American Culture Observation Report

Culture attributes to the daily expectations we humans have, and when one of those social norms is broken, it usually causes us to feel a flux of emotions. This flux in emotions possibly may derive from their fear of the unknown, and to cope with the uncertainty people respond to the situation arbitrarily. This is the observation I gathered from conducting two experiments where I defied the norms of the American culture. To cancel the risk of the Hawthorn Effect, I asked permission to conduct an experiment on both my family and my girlfriend at any point in time. With their informed consent, I then waited days to actually perform the experiment. During the beginning of my experiments, I hypothesized that if I were to purposefully desert some …show more content…
This goes hand in hand with scholarly research article “Emotions and Actions Associated with Norm-Breaking Events” by David Sloan Wilson and Rick O'Gorman. In this article, Wilson and O’Gorman examined the various ways people cope with the breaking of social norms. In their study they found that when coping with a social norm people tended to believe that going in the situation would have been more negative or less positive, but all the conceptions were not accurate. In the text Wilson and O’Gorman stated, “Just as emotions are expected to be (roughly) adaptive for the person experiencing the emotions, beliefs about others should be (roughly) adaptive for the believer. However, the most adaptive beliefs are not necessarily accurate.” (Wilson and O'Gorman, 297) This is relevant to the studies because after both studies saw that I was breaking a norm they assessed the reasoning behind it and came up with inaccurate conclusions. One inferred that I was upset or uninterested while the others inferred I was not well or something was wrong. Although they were all using life experiences to interpret the abnormality they were all incorrect because I was neither upset or uninterested, or not feeling well during the time of the