Nowadays we like to say that we thrive on being ourselves and embracing our individuality, while this may be true in my social experience, I have found that most Often we tend to keep to ourselves and follow the social norms of everyday life. Social norms are behaviors and signals that almost everyone learns throughout their lives. These standards teach us what is acceptable and what is not. To fully understand and analyze how norms are used to regulate behavior in our social world, I decided to break my own social norm. I chose to break the social norm of clapping and cheering for people when they enter a room for no reason. . I chose to break this norm at Seven Springs Ski Resort in the main lodge. I broke this norm at all hours of the day, from nine in the morning to seven in the evening. Inside the main lodge, families and friends sat at tables of four in open rooms with large windows that allowed monitoring of the weather and the slopes. It snowed steadily all day, the sky was overcast and it was around nine degrees outside. People seemed either extremely annoyed by the weather conditions or quite happy. Inside the main lodge, different groups were eating, relaxing, playing cards, or waiting in endless lines at a makeshift Starbucks kiosk. I've seen people quickly get excited about walking in ski boots while others sit and laugh about their falls on the slopes and discuss the Winter Olympics. My friends who accompanied me on the slopes that day never heard about my experience until the end of our day. but I believe they helped my experience in several ways. I tried clapping strangers on my own a few times, but only managed to convince other families and groups when my own friends joined in... middle of paper... ...the unwritten rules of our society. My experience of violating social norms revealed its importance in our society. These normative behaviors are so powerful because of our natural desire to conform to the behaviors of others. Even though social norms are learned behaviors, I believe our desire is still there. All societies and cultures have normative behaviors. The human desire to conform is recognized as conformism, which helps ensure stability and boundaries within our society. People didn't choose to join in and clap, sing, or chant with me because they were excited for that person or proud of them, they did it because everyone around of them did it. The power of conformity in our society is overwhelming in my opinion, but I don't know if some individuals in this culture would be able to function properly without these normative questions that most of us all seem to follow..