Social interaction proceeds fluidly in everyday life, because people have shared definitions of and expectations about routine situations. As we go about our day, we generally assume that people are going to behave a certain way and observe certain norms. When they don’t, we may sometimes know how to respond, because we have seen that kind of violation before. For example, if someone cuts in front of us in line, we probably already know how we would react to that breach of common courtesy.
But other norms are so ingrained and automatic that we can hardly imagine anyone breaking them. Because we have never been confronted with the behavior, we have no pre-set idea of how to react when someone fails to behave "normally." For instance, if you were sitting in a near-empty movie theater and a stranger suddenly sat down directly beside you, how would you react? Chances are, you have no idea, because it’s just not something people do.
If you are physically unable to perform any type of norm breaching experiment, you may analyze an example of norm breaching in the media in a film, television show, literary novel, or other form of media. Directions given below.
1) Think of a social norm to violate. It should be a situation where everyone knows what the appropriate behavior would be without having to think about it, with the limitation that it cannot be anything illegal or harmful to yourself or others: we are examining LEGAL deviance only in this assignment.
You may find this site to be helpful in thinking about social norm violations. It gives information on the norm breaching experiments of Harold Garfinkel and others who studied this phenomenon:
2) Violate the norm you chose over a long enough time to permit yourself to observe at least three reactions from others.