Posted by Jay Livingston
The previous post was about those “breaching” experiments some instructors assign their students. Here’s an example:
| For this assignment, you will hypothesize the existence of a rule or expectation . . . and then break it in the presence of at least one naïve subject. You may do your breaching in cooperation with classmates. Possible topics of the breaching exercise include clothing, grooming, conversational topics/styles, shopping behavior, and romantic behavior. The breaching activity must be something you do not regularly do. Possible naïve subject(s) include parents, siblings, roommates, boy/girlfriend, and strangers. Describe the reaction of the naïve subject(s) to your breaching exercise and any interaction you had with them. |
My point was that they’d chosen the wrong “naïve subject.” Forget about how other people react. Students would learn a lot more about norms if they thought about their own reactions to themselves as deliberate norm-breakers. Lesson #1 in that post was that the norms are very powerful. When we think about it in the abstract, breaking a norm doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But in the specific situation, it becomes something much larger. But why?
Lesson #2: When we think about breaking a norm, our anticipatory anxiety is highly exaggerated and not rational. When you ask people why they can’t, just can’t, break the norm, they imagine consequences far out of proportion to what might happen. When Stanley Milgram (see the previous post) told his students to go into the NYC subway and ask people for their seats, one student said, “You want to get us killed?” When I’ve asked students about doing the breaching experiment, they imagine offended strangers raining mayhem upon them. But even as they say it, they know that it’s preposterous. Which leads to . . .
Lesson #3: We follow the norms not out of some rational cost-benefit calculation. We follow them because we have internalized them. Society is not just “out there”; it’s “in here,” inside us, as well.
Lesson #4: Because reactions are so mild (a puzzled look, a question), with each incident, breaking the norm becomes easier. Norm-breakers therefore can eventually arrive at a rational, cost-benefit perspective. The student whose breaching consisted of offering to pay less than the price of an item might find that in some stores, you can actually bargain down the price. She then decides to try it as a general practice, not just as an assignment for her sociology class.
Lesson #5. Norms are not absolute. No behavior is always and essentially a breach of the norms. Harold Garfinkle, who invented the breaching experiment, found that his students, no matter what the behavior, could come up with some story or invent some context that “normalized it.”
For the breaching exercises, the simplest, all-purpose normalization is “This is an experiment.” As one of my professors once put it: If you go up to someone and say, “Lie down,” they’ll look at you funny and probably demand an explanation, and if they don’t get one, they might refuse. But if you say, “This is an experiment. Lie down,” down they go.
All this is about social control – how a society gets people to do what they’re supposed to do. Even these mild reactions to norm-breaking are forms of social control. The raised eyebrow, the questioning look, or an actual question (“Why are you wearing that?”) tip the person off that they are breaking a norm. These are sanctions – negative sanctions. If that’s all we say about social control, we’re missing at least half of the story – positive sanctions as a form of social control. These may be even less noticeable than negative sanctions, but they may also be more important, as I try to show in the next post.
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