Social Norm Violation Examples

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In society there are unwritten rules or norms that are hardly noticeable, unless we take a step back to notice it. Norms are, “the basic rules of society that help us know what is and is not appropriate to do in any situation” (12). In society we have a variety of norms such as mowing the lawn, saying “please” and “thank you”, or asking a person’s permission to use their bathroom. There are still many more norms that can be added to the list and I never realized how many norms are in effect until I started thinking about them. We all just grow up knowing that these behaviors where the right behaviors to obey and abide by. For my norm violation I decided to violate the norms of an elevator. The reactions people gave me was not something that The first time I preformed this I felt very uncomfortable and I could tell that the people around me did also. I looked at their eyes looking at me then wondering the elevator to avoid any type of contact with me. I could also tell that their bodies tensed up, because I was making them uncomfortable. After doing this a couple more times and as I started to feel more and more comfortable with it I received many different reactions. During one of my elevator rides it was another man and myself on the elevator. As I did my experiment he started to get angry with me and asked “What are you looking at? The front is that way”. Then I told him that there is no rule that says I had to look at the front of the elevator. He quickly got frustrated, called me a name, and stormed out of the elevator. The man was about five feet six inches and I stand at six feet one inch. Maybe he saw it as me showing dominance over him or if he was so uncomfortable with me staring in the wrong direction while standing so close to him that in response he was angry. I found it interesting to me, because his reaction was the only one that resulted in anger toward me for violating the elevator norm. Another trip on the elevator it was myself One explanation I found was located in chapter five in the book, “Socialization is the process through which we are trained and learn how we are expected to behave in society or in a particular social setting” (110). Socialization is similar to norms. Growing up we are taught, without knowing it, how to act in society or in a situation, which in this case is facing the elevator door and give as much space as possible between the person standing next to you. It is a way of being polite to the people on the elevator. That is a reason the man acted angrily toward me, because I was being rude for invading his space and why the bodies of others tensed up when I started to approach them closer until I was at most three inches away from them. Also path dependency might had another impact of as to why people acted the way they did. Path dependency is, “in which outcomes of the past impact actors and organizations in the present, making some choices or outcomes logical and others illogical” (113). When the people started laughing at me, instead of viewing me as being rude they viewed me as being illogical, because as I was they were taught the norms of being in an elevator, therefor, making myself look illogical in their eyes while they were being logical in their own eyes. One other chapter I found some possible help in

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