Deviation from social norms

• Deviation from social norms refers to a person behaving differently from what society expects, this can vary from time, place, age ect
• Example of deviation from social norms


  DSM-V describes symptoms of someone suffering from an anti-social personality disorder (psychopath)

  One symptom is failure to conform to lawful or ethical behaviour

  A psychopath does not follow social norms and is therefore abnormal by this definition
• Strength of Deviation from social norms

  Has real life application when diagnosing mental illness. For example, in diagnosing anti-social personality disorder many characteristics deviate from the social norm. This suggests it is useful in clinical assessments, when psychologists are diagnosing certain mental illnesses.
• Weakness of Deviation from social norms

  The definition also takes into account the desirability of a behaviour. For instance, with statistical infrequency definition a "Genuis " would be regarded statically abnormal, but not an undesirable trait, and can be a useful tool on analysing specific behaviours
• Weakness of deviation from social norms

  Misses out important features of what makes a person abnormal. For example, in the case of anti-social behaviour, it misses out the distress it would cause to other people. This means this definition cannot be used alone to define abnormality
• Weakness of deviation from social norms

  Major problem is cultural relativism. This is related to how social norms change a lot between different cultures and different periods. I.e: hearing voices, no shoes, difficult to judge people who have migrated from a country
• Social norms are unwritten rules of how members in society are expected to behave
• A person is abnormal when they don't follow social norms
• A behaviour is considered abnormal, when the individual does not follow social norms
• A strength of deviation from social norms is that it considers how our behaviour affects other people which can reduce harm to others
• A strength of this is that it means we can treat people, and prevent them from causing harm to others
• A weakness of this definition is that social norms are not fixed, this would cause problems within cultures and classification of mental health has to be constantly updated, meaning it lacks reliablity
• Social norms vary with culture
• In some countries homosexuality was once seen as an illness but now its accepted so if someone had been diagnosed with homosexuality they may no longer fit into the criteria for being mentally ill
• Abnormal behaviour based on culture
• A weakness of deviation from social norm is that it is relative to culture