Tunnel‐visioned activity and sociologically problematic deviant behavior

Interactionist notions of the process of self‐indication justifiably bear on sociological explanations of the freedom involved in most forms and instances of deviant behavior. Yet, a substantial number of episodes of such behavior are treated by sociologists as individual “aberrations” that are unrelated and unable to be typed sociologically. Our effort to relate and to type these deviant acts centers on the assertion that, although most people, most of the time, align behavior with the organized attitudes of the “me,” normal forms of self‐indication may be narrowed in situations in which a person becomes overly focused on the mechanics or the outcome of a task at hand. The result is a form of tunnel visioning by which actors attend only to certain elements of an act in devising a line of action. Additionally, we posit that tunnel vision is not randomly distributed across populations, subgroups, and social situations. Thus, we examine the possibility that tunnel visioning and accompanying forms of deviance may be linked to age and gender, to certain institutionalized social settings, and to temporal elements of interaction settings. In this manner, we promote a broader explanatory framework for the freedom necessary to deviance, one that is anchored in sociological theory and is able to address episodes previously considered sociologically problematic.