Social Norm Examples

I went to a football game for my high school on a bitter cold night. The temperature was subfreezing and the wind only made it worse. Everyone at the game knew they were going to be outside watching the game in the horrible weather for over two hours. However, when I looked around, at my friends and peers, almost everyone was dressed the same way. They were not wearing coats. The concept of societal norms is crazy for me to grasp my mind around. The fact that what happens in my hometown can be so different than the things that happen in a different community is mind boggling. Why is something so different in my town than in a town just an hour north of me? One of the intriguing parts about this concept is that there must be a trigger the trends. There are endless questions about societal norms, some of which are so complex to understand that scientists have done research on them.
When an idea or concept has as many questions as this, it is near impossible to not let it grab your attention and let your mind wonder, ponder, and search for the answers.
At home, in my community, the things I say and wear seem normal to me. However, when I travel outside of my own community, it is obvious that the the things that go on here are not the same everywhere. The societal norms in Mount Laurel, my hometown, are not the norms everywhere. Here, I say words like “soda” and “sneakers,” and I dress with shorts to the tip of my knees. In the cold weather, many people can be seen without a coat on. When I attempt to search for answers to my questions, I go to my friends and cousins who live in different communities.
One of my cousins, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia, would define his norm completely different than the way I would define it. In his community, the shorts they wear do not reach their knees, but in my town this style would stand out because it is not the norm. In his area, people tend to say “y’all” instead of “you all.” The dialect in the Northeast versus the Southeastern dialect is very noticeable even when witnessing just a short conversation. If someone was at a bitter cold football game in Georgia, when they looked around, the majority of the crowd would be wearing a coat. The norm in Atlanta is to wear their coat, while in my hometown it is less likely you would see someone wearing a coat, and it is more likely a person would wear a sweatshirt in this weather. If my cousin were to move to my community, would he continue to use the same dialect and dress the same way as he did when he lived in Georgia, or would he conform to my town’s societal
norms? The Northeast refers to a certain type of shoes as sneakers, while that term is used significantly less in the rest of the country. The majority of the country refers to these shoes as “tennis shoes.” If my friend from Indiana moved to my town, again the dialect difference would be evident. Would this friend continue to speak the way he did in Indiana, or would he convert to the norm of his new town?
More questions will be asked when I go to college and enter a new town. It will be interesting to see how I adapt to the norms of the college I go to after I graduate high school. Will I need a coat?