Deviance Symbolic Interactionist Perspective Summary & Analysis

Primary and Secondary Deviance

Sociologist Edwin Lemert differentiated between primary deviance and secondary deviance. The difference between primary deviance and secondary deviance is in the reactions other people have to the original act of deviance.

Primary deviance is a deviant act that provokes little reaction and has limited effect on a person’s self-esteem. The deviant does not change his or her behavior as a result of this act.

Example: An adolescent who smokes cigarettes with other adolescents is not at risk of being labeled a deviant among her peers, since they all smoke. Even though adolescents who smoke cigarettes are considered deviant by the larger American society, that teenager’s actions go relatively unnoticed, unpunished, and therefore unchanged. The primary deviance is of little consequence.

Secondary deviance includes repeated deviant behavior that is brought on by other people’s negative reactions to the original act of primary deviance.

Example: The same adolescent moves to a new school where his peers never smoke and where smoking is considered a deviant behavior. The students call him names and exclude him from all of their social activities. Because of their reactions to his smoking, he feels like an outcast and begins to smoke more, perhaps engaging in other deviant activities, such as alcohol or drugs.

According to Lemert, the reactions to the adolescent’s primary deviance provoked a form of secondary deviance. Because his alleged friends reacted so negatively to his behavior, he began to engage in more of the deviant behavior. This repeated deviance results in the adolescent having a deviant identity. He now has a “reputation,” and no one looks at him in quite the same way as before.

Chambliss and the Saints and Roughnecks

In the 1970s, sociologist William Chambliss studied two groups of high school boys to find out how strongly labels affected them. The eight boys in the group Chambliss called the Saints came from middle-class families. Society expected them to do well in life. The six boys in the other group, the Roughnecks, came from lower-class families in poorer neighborhoods. The community generally expected them to fail. Both groups engaged in deviant behavior—skipping school, fighting, and vandalizing property—but suffered different consequences. The teachers, the police, and the community excused the Saints’ behavior because they believed the Saints were good boys overall. The same people saw the Roughnecks as bad and prosecuted them for their behavior more often.

Years later, all but one of the Saints had gone to college and subsequently into professional careers. Two Roughnecks went to college on athletic scholarships, graduated, and became coaches. Two never graduated from high school, and the other two ended up in prison.

Chambliss discovered that the boys’ social class had much to do with the public’s perception of them and the ways the public perceived their acts of deviance. He also hypothesized that a deviant label can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Roughnecks had heard for so long that they were never going to amount to much that they behaved in accordance with the negative expectations others had of them.

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