Deviance and Norms in Society

Deviance: Breaking Social Norms For this exercise, I decided to be deviant at church. At our church, people tend to pick a pew and spread out in it. Usually there are a few families who will stand in the back because all the pews are taken.

However, there is always still plenty of space in a pew for multiple families—but in America personal space is considered rather important, so it is rare to find a pew that is jam packed full of people unless they are all related or know one another well. Sharing space with a person in America is deemed something that is reserved for intimates rather than for strangers. However, in a country like India there is really no concept of personal space.

People when pack themselves on trains to beyond capacity and to the point that one can be literally hanging out the door as the train leaves the platform because there is just no way to get into the car completely. Or in a church in India, one will find that Indians are not possessive when it comes to space and will sit right down next to a stranger without thinking twice about it. So I decided to act like an Indian at our church.

There were plenty of pews with spaces where I could go and not be bothersome to anyone—but I selected a pew that already had people in it and entered it and stood right next to a person. The person was clearly agitated and looked exasperated because there were plenty of other places to sit and he looked like he was very well situated. But then I entered, so he tried to scoot over and make room.

But each time he scooted over, I imperceptibly scooted over too so that I was still right beside him all through Mass. By the end of it, we had basically gone from one end of the pew to the other. He never said anything rude to me or got up and went to another pew, but I could tell that he was distracted and did not understand what was going on with me.

Breaking the social norm of giving people their own personal space made me feel like a deviant, to be honest, and I quite enjoyed it. I enjoyed it primarily because I knew I was doing something taboo for a reason that he did not understand and it made me laugh on the inside to see him so flummoxed. Afterwards, I apologized and explained what I had been doing.

I felt somewhat bad about choosing to do this during church, but I thought it would be good time to try because I knew I would have a captive audience. In a way, I felt like I was pranking someone—like Johnny Knoxville on Jackass or like a YouTuber with a channel devoted to pranking people by doing some deviant behavior to them in public.

Norms contribute to the concept of conformity and social control by establishing modes of behavior for us that we view as acceptable or unacceptable, and we align our behaviors to these norms out of a feeling of respect and observance, knowing that people will get upset if we go outside these norms. While it is fun to shock people sometimes, it is also important to get along with people and not try to make them feel bad or.