The Importance Of Violating Social Norms

Norms are how values tell us to behave, says our textbook. Thus, paying attention to our societal norms can help us discern our societal values. Some groups uphold an ethnocentric norm by speaking xenophobically about other cultures, judging them as “weird” for shallow reasons. In order to view the world accurately, one must instead practice cultural relativism-- that is, suspending judgment from one’s vantage point and seeing that each culture must be examined according to its own values. Furthermore, we must recognize that sometimes-arbitrarily formed social construction shapes our own assessments of what is “normal” or “weird.” Then we begin to view society through a clearer, less warped lens-- what some might call cultural humility. Violating social norms in our own society can bring new insights to the fore as well. For example, today at about 5:15pm I started violating several norms on one Sonoma County Transit bus, and then transferred to another SC Transit bus and continued …show more content…
This was rather humbling. People seemed to commiserate with me when the second bus driver corrected me about the bus pass, which was nice and softened my feeling of embarrassment. The fact that no one who had probably seen what I was trying to do corrected me until the bus driver did, I think reveals people’s discomfort in reaching out to correct a well-meaning, mistaken stranger like me. Perhaps bus passengers have been socialized to not interfere with each other’s business, and/or people in our culture generally learn it is not polite to “burst someone’s bubble”. I also wonder if this has to do with the fact that on the bus, one cannot always predict what strangers’ reactions will