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develop full-blown ideologies explaining why they are right and why those who disapprove of and punish
them are wrong.
Definitions of Deviance
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(8) The outsider — the deviant from group rules — has been the subject of much speculation,
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theorizing, and scientific study. What laymen want to know about deviants is: why do they do it? How can
we account for their rule-breaking? What is there about them that leads them to do forbidden things?
Scientific research has tried to find answers to these questions. In doing so it has accepted the common
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sense premise that there is something inherently deviant (qualitatively distinct) about acts that break (or
seem to break) social rules. It has also accepted the common-sense assumption that the deviant act occurs
because some characteristic of the person who commits it makes it necessary or inevitable that he should.
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Scientists do not ordinarily question the label «deviant» when it is applied to particular acts or people but
rather take it as given. In so doing, they accept the values of the group making the judgment.
(9) It is easily observable that different groups judge different things to be deviant. This should alert us
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to the possibility that the person making the judgment of deviance, the process by which that judgment is
arrived at, and the situation in which it is made may all be intimately involved in the phenomenon of
deviance. To the degree that the commonsense view of deviance and the scientific theories that begin with
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its premises assume that acts that break rules are inherently deviant and thus take for granted the situations
and processes of judgment, they may leave out an important variable. If scientists ignore the variable
character of the process of judgement, they may by that omission limit the kinds of theories that can be
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developed and the kind of understanding that can be achieved.
(10) Our first problem, then, is to construct a definition of deviance. Before doing this, let us consider
some of the definitions scientists now use, seeing what is left out if we take them as a point of a departure
for the study of outsiders.
85 (11) The simplest view of deviance is essentially statistical, defining as deviant anything that varies too
widely from the average. When a statistician analyzes the results of an agricultural experiment, he
90 describes the stalk of corn that is exceptionally tall and the stalk that is exceptionally short as deviations
from the mean of average. Similarly, one can describe anything that differs from what is most common as a
deviation. In this view, to be left-handed or redheaded is deviant, because most people are right-handed and
brunette.
95 (12) So stated, the statistical view seems simple-minded, 95 even trivial. Yet it simplifies the problem by
doing away with many questions of value that ordinarily arise in discussions of the nature of deviance. In
assessing any particular case, all one need do is calculate the distance of the behavior involved from the
100 average. But it is too simple a solution. Hunting with such a definition, we return with a mixed bag —
people who are excessively fat or thin, murderers, redheads, homosexuals, and traffic violators. The
mixture contains some ordinarily thought of as deviants and others who have broken no rule at all. The
105 statistical definition of deviance, in short, is too far removed from the concern with rule-breaking which
prompts scientific study of outsiders.
(13) A less simple but much more common view of deviance identifies it as something essentially
110 pathological, revealing the presence of a «disease». This view rests, obviously, on a medical analogy. The
human organism, when it is working efficiently and experiencing no discomfort, is said to be «healthy».
When it does not work efficiently, a disease is present. The organ or function that has become deranged is
115 said to be pathological. Of course, there is little disagreement about what constitutes a healthy state of the
organism. But there is much less agreement when one uses the notion of pathology analogically, to describe
kinds of behavior that are regarded as deviant. For people do not agree on what constitutes healthy be
120 havior. It is difficult to find a definition that will satisfy even such a select and limited group as
psychiatrists; it is impossible to find one that people generally accept as they accept criteria of health for
the organism.
(14) Sometimes people mean the analogy more strictly, because they think of deviance as the product of
mental disease. The behavior of a homosexual or drug addict is regarded as the symptom of a mental
125 disease just as the diabetic's difficulty in getting bruises to heal is regarded as a symptom of his disease.
But mental disease resembles physical disease only in metaphor and the medical metaphor limits what we
130 can see much as the statistical view does. It accepts the lay judgement of something as deviant and, by use