student exchange program" " Yeah, she must be hella smart though, I mean she came from Cornell guys." In my mind, I'm thinking " they seriously never seen someone with a different college t-shirt on campus or is this a joke?", majority of student wear different colleges clothes, so what makes my shirt any different. I

Mainly, because socialization made it necessary to maintain social order to control individuals behavior so chaos wouldn’t come into play. Allowing certain skills, behaviors and attitudes to be validated based on social norms that are implemented. From the sociological perspective, social norms is a familiarity that can be perceived as strange or unnatural. What we see are rules put into place to ensure a structured system, but that really isn't the case. For example, a child is taught right from wrong as they grow, which reprograms their mind to follow the rules of society. But as they get older, they start to question and doubt these social norms such as: why do we associate the color pink for girls and the color blue for boys? And why do we always view men as masculine and big and women as slim beautiful Supermodels?. As a result, they learn that these social norms has absolutely no meaning, just the simple fact that society wants to control and evaluate everyone's behavior or views that doesn’t fit in. Another key point, the influences of social norms is related to symbolic interactionism. Symbolic Interactionism explains how every individual each other affects the social order and causes change. For example, it’s a common norm for people listening to music to not sing out loud in public without drawing attention to themselves from other people.