Breaking A Norm Analysis

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For this assignment I decided to make a small deviation from the status quo and hang out in a place where no one else was hanging out. Breaking a norm inspires many different feelings and gave me the opportunity to make some interesting observations. Functionalism helped me to understand and interpret some of the things I witnessed.
The norm that I broke was following status quo. During my time here I noticed that students rarely ever hang out on the quad. I’ve seen people walking through the quad but I haven’t ever seen anyone just go to the quad to do homework during the weekend. So, I did what I haven’t seen someone do before; a friend and I brought a blanket out to the quad and did homework. When we first sat down there was absolutely …show more content…
We were there for about a half hour all by ourselves when some other students decided to follow our lead. Slowly, a few more small groups of students also started to join us on the quad. They didn’t talk to us or sit too close but it was clear that they came to hang out just like us. Although, my friend and I were still the only ones doing homework, as far as I could tell, we still seemed to start a trend of hanging out on the quad. The fact that people joined us on the quad normalized our behavior and made it seem as if students had been hanging out on the lawn all …show more content…
In functionalism is about how society holds together and emphasizes the importance of people following certain patterns of behavior to create so everyone has a clear role in society. Without this organization of people there would be no way to create a stable system for people live, work, or establish meaningful relationships. While functionalism helped me to understand the how going along with the status quo is important it also didn’t apply completely with my violation because I didn’t affect any other parts of society. My life was effected because I made the choice to spend time sitting in the grass instead of sitting in my room, I may have encouraged others to do the same, but my actions did not force anyone to change their plans. However, this theory helps to explain why I felt more comfortable once others started to sit in the grass as well. In functionalism it states that people share behavior as a way to feel solidarity and once I was no longer alone I felt reassured that I wasn’t doing something that would get me
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