Walmart As A Social Norm Essay

A social norm is the rules of behavior that are considered acceptable in a group or society. People who go against the social norm may be shunned or looked at as a bad person. For my social norm breaching experiment, I decided to dress up as a hospital patient that had just been released from the hospital and walk around Wal-Mart. My mom is a registered nurse at the Baptist Memorial Hospital, so she was able to get me the materials that I needed to conduct the experiment. I decided to do this at Wal-Mart, because of the people that go in there. However, I didn’t conduct this experiment at the Wal-Mart in my hometown. I knew that less people would catch on to the operation if they didn’t recognize me. There is always a variety of people in every Wal-Mart across America, so I speculated that I would get a lot of responses and/or emotions from several different people that didn’t know me personally. I only
It’s not normal for a person dressed up in a hospital gown and funny looking socks to be looking at medicine in the middle of Wal-Mart. By the way that people responded to my social norm breach, I’ve concluded that people thought it was weird and that it was definitely an odd thing for them to have seen in a popular store. I also think that people don’t know how to react in a different situation that they have never experienced before. I think this, because most of them would just stare at me clueless and stay silent. I also believe that social media plays a major role in social norms. Social media takes on its own voice in every aspect of life. If someone is breaking the social norm, they are automatically strange people and can be targeted for it. If I would’ve experienced the same thing that the people in Wal-Mart did, I wouldn’t have known what to do, only because I’ve never seen it