Breaching experiment
The assumption behind this approach is not only that individuals engage daily in building up "rules" for social interaction, but also that people are unaware they are doing so.
[2] The work of sociologist Erving Goffman laid the theoretical foundation for ways to study the construction of everyday social meanings and behavioral norms, especially by breaking unstated but universally accepted rules.
[5]: 235 Garfinkel suggests that each member of society uses "background expectancies" to interpret and decide how to act in a social situation.
One way to help make background expectancies more visible is to be a "stranger to the life as usual character of everyday scenes".
One task Garfinkel assigned to his graduate students was to challenge everyday understandings by frequently asking for clarification during a normal conversation with a friend or family member.
Below is an example of an excerpt quoted in Garfinkel's text, Case 2 of Studies in Ethnomethodology:[8] This is a breaching experiment in the form of interpersonal conversation.
The violation of the expectancy of shared verbal understanding between friends results in the subject expressing confusion and irritation.
[3] The other was conducted in the 1980s, and studied the reactions to graduate student experimenters cutting ahead in lines of people waiting to purchase railroad tickets.
[4] These experiments build on the sociological work on breaching norms, but note that they are approached quantitatively by being structured so the experimenter can observe and count people's reactions.
They then measured the responses as the number of times individuals consented or refused to give up their seats, and also noted people's verbal and physical reactions to the request.
Once they made a successful request for a seat, they felt pressure to act in a way that would actually justify the request, such as pretending to be ill. Milgram proposes that the experimenters were playing the social role of subway rider, and they felt an extreme emotional reaction as a result of breaking implicit rules for that role.
Another norm breaching study led by Milgram sought to examine the response of people waiting in line to intruders, again violating first-come, first served.
The experimenters encroached on a total of 129 waiting lines, formed at railroad ticket counters, betting parlors, and other New York City locations.
Three female and two male graduate students acted as intruders, with an observer watching nearby to record physical, verbal, and nonverbal reactions to the intrusion.
