Social Norms: The Breakdown

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Social Norms: The Breakdown Everyone in society has a different culture, values, roles, and identities. But mostly in society, there is a commonality among social norms-what is socially acceptable and expected of an individual. Most people don’t think deeply on the value of norms and what they do for a social situation. Norms are the brain of a social society, and without them, there would be no structure in the world when considering interpersonal interaction. Many individuals have this idea of not caring what other people think and believing they can behave however they wish. I was one of these people until deciding to act out and break a social norm that changed my entire view on social structure. I began to seek out different social situations and environments where I could not only observe many different people, but how they interact with each other and how they socialize in a certain environment to respect the norms. I immediately thought of one of my favorite places to go-the movie theater. I started out my experiment one Sunday afternoon. I took a trip to the Cinemark near Fayette Mall, bought a ticket, and sat in the back row of the theater. I wanted to spend this day just observing different people: how couples acted (young and elder), how friends socialized with each other, and how individuals handled the environment by themselves. I observed almost identical things in each group of people. Most attending’s would walk in, stop and look around for a seat first (around 90% had food/drinks). If there was a couple, they normally talked and ate their popcorn during the commercials. When individuals came in alone, they would eat their food, and majority of them would text or play on their phone to pass the time before the movie started. When groups of 3 or more sat down, they were normally much louder than everyone else, laughing, eating their

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