Examples Of Social Norms

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Norms are informal rules which guide society’s social interactions, they are the expectations, standards, and fundamentally do’s and don’ts of daily interactions. While conducting my own observations throughout the day, I realized there was a certain pattern in my actions. When it comes to interacting with my phone, I noticed that in class I checked it every 10 or so minutes. While being in a lecture, you do not want your phone going off, so you put it on silent, or vibrate, nonetheless you still want to feel connected. Here, I noticed that I was in conflict with two norms, it is an informal rule that you will turn the volume on your phone off, however, because your volume is off you might miss a message, or a notification. It is another informal rule, that if someone messages you, you …show more content…
While walking with my friend Daniel, we were talking about a big argument he had with his family, so it was a serious topic. As we continued walking home, my phone suddenly started exploding with notifications. At first, I fought off the urge to check, but as I got more and more notifications, I could not resist. Though, it turned out that the notifications were just match updates from a soccer game, sent to me by an app. Once again, I broke a social norm to fulfill another. I took my attention off my friend, who was talking to me about a serious issue, just to look at my phone. Although, norms are subjective, it is commonly believed that in a social interaction one would pay more attention to a living human being. However, I feel as though that as technology becomes more and more entrenched in our daily life, the poorer our quality of social norms in social interactions with people in the real world will become. Nonetheless, I feel like these two instances occurred because even though I disobeyed certain norms, I more importantly, subconsciously picked between which certain values to follow, and which to