Social Norms Of Elevator Etiquette

The Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale University in 1963, focused on whether a person would follow instructions from someone showing authority. Students (actors) were asked questions by the teachers (participants), if the students got the answer wrong they would receive a shock each higher than the previous. The shocks ranged from Slight shock (15v) to Danger! (300v) to XXX (450v). Stanley Milgram wanted to know if people would do things just because someone with authority told them to, even if it was hurting someone. I believe that the experiment was a good way to test the obedience of people

My mother has always told me that certain things should not be done in public. Social norms are opinions and beliefs that are shared amongst a group. Throughout our lives our parents tell us things that aren’t socially acceptable, and that there are consequences for those actions. Those that don’t act in ways that are socially acceptable are isolated from society. Norms help to guide the general public by reinforcing it with a punishment in waiting.

For the deviance assignment I decided to break the social norms that are prevalent in the gym while working out. Cal Poly has a very active campus that uses the gym very regularly. The gym has its own set of rules and norms that are followed by everyone. I personally do not spend a lot of time in the gym so to prepare I watched 30 minutes of YouTube videos and read multiple lists of unwritten gym rules and things not to do at the gym.

For my violation of a folkway I chose to walk to all my classes backwards. I also added my own twist to violating this folkway by questioning other students on why theyre not doing the same as me as if they were wrong. This past Tuesday I decided to violate this

Norm violations are a form of actions that do not seem right to some people. Let’s say that you are in a public place, you are expected to act respectful and normal. Norms describes the expectation of a behavior. (James M. Henslin) One can perform a norm violation by doing the opposite of that, like invading personal space. There can be different reactions to violated norms which sociologists call sanctions. (Henslin) Mores, folkways, and values revolve around norms as well.

The social norm experiment that I performed consisted of me violating a social norm and observing people’s reactions for doing so. I did something that is deemed “not normal,” based off from societal standards. The norm I broke was an interesting one. Instead of respecting strangers’ personal space, I invaded their space. I stood in front of them as close as I could possibly get, without touching them. I choose to break this social norm because of how I am with people. Strangers or friends, it does not matter, I do not like when people stand close to me. I feel as if they are invading my personal space. When people stand too close to me, I tense up and feel very uncomfortable. In my eyes, this social norm is necessary, especially for people who are similar to me and need to have their distance from others.

The social norm that I broke was related to pushing a grocery store. When someone goes shopping, they push the cart from the wider side and the side with a “handle.” I decided that I would push the cart from the other end, or the narrower end. People automatically grab a cart by the wider side or they grab the cart by the narrow side and pull it behind them. I thought this would be an interesting thing that I could do that would break the norm of grocery shopping.

The norm that I am breaching is the courteous act of picking up papers when someone drops them.

A breaching experiment is arguably the best way to obtain data of the sociological reactions exhibited towards a fracture in the perceived social normality. Commonly, people are able to enjoy a leisurely stroll from store to store in a shopping mall with little or no obstructions in their path. Faced with the encumbrance of someone hindering their stroll, how would they react? This is the question we strived to answer. First, we had to decide how we were going to impede their travels. The settlement ended being relatively simple; just sit down in the middle of the walkway. But that wasn’t quite enough to suite what we were looking for. There had to be something else being done while sitting to dupe one’s emotions so they would attempt to

A norm is defined as expectations, or rules of behavior that reflect and enforce behavior.(Henslin, 2009) When people are in public settings we expect individuals to behave in a certain way. For example when standing in line to see a show or to purchase an item we expect everyone to stand in a single file line. We expect individuals to wait their turn as they proceed to the front of the line. Another expectation or norm is we expect individuals to have dinning etiquette when eating in restaurants. We expect people to dine using the proper utensils. I thought about this example as I was pondering for an observation to perform. I decided that I would take a chance and visit a well respected restaurant in my area and break the norm

My breaching experiment was actually not an experiment at all but a mistake, a breach of socially acceptable etiquette, with the predictable response, so I thought it was worth a write up.

They depict an experiment where a woman leaves the room and goes into an area where she can not be seen, but she can be heard. She then feigns an injury to provoke a response. [The experiments results were twenty-six individuals waited alone reacted to an accident seventy percent of the time.] Then they reenacted the same accident with individuals in a group, and only twenty-percent offered the person in distress their assistance (Darley and Latane 770). After the experiment, the individuals that did not respond said that they did not want to embarrass her because they thought that it was just a minor injury.

Breaching experiments are sociologically based and used by Ethnomethodologists to help gain a better understanding on how people make sense of their world. Typically, Ethnomethodologists do not focus on analyzing a mass-level society, but rather dedicate their research on individual’s reactions in social situations. The purpose of a breaching experiment is for the researcher to be in a controlled social site and intentionally break social norms. It is important to do these experiments because it helps gain an understanding of socially driven rules and structure, and how people react when they are broken. I decided to go up to people and ask them how their day was, wait for them to ask me how I was and stand there without responding.

However, today we know that the context has an important role in morally orienting our behavior towards others: to prove it, we have only to break the shell of "normality" in which we have built our customs and customs. One of the clearest examples of this principle is found in this famous research, led by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 in the basement of his faculty. What happened there is known as the Psych wardexperiment, a controversial study whose fame is partly based on the nefarious results it had for all its participants and which will form the base of my experiment.

The second experiment involved a group of people trying to trick others. Our experiment was based on obedience. Obedience is classified as a human behavior that is altered