Breaking The Norms example essay topic

636 words
Sociology March 12, 2001"Breaking the Norms" It is 9: 00 PM on a Sunday night. Televisions all across America tune into MTV. Millions of viewers will now spend the next thirty minutes watching a television program titled "Jackass". While watching this program, the viewers will observe everything from people eating hard boiled eggs in an attempt to purposely vomit, to a man testing out various self defense devices on himself.

Next week viewers will tune into the same program to see the same kinds of stunts performed. The reason that America watches these kinds of programs, and the participants in them perform these stunts, are because "norms" are being broken. A norm is something that is generally accepted by a society as the right thing to do, or the way things are supposed to be. For example, a norm would be to enter an elevator and stand facing the front for the duration of the trip. Breaking that norm would be to enter the elevator and face the back for the duration of the trip. It is not what is expected.

Different norms exist in different societies, and when these norms are broken within these societies people pay attention, because it is not an occurrence observed on a regular basis. For our class project, each student was asked to break a norm that exists in our society and record the reactions of observers and results of the experiment. The norm I chose to break was the idea of driving normally-the belief that cars should be driven by pushing the gas pedal and moving in a forward motion, not a reverse motion. The implement needed for this task was simply a car. I awoke at approximately 12: 45 PM on Saturday March 9, 2001. I immediately showered and got dressed.

After doing so I got the keys to my parents' car, and backed out of my driveway. Since my house is in the middle of my street, I drove to the end of my street as I normally would, then pulled into a neighbor's driveway. I then proceeded to back out of the neighbor's driveway, and head back in the direction of my house in reverse. I passed my house and drove to the end of my street in that same fashion. After pulling into another neighbor's driveway, I went back down the street in reverse and did so twice more before I realized that my next-door neighbor was standing on his porch watching me. After two more trips down the street he came out to the car and asked me what I was doing.

I told him I was just going for a drive, and he asked me why I was going backwards and proceeded to tell me to stop it because I could get hurt or injure one of the children in the neighborhood. At this point I had to tell him that it was for a class experiment and that I would be very careful and finish up soon. After my meeting with Mr. Daugherty (No, not the math teacher) I continued with my experiment for about another five minutes, before some kids from the neighborhood walked by me, then started to stand and watched and I continued down the block in reverse. They watched for the next few minutes as I finished up the experiment, then came up to me and asked me what I had been doing as I got out of the car. I told them about the class experiment, and went into my house. I learned one thing from our class experiment of "breaking norms", and that is that I have nosy neighbors.