A social norm is a set of guidelines, rules, regulations and principles that guide the behavior of people in a particular society. Social norms are usually different from time to time and in various geographical locations or environments. Individuals who break or breach these code of regulations which govern the behavior of society members are considered an outcast since they are neglected by other people, and their behavior would lead them to suffer some punishment or consequences. This essay will explain my real-life experience of breaking a social norm in which I attempted to try something extremely unexpected in the streets of my town. My task was based on greeting random strangers in the streets of my town.
It is has been a culture since long that people are only supposed to greet people who they know, people they had met earlier or people they have had a close relationship in the past especially when it comes to greetings in public streets. Greetings to strangers is a very informal type of social norm and draw a huge attention when carried out in busy public places such as public streets. At any specific moment, I greet an unfamiliar person he/she will most likely ignore the greetings or be surprised since it is not a usual norm. Sincerely, this type of norm that I breached will have a little or no impact on my life chances since it happened for a very short period and at the same time, it involved totally strange people who are not in any way influential to my life chances. However, the act of breaking this norm will in some way or the other affect my perception regarding my behavior when it comes to greeting strangers and people I completely have no idea about. This is because I expect to have received a hostile reaction from the people I will greet in the streets, their surprises and nasty talk about my behavior will affect my thoughts about this norm ( Ostrom, 2014).
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Finally, as I pass through the busy streets of my hometown stretching my hands to greet people who I completely know nothing about them, I am faced with a hard time due to the mixed reactions demonstrated by the strangers I meet in the streets. The biggest portion of the people I greet are very hostile, and I even imagined that they thought I was a thief or something of that kind. This act created a great attention to even the passersby since they were astonished by my behavior and every moment a stranger would be suspicious about my greeting, people would gather around since it was very uncommon for such a thing to happen. This reaction had an effect on my personality since at some point I felt that even though I had good intentions while greeting these strangers, to them it was completely different since they even confronted me for breaking this social norm. This exercise made me learn a lot about myself, but most importantly it taught me about adhering to the social norms governing our society which I didn't take into too much consideration earlier before the start of this experiment ( Ostrom, 2014).
References
Ostrom, E. (2014). Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research , 6 (4), 235-252.
