Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Field Experiment: Violation of a Social Norm In this project, we were asked to violate a social norm in a public setting and make observations on what we saw and how our audience responded. The social norm that I chose to violate was simply that of common courtesy. I decided to go to the mall and walked around, bumping into random people and saying absolutely nothing in apology. I simply bump into them and keep walking as if nothing has happened. Norms are a very important part of society. In the book, norms are defined as “the specific expectations about how people behave in a given situation”. Without norms, a society has no foundation on which to stand. It would have no, as the name promotes, normalcy. Norms are what make a society unique. Other concepts such as ethnocentrism also tie into how norms affect a society. People who are ethnocentric often compare the norms of their society with that of others and through this, determine that their own society is superior. In contrast of these ideas, I believe that all societies are normal according to their owns norms, not the norms of others. In doing my experiment, I expect many different kinds of rections from people I encouter. I am