ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the major conceptual issue entails slighting substantive theories, research findings, and the interrelation between the sociology of deviance and the social psychology of conformity. Even normativists use reactive data, but they assume that official rates of deviance are closely correlated with “true” rates. The foregoing conceptual issue is conspicuous in the literature, where sociologists debate it monotonously and busily concoct new definitions of deviance, even attempting to distinguish it from rule breaking. Whereas sociologists speak of conformity as though it were simply the obverse of deviance, that logical relation is inconsistent with the predominant conception of conformity in social psychology. The separation of the social psychology of conformity and the sociology of deviance stems primarily from two traditional predominant concerns of the latter, etiological questions about “serious” types of deviance and variation in rates of crime.
