Deviant Behavior Sociologists use the term deviance to refer to any violation of norms- whether the infraction is a minor as jaywalking, or as serious as murder. This deceptively simple definition takes us to the heart of the sociological perspective of deviance, which sociologist Howard S. Becker identified this way: it is not the act itself, but the reactions to the act, that make something deviant. In other words, people’s behaviors must be viewers …showed first 75 words of 400 total…

…showed last 75 words of 400 total…there was someone there. Out of the 13% that stopped completely, 6 % of those people where elderly, 7% where young people around my age (but I couldn’t really tell because I was about 30 feet away). This clearly could be defined as deviant behavior. Those people that didn’t even think to slow down could’ve seriously hurt someone if they walked across the street at the wrong time. And then those people would have really been deviant.