Worksheet
Introduction:
What is your paper about? What will you say?
Theory: Discuss in detail the theoretical issues that are related to social norms in general and to the one you chose to break in particular.
Where do social norms come from?
What is the social norm that you chose and how and why did it evolve?
How does your behavior break the social norm?
Why is the social norm you broke a social norm?
How might normative and informational social influence relate to obedience to this norm?
Is it a descriptive or an injunctive norm (what are those and why)?
What predictions did you have about how you would feel or how people would react?
Tell everything you know about social norms and why it relates to the theory. Make sure to address each of these questions at some point in your paper or you will lose points.
Your experience:
Describe how your behavior breaks the social norm. What did you do?
Describe the reactions of the people when you broke the social norm. Did they get angry? Did they give you weird looks? Did anyone say anything? Did different types of people react in different ways? Why did they react this way? Did they react how you predicted?
You will also want to talk about how you felt. Did you feel embarrassed? Sick to your stomach? Liberated from society? Discuss any reactions or feelings in terms of the relevant theories and studies.
It might be also fun to speculate about how someone else might have felt if they were in your position.
Integration:
How does your experience relate to the theories?
Do different theories of conformity predict the reactions you got when you broke the norm?
There are many other interesting questions and issues that you might choose to raise when thinking theoretically about the experience of breaking a norm.
Conclusion: Take a step back to look at the big picture of social norms. Evaluate your feelings and the behavior you observed in the context of the theories. What does your experience have to add to the theory?
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