The Deviant Act and Social Control - Essay Example

The importance of norms in society is to control peoples’ baser instincts. Instead of doing whatever they want, humans have a set protocol of social and religious mores that they must follow if they want to attain a certain level of normalcy in their lives. Since most people strive to be normal (rather than deviant), it naturally follows that people will want to try to be as much like everyone else as possible.

The social norm that was broken was wearing two different-colored socks to school. The social norm is that one’s socks should match. The color of the sock on my left foot was pink, and the color of the sock on the other foot was blue.

Conformity would benefit society in this regard because perhaps people outside on-campus might consider me a raving lunatic. One just never knows what kind of assumptions people who don’t know you are going to make.

Most people at school didn’t notice when I tried this small act of social deviance by breaking with the traditional norm of wearing two socks of the same color. A few people gave me strange looks but other than that did not talk to me at all about it. Perhaps the people were too afraid to ask why I was wearing two different-colored socks. Others probably considered the behavior deviant because I was given a couple of strange glances, looking at my socks. Society has probably shaped its opinions to ensure that everyone wears socks of the same color. This was, more or less, the reaction that I expected to my little “experiment”.

Regarding committing this “deviant act”, per se, I felt a little bit unusual putting on socks that were not matching colors. I had always been raised to dress well and appropriately—and thus, this was a bit of a challenge for me because I wasn’t sure how people were going to react.

Afterward, I was glad I did this because it demonstrated to me how judgmental people can be based on a person’s looks. People’s reactions certainly tried to influence me, but I think their reactions might have bothered me more had I not been doing this for a classroom assignment.

Having completed this assignment, I realize how strictly structured our society is and how social norms and sanctions can affect how people see us and see the world around us regarding value judgments.

A deviant is someone who does something unorthodox outside the normal realms of behavior. Sanctions and social norms are created to keep people in line.

Conformity and social control are ways in which large populations of people can be manipulated into being controlled. This occurs in various ways. “Like a deviant event it seeks to limit, social control is a process” (Clinard et al, 2010: 31).

To “explain” my deviant behavior, I can only touch upon one moment when I tried this experiment in grade school and received a bunch of odd looks, especially from my classmates, who dogged me relentlessly about not wearing two socks that matched.

Perhaps my classmates thought I dressed in the dark, or that my mother dressed me. Perhaps they thought I was careless with my style of dress.  Whatever the case, this experiment helped me realize that we shouldn’t necessarily make snap judgments about people based on appearances all of the time.

Having committed a deviant act, makes one realize the following elements which embody the very ‘event’ itself: the importance of norms within a society, the norm is broken, and reactions; the feeling of committing the deviant act and what was learned; and finally, a definition of terms and thoughts about deviance.