What Are Social Norms Important

Fake Birthday

In order for us to be accepted in society or into any form of group, we are forced to follow certain guidelines of how we need to act. This is called “Social Norms”. If we do not follow these guidelines, we will receive some kind of consequence: shunned, neglected or rejected. Norms provide a key to understand social influence in our daily lives, conformity in particular. Social norms are the accepted standards of behavior of social groups.These groups come in range from close friendships to work groups to big nation states. Behavior, which fulfills these norms, is called conformity Most of the times norm is a powerful way of understanding and predicting what people will do (2006, Basu). There are norms that define appropriate

Laws are not enough to keep a society peaceful and conflict free. The two different types of norms that exist until now are formal and informal. Formal norms are what we call laws or rules in our society and informal norms are norms in which there is an agreement among everyone in a society to follow. Norms can be more important than laws because informal norms cover many things in which there can be both agreements and disagreements among people (2001, Huck and Weibull). Violations of these norms can lead to fights and misunderstanding and might escalate to violating laws/rules. People in different societies may not follow all the norms, but it is clear that people understand these norms and live their life according to

Emily and I teamed up to try and break the “Social Norm”. On the 16th of September 2016 we both decided to make someone's birthday happen before it was there actual birthday date. The night before the day we experimented, we got 2 shoe boxes and filled them with low value gifts. Into one of the boxes we filled a tissue roll and into the other we filled a lemon inside an empty poptart box. After putting the gifts inside the boxes we wrapped it with old newspaper, which completed the process of making the gift. The last gift was dark chocolate, we covered it with an orange plastic bag. We decided to give one of the presents to Janet, who is very shy and quiet and a person whom we barely knew. The other gift we gave to Ezell who is an easy going person whom I knew very well and played around with a lot. Finally the last gift we gave to my sister who is very active and talkative. I hypothesized that all the participants would gladly accept the gifts, but I was proven wrong. All the participants had different personalities but I assumed they would accept the gifts because I thought it would be hard to decline something