“Write short note: Conformity and deviance.” (1990)
Conformity is behaviour that follows the norms of a group or society; deviance is behaviour that departs from them and draws disapproval or sanction. Sociology treats both as products of social life, not of individual nature: the same norms that produce conformity also define, and even require, deviance.
Conformity: why people comply
- Socialisation and internalisation: Talcott Parsons saw conformity as the outcome of internalised values backed by sanctions.
- Group pressure: in Solomon Asch‘s line-judgement experiments (1951), subjects gave the group’s plainly wrong answer on roughly a third of critical trials, and most yielded at least once.
- Obedience to authority: in Stanley Milgram‘s study (1963), 26 of 40 ordinary men went on to administer what they believed was the maximum 450-volt shock when instructed.
- Social bonds: Travis Hirschi (Causes of Delinquency, 1969) argued that attachment, commitment, involvement and belief hold people to conformity; deviance follows when bonds weaken.
Deviance: how sociology explains it
- Normality of crime: Émile Durkheim (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895) called crime normal, found in every society. It marks moral boundaries, strengthens collective sentiment when punished, and can anticipate future morality, as with Socrates.
- Structural strain: Robert K. Merton (“Social Structure and Anomie”, 1938) traced deviance to a gap between cultural goals and legitimate means, yielding innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion beside conformity.
- Cultural transmission: Edwin H. Sutherland‘s differential association holds that deviance is learned like any conduct, so conformity to a deviant subculture is deviance from the wider society.
- Labelling: Howard S. Becker (Outsiders, 1963) argued that deviance is not a quality of the act but of the social reaction to it: “the deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied”. Edwin M. Lemert separated primary deviation from secondary deviation that follows labelling.
Relativity and the link between the two
- What counts as deviance varies with time, place and power. Kai T. Erikson (Wayward Puritans, 1966) showed that communities “need” deviants to mark their boundaries.
- Over-conformity to one group can be deviance from another, and today’s deviance can become tomorrow’s norm.
Indian illustration
- M. N. Srinivas showed that lower castes adopting upper-caste rituals through Sanskritisation were often punished as deviants by dominant castes, yet such mobility later became an accepted route.
- Mob lynching is conformity to a crowd’s communal or caste norms and deviance from constitutional law. After Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India (2018) the Supreme Court issued preventive guidelines, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Section 103(2)) now prescribes death or life imprisonment when five or more persons murder on grounds such as caste or community.
Conclusion
Conformity and deviance are two sides of one normative order. Whether an act is labelled deviant depends on whose norms prevail, so the study of deviance is also a study of power and social change.