Reaction paper on the articles on Deviance - Essay Example

The book focuses on daily social interactions and includes articles that talk about the various misguided views of the American families, criminal records and several other social tendencies. These articles also emphasize upon important subjects in contemporary sociology including religion, politics, power, homelessness, poverty, gender and crime. One of the articles ‘Eating your Friends is the Hardest’ is about the survivors of a plane crash who are forced to eat human flesh of the corpses in order to stay alive.

Is this sort of behavior deviant? Does this behavior not obey to the social values set up by this society? If yes, why is it so? What is it that causes us to behave in a particular manner? Researchers have not been able to come up with an exact answer however there are three kinds of researches that can help us answer the question; the biological, sociological and the psychological reaction. Although there is no right reason to why people behave in a deviant way, the sociological perspective gives us the most in-depth knowledge.

Because every society has its own social norms for governing behavior some of them might not be deviant for one society or the other. After reading this article many people would think right away that the actions of the plane crash survivors are definitely exemplify deviant behavior. There are three kinds of deviances; good or admired actions such as heroism, unusual behavior such as living with twenty cats and bad behavior such as committing a crime. Does eating human flesh when there is no other means of sustenanceleft a deviant behavior?

In essence yes, it might seem that way but when we talk about the structural strain theory we realize that this is not the case. The theory defines situations in which people cannot live up to or do not have the means to live up to the social norms or expectations and as a result they