Deviant Behavior & Sociology Control

So part of the normal deviance class experience is being assigned to break some norm (think folkways, not mores – and definitely not taboos!). I want you do do that. Now, there are some ground rules I’m going to cover, and then you’ll have to answer a very specific set of questions about your experience.

Rules: Nothing illegal, nothing that will get you beaten up, don’t be mean, and must occur in public. There is a pandemic, so at home is perfectly fine. I’ll include some ideas to help you out at the end of this post.

Once you break your norm, I want you to:

Describe what you did.
Describe the reactions of people around you.
Describe what norm you violated (what made it deviant).

Example: Examples of what you can do: wear shoes that don’t match, wear a winter coat in summer, wear a stained shirt in public, stand backwards in an elevator, wear headphones but let your music play from your phone speakers, eat pizza with a fork or chop sticks, eat something not meant to be eaten by hand with your hands, answer someone with only questions, insist on paying too much for something at a store, wear a Halloween costume today, bring McDonalds to Burger King, order drinks that don’t match what’s expected for your gender, walk backwards, drive through campus jamming “Baby Shark” at full volume.

ANSWER

Deviant Behavior and Sociology Control

My family and I went out to a prestigious hotel. Instead of using a spoon to eat, I decided to eat using my hands. My younger siblings were fascinated by what I was doing, and my parents were horrified. The youngest decided that copying me was fun and that my food looked more delicious with me using my hands. My mother gave me this look like she would kill me once we got home, and my father looked sorry for me because he knew his wife was going to kill me. I thought my mother would have stopped me, but she let me go on with whatever I was doing. It was quite an awkward dinner, but I had a blast watching the reactions. Our youngest is seven eras old, and therefore her copying what I was doing is what made sense to her. She thinks I am cool, and therefore anything I do is cool.

The social norm I had broken was one concerning table manners and eating in exquisite hotels. There are certain unwritten rules on how one should carry themselves in a hotel, especially a prestigious one. One is expected to eat in a certain manner that oozes class. I was deviant in the behaviour that they expected from me and hence, the astonished looks from my father and the disappointment and murderous stare from my mother. The only person who thought what I was doing was fascinating was the youngest in my family, and that is because she is not yet fully immersed in the social norms. She has not yet undergone the life lessons of what should be done and should not be done in public. She is still learning, and therefore when she saw me eating with my hands, she took that as a lesson.