Cultural Norm Analysis

Henry Cloud once stated, “A culture is like an immune system. It operates through the laws of systems, just like a body. If a body has an infection, the immune system deals with it. Similarly, a group enforces its norms, either actively or passively.” Culture is a system of meanings that provides a way of life for a certain group. Within our culture, there are culture norms, which are accepted ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving by which members of a social group are guided. Like Henry Cloud stated, when a cultural norm is broken, the social group will attempt to reinforce this norm back to normality. The objective of this experiment is to use ethnomethodology to illuminate the culture norms and perceive culture’s effect on people’s behaviors. …show more content…
In which, I observed the members of my social group that dealt with the abnormality of “me”, the researcher, and my inability to speak. From this experiment, the responses of the other social group members were observed and analyzed. This experiment was carried out between my friends and me. In which, I played the role as the researcher and my friends were the research subjects. The social norm that I had broken for this experiment was communication. I had “lost my voice” and stopped all forms of verbal communication with my friends for four days straight. Communication, throughout human history, has been treated as the key element in relationships, including friendship. This type of interaction has been taken for granted and became a part of our social norm. I wanted to see how people will react to the sudden loss of verbal communication in part of their friendships and how it will affect the person who lost the ability to verbally communicate. I wanted to see how the loss of speaking would affect the everyday interactions and social roles that each person will …show more content…
In lab, I had two partners, whom I had never worked with before. However, they understood my intentions by my body gestures. For instance, if I wanted to get ice for our lab, I would point to the icebox, and they understood my action. Furthermore, when I wanted to tell them that there was a mistake in our lab observations, I would point to the mistake in the lab notes and they were still able to understand my concern. Overall, I observed that the loss of verbal communication does not affect a person’s everyday needs. However, it may be difficult to communicate specific or personal information. Another interesting observation is that with all the tested members, they all became more talkative due to my loss of voice. Mostly importantly, they all had similar reactions after I gained my voice back, exclaiming something close to “I am so glad you got your voice back. It was so weird when you had lost your voice. Finally, it feels normal