Changing Definitions of Deviance

Almost all deviance fits into what Adler and Adler refer to as the ABCs of deviance: beliefs (attitudes), acts (behaviors), or traits (conditions). Social groups or audiences may have a particular collective or agreed-upon judgment of someone's attitudes, behaviors, and conditions, with which that individual strongly disagrees. Social control creates deviance by naming, labeling, or categorizing some attitudes, behaviors, or conditions as types of deviance, separating them from other attitudes, behaviors, or conditions that are considered to be proper or even desirable. The Thomas theorem reminds us that humans respond to the meanings or definitions of some situation, not necessarily (or even) to its objective characteristics. Mills' analysis of the professional ideology of social pathologists demonstrated that definitions of social deviance and social problems always reflect some specific group's view of what is proper or improper; norms reflect the power, interests, and outlooks of the groups that create them.