|
Ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkle pioneered the use of what he called
“breaching experiments” designed to break the rules of unstated
social rôles as a way of studying them.
Here are a few examples of breaching experiments I’ve found
here-and-there:
- “One example is volunteering to pay more than the posted price
for an item. Another is shopping from others’ carts in a grocery
store. The taken-for-granted routine is that once you have placed an item
in your cart, it belongs to you. The students who performed this
‘breach’ matter-of-factly took items from the carts of others.
When questioned, they responded simply that the item in the cart had been
more convenient to reach than the one on the shelf. When assumptions are
breached, people look for a ‘reasonable’ explanation — something that reaffirms the underlying assumptions. ‘Oh, I’m
sorry, I thought that was my cart’ is an example of a reasonable
explanation… But to act as if there is nothing wrong with doing so
confuses the other person and makes her or him question, just for a
moment, the reality of the situation.”
- “[A] student cheerfully asked a McDonald’s clerk for a
Whopper, a menu item at rival Burger King. Rather than say, ‘We
don’t carry that,’ the McDonald’s clerk asked the
student to repeat the order. When the request for a Whopper was repeated,
the clerk looked around to see if fellow employees had heard this
‘bizarre’ request. In other words, he searched for
interactional corroboration of his reality that ‘everyone
knows’ McDonald’s menu and anyone who doesn’t is
obviously weird. Something as simple as a sideways glance and raised
eyebrows from a co-worker can indicate that one’s reality is intact
and that the momentary experience is merely an aberration that can be
ignored. In this case, however, the students were particularly tenacious
in testing reactions to breaching. After the first person breached the
fast food order routine, another classmate stepped up and ordered a slice
of pizza, which, of course, McDonald’s restaurants don’t
serve.”
- A game of tic-tac-toe where the experimenter would ask the subject to
make the first move, then would erase that mark and move it to another
square before making the responding move.
- “[S]tanding very, very close to a person while otherwise
maintaining an innocuous conversation… saying ‘hello’
at the termination of a conversation.”
- “Another of the procedures Garfinkel developed was to send
student experimenters into stores and restaurants where they were told to
‘mistake’ customers for salespersons and
waiters…”
- “In a now classic experiment, Garfinkel instructed a class of
students to return to their parental homes and to act as lodgers. To the
parents, the behaviour of their children was bizarre and disturbing, as
the taken for granted (and unnoticed) conventions of how children behave
in their home (and thus how parents behave to their children) were
unravelled.”
- “If you were to ‘tip’ your friends, parents or
strangers for small kindnesses…”
- “For example, you might try to haggle with the bus driver over
the fare or eat with your fingers in a fancy restaurant and then carefully
note the confused and angry responses around you.”
|
