Example Of Social Norm Violations

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There were a few violations of the social norms that my group carried out, each one being carried out in the library. The first one included two group members facing the two corner walls of an elevator. The Second one involved a group member and myself lying on a table. For the final act of social violation, two members of my group ran around and took selfies with random people. There were five members of the group that I was a part of. Two members volunteered to stand in the back corners of the elevator and wait until someone got on. The other three of us stood on floors two, three and four also waiting for someone to get on the elevator. After waiting a few minutes, a girl walked into the elevator by herself. I hurried and ran into the …show more content…
There were three of us that were facing the wall of the elevator. Humans have the pressure to conform to the surrounding environment, something the girl did not participate in. Chapter nine of the Social Psychology book states that conformity causes a change in a person’s behavior in order to respond to the surrounding social environment. No only that, the book states that, “the larger the size the greater the group’s influence, but only up to about four people.” (344). The girl who got into the elevator by herself, did not conform to our actions and turn to face the wall. She stood there confused, in disbelief, feeling awkward. It amazed me that she did not conform since there were, in fact, three confederates that were actually facing the wall. She probably did not feel compelled to conform to our actions because she had no investment in the group. Although she was noticeably uncomfortable, she knew that the ride was going to end and others would see her. She did not want to look weird if she had faced the wall of the elevator since we only represent a very small minority of the library population. As the girl left, there were people who felt weird about the situation and some who laughed because they saw us in the elevator not following society’s implicit rules. This made people feel uncomfortable since it was a completely foreign situation and they had no prior knowledge about how to act. There was one man in fact, that said that he chose to ignore us because he did not want us to feel embarrassed. As a participant in the activity, I did not feel any anxiety or embarrassed from participating in this experiment. However, he in essence put himself in our shoes and believed what it would feel like to stand against the norms and violate them the way my groups members and I did. Due to this, he wanted to ignore us and lessen the embarrassment that he assumed we would have. This shows that the social conformity we

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