Social Norms In Sociology

A norm is something that is generally accepted by a society as the right thing to do, or the way things are supposed to be. Social norms are defined as one’s cultural beliefs and what they believe to be important to them. Social norms range from country to country, culture to culture, and society to society. A norm is something that is usual or as says typical that defines as a rule on how a society should act. Sociology is the “systematic study of society and social interactions” (Keirns & Strayer, 2013, p 10). While studying sociology you eventually notice around how others react to things outside the normal standard so I did as followed. A norm that I decided to violate was going the wrong way on the escalator. It is normal in everyday

It would be the perfect setting to test out my theory of how people around me would react. I asked my 16 year old cousin Vanessa and my boyfriend Alberto to accompany me so they would be able to take notes of peoples reactions but not only of others but as well as themselves. I asked for one of them to go up the escalator first before me and to wait on the top and one in the bottom to be able to record different peoples reactions. I then proceeded to walk up the escalator as it was going down because it is not normal to take the wrong escalator when it is clearly that there was an escalator that led me the same way but that was normal in everyday society. I predict that the major reaction will be a sense of confusion and self

They personally did not want to walk next to me while I initiated my experiment because they felt embarrassed that people would start staring at them and eventually start making fun of them. The first recording of data collected came from my cousin which there was many interesting things that she observed. There was a young man and his family that started to stare at me and he started to question what I was doing. He reacted by saying to his wife, “is she dumb not to notice she is going the wrong way” this was collected by my cousin she she waited in the bottom. I personally noticed people giving me the “look” as well as some teenagers rolling there eyes as I was trying to walk up and they were going down the escalator because I was getting in the way. My feelings started to get in the way when I encountered that reaction with those teenagers and I started to feel embarrassed because I had the feeling they started to say things about me. Lucky I faced my fear and continued the project because after a little bit my feelings started to get in the way I am usually a very shy person and would have never imagined that I would do something so embarrassing. There were obvious behavior changes as well from the control during the experimental. My boyfriend and my cousins started to feel embarrassed as well so it was hard to collect data because they did not want to continue the