Thursday, February 11, 2010
Week 3 Question 2: Functions of Group Norms
The functions of norms in groups include: establishing accepted rules of behavior, “having a map of group behavior and processes”, providing common goals for those in the groups. (Harris/Sherblom 46) When I was in junior high school, I had a close group of friends. We hung out at school and outside of school. We became so close that we had several inside jokes that only we understood, and even came up with our own language. It sounds funny now that I think of it but during that time, it made us all feel that much closer I believe. Many people thought it was stupid the way we talked (or really just abbreviated and changed words) but we did not care. However those same people that ridiculed us for our language violated that norm. Our language was only for our close group of friends, making it a norm. When we heard others using it we felt as though it was our own anymore. It was not a huge deal but I just remember seeing that our exclusive norms were no longer so exclusive. Ultimately our select group tended to just seem like all the other kids on campus. I believe that when norms are established or used by others, you feel less private and/or unique. This however is not always a bad thing, it just happened to sort of be that way for my junior high friends and me.
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Hey Pocahontas I would first like to tell you that was interesting reading your view of the way group norms have their behaviors with the norms. I would like to say the example that you used I have encounter before while I was in high school. Many of the people at my school were classified as whether you were popular or not. Moreover, the popular kids had such languages that was classified with the group of being popular, however , if the students that wasn’t popular tried to used the same language as the popular kids, they would conflict with the norms a bit and then it become a violation. Yet these languages are made up between the norms of the group. They make them so explicit that it people have to be classified to be able to use these language. We can’t determine these factors because language changes so often that people who think they’re hip and get among people who introduce them to new languages and they don’t understand the terminology get considered non-popular anymore among people.
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