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Breaking Social Norms

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Norms are the behaviors that are expected out of us depending on the society that we live in. The norms that we have learned about this year in class can be on different levels of importance and they are also situational. There are many different types of norms and they all mean different things. The two main norms I will be focusing on today with my acts of deviance will be Folkways and More. Folkways are minor rules that change from what group of people you are with and there really isn’t much of a punishment for them. The other norm, More, is a way more important and also cares a severe punishment for breaking them. There will be two act of deviance that I will be discussing today that I performed to see if it changed any of the other people I was around to break these norms. The first act of deviance will be to kneel in an elevator. I choose this because of the video we watched in class when the people stood backwards in the elevator and everyone that got into the elevator turned around as well. I want to see if it still works today and if it works with more people or just with a single person. I expect it to probably not work in today’s society and people to just look at me and my …show more content…
This act is breaking the norm of a folkway and I went to the mall in Rockford, Illinois and tried it in different elevator all over the whole mall. I went with my girlfriend, Kelsey, and my best friend, Andy. I tried by myself and then with all three of us. So to start I went into an empty elevator and kneel right in the middle of the elevator and rode it until someone got on and waiting to see how they reacted. Then I got into an elevator with people already in it and kneeled when I got in and I repeated both of these with Kelsey and Andy. The people that were around when I did this was a wide variety of people ranging from kids to elderly people.

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