Disrupting
Norms of Behaviour.
The American sociologist Harold Garfinkel decided to show how norms exist (and what happens when we break or disrupt them) by asking his students, in a series of experiments, to deliberately (but secretly) break some expected norms. We can look at a couple of examples as follows:
a. Garfinkel asked his students to engage their friends in conversation and deliberately break the "conversation norms" we all usually take for granted when we talk to other people. The following is an example of what happened...
(S waved his hand cheerily).
S: "How are you?"
E: (Coldly) "How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my..."
S: (red in the face and suddenly out of control) "Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly I don't give a damn how you are".
There are a number of possible explanations for the above exchange:
One reason might be that
we rely on people behaving in roughly-predictable ways
towards us, mainly because if they did not life would be extremely difficult
and tiring. In this respect, each time we met someone, even if they were a close friend
that we'd known for years, we would have to establish a whole new set of norms for our
behaviour - we would have, in short, to "get to know someone" each and every
time that we met them.
Other answers might be that E. was deliberately trying to upset S. by taking a greeting literally or perhaps E. had gone mad and genuinely did not know how to answer S. in a socially-expected and acceptable way. This leads us to Garfinkel's second experiment.
b. Garfinkel asked his students, when they returned home during their University vacation, to behave towards their parents as if they were lodgers, rather than sons and daughters. The lodgers were to behave politely and not to show any recognition of ever having met their parents before...
As you might imagine, the parents of these students found this situation very difficult to handle - they had no initial idea about why someone who was their son or daughter should suddenly start to behave like a complete stranger. Very quickly, the parents tried to make sense of this "senseless" situation by explaining their children's behaviour in terms of illness or madness.
Such experiments show how important norms are and how easy it is to disrupt norms - with frequently alarming results. Because there are thousands of norms that we recognise (usually without thinking about it, precisely because normative conformity seems so natural), it is easy to construct simple everyday experiments to test the existence of norms in your life.