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Folkway Norm Research Paper

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In America people love to have their personal space. They like having their own rooms or bathrooms and not having to share their belongings. When sitting on a bus or train that is nearly empty, it is considered weird to sit next to someone if there is plenty of other seats available. Getting in someone’s personal space can be done in other ways besides in a train or bus setting. People can also break this norm by sitting closely to the person in a movie theatre or walking closely behind some other person. In some countries this is not a big deal, but in the United States it is a norm that is still held in modern society. This is the kind of folkway norm that people can break without it harming someone else or breaking the law. I broke this …show more content…
I think that they reacted this way because younger generations do not get as much human contact as the older generation. We now have electronics to text and leave messages, so we never have to do things face to face. I think this makes younger citizens more aware of their personal space. Another thing I noticed was that people were not as reactive as I thought they would have been. I think this happened because I do not look like someone to be afraid of. I think if I were to look more intimidating I would have seen different reactions. This led me to realize is that most of the little reactions I got were the groups tensing up, giving me a glance or weird facial expression. From the results of this experiment, I noticed that the girls reacted more than the boys when I sat next to them. I think this happened because I believe that women would enjoy more personal space than men. I did not seem too many differences between the races. I think if I had a bigger sample size, I might have been able to see a bigger difference. Another reaction I noticed was that they wealthier people reacted with more disgust than the less well-off people. I believed this occurred because wealthier families are able to provide more space and the family is able to have their own bedrooms and bathrooms. They also do not have to share their belongings as much, while the people that …show more content…
I was not expecting too big of reactions, and it was interesting to see how others react to their personal space being invaded. It was hard to not make it obvious about what I was doing. I felt like I would be embarrassed for doing something that would be considered weird, and sometimes I had felt a little nervous sitting next to people because I was afraid of how they might react to me sitting next to them. I was surprised that I did get the amount of reactions that I received. I thought I would have gotten less reactions from people because I thought that personal space was not as big of a deal that people make it out to be. I think I would do this or another experiment again, but with a bigger sample size. I would do it again just to see if I might get different reactions from different areas. I would also like to see how big of a difference people perceive as there view of personal space and what they allow close to them. This made me realize just how powerful norms are to a society. I noticed something as small as sitting close to someone would cause a person to feel as if they are doing something wrong. This made me think of how this helps keep people within a society in check. Since people do not want to feel unaccepted they try to fit in with everyone else. If they break a norm, they no longer fit in with the bigger picture in society in their minds. In the end, this social norm helped me understand slightly why people

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