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Research Paper On Breaking Social Norms

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The norm I decided to break was number two: proximity norms. I decided that school was the perfect place to test our this project. I think it's safe to say that in our culture, it's not exactly normal to stand too close to complete stranger, or even in this case, friends. If it was normal, we wouldn't have to popular term, "personal space" and/or our "personal bubbles." Before I broke the norm, I was actually extremely nervous. I had lots of thoughts going through my mind. I had feelings of nervousness that were similar to a strange form of anxiety. More so than that, I had this nagging fear in the back of my mind about being judged for doing something that was so abnormal. Right from the start those feelings made this project particularly overwhelming, and I think that's why. Everybody has an overpowering urge to be completely normal or to be accepted and violating social norms such as the proximity norm, makes it feel impossible to be accepted at all. To break the norm, whenever I saw a friend at their locker, I approached them and stoof within a foot away while they were getting …show more content…

It sounds absurd to think that something this simple could be so challenging, but when it's something that is seen as socially unacceptable, it's a natural instinct to not want to do it. If I had to rate this experience on a scale of 1-10, it would easily be a 9. I think that possibly the most challenging part of it was resisting to tell other people the reasoning behind breaking this social norm, and I think that's because being that people around me saw it as "socially unacceptable," my immediate reaction was to give an explanation. I'd rather have a reason for acting weird than have people think that I really was, and that could be where social norms actually stem from. All in all, the project itself was fun to do in the moment, but the before and after made me very

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