Breaking Social Norms: A Personal Deviance Experiment

Introduction: Choosing a Deviant Act

For this exercise, I decided to be deviant at church. At our church, people tend to pick a pew and spread out within it. Usually a few families will stand in the back because all the pews appear to be taken. However, there is always still plenty of space in any given pew for multiple families. In America, personal space is considered rather important, so it is rare to find a pew packed full of people unless they are all related or know one another well. Sharing space with a stranger in America is deemed something reserved for intimates rather than for unknown others.

Personal Space as a Cultural Norm

The American norm around personal space stands in sharp contrast to practices in other parts of the world. In a country like India, for example, there is little equivalent concept of personal space. People pack themselves onto trains well beyond capacity, to the point where passengers can literally be hanging out the door as the train leaves the platform because there is simply no way to fit fully inside the car. Similarly, in an Indian church one will find that worshippers are not possessive about space and will sit right down next to a stranger without thinking twice about it.

These contrasting cultural norms illustrate how social norms are not universal laws but locally constructed expectations. What feels intrusive in one society feels perfectly natural in another. Understanding this distinction was the foundation of my experiment.