Breaking Social Norms

The social norm we broke was dancing in public, and not just dancing, dancing baldy. In public people are supposed to behave civilly and keep to themselves. Dancing in public breaks this norm because it calls attention to oneself and distracts others from their tasks. Shoppers generally go to get their items as quickly and efficiently as possible. Going to a store to dance is not a normal activity one would participate in. It is a folkway because there isn’t any moral significance attached to dancing in public. It encourages conformity because dance is a form of expression, and that expression is muted in public. We will violate this norm by going to Smiths and dancing. I think that we will turn a lot of heads. I think that most people will stare but some will glance and continue shopping as if nothing is happening. There may even be people who don’t even notice we are dancing. I know that if I were to see someone dancing in public I would watch and be annoyed. I think that for the older generation it will be offensive to them to see dancing in public. The younger …show more content…
We danced through the food aisles that are in the middle of the store. We scoped out other parts of the store, but there weren’t enough people to make breaking the social norm worth it. The busiest part of the store was the produce section. Other than that we just up and down the other aisles in the food section. We went on a Thursday from 4:30 - 5:30. It wasn’t super busy, but there was a good ammount of people there. There weren’t a lot of teenagers there, but there were a lot of adults. There was a teenage couple that avoided particularly because we were most scared of them judging us. The adults could just glare at us and think we were typical millennials fighting the system by being outrageous disturbances in a grocery store. The only race we observed was caucasian. It looked like everybody there was middle class. We observed an equal ratio of the