Ethic Breaching Exercise of Group 7

Breaching Exercise of Group 7

     In Biological Science, we all know about “Survival of the fittest” in the Darwinian Evolution. Actually, “Survival of the fittest” can be used in all disciplines, including Sociology. And norm is precisely the fittest way for people’s interactions in the society. However, people engage daily in building up norms for social interaction while they do these unconsciously.

     A breaching experiment seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms. The idea of studying the violation of social norms is to explore people’s adherence to this.

     For our breaching exercise, we chose to see how people would react when a stranger invades their personal space and pretends to snap pictures for them. We observe how uncomfortable people would get when their personal space and privacy are invaded. While in real life, everyone makes his surrounding space psychologically as his own personal space and they want to protect their privacy, here you get it as a social norm. When strangers infringe their personal place and their privacy, they show anxiety and feel insecure about the surroundings and they will leave soon.

    So we chose four experiments in the food court and the common area in Plaza Singapura, which is located right above the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. And during the experiments, the rest of us observed the subjects inconspicuously for each experimenter. And we got the following results:

Experiment 1:

It was not crowded in the food court at 3 PM and there were quite a lot of empty chairs. Ragini selected an alone man with a cup of coffee on his table and took an opposite position toward him and stared at him. At that time, he was playing with his phone. When he found someone breaching his personal space, he just smiled and pretended not to be worried. However, after 1 to 2 minutes, he just drank all his coffee and left at once.

Experiment 2:

Later, we found two guys who were eating and talking to each other in the same food court. They dressed the same Yamaha T-shirts and sat across each other diagonally, instead of the direct opposite ways. Viola and I planned to sit across diagonally in the table because there were just two positions for us. Then, we sat across the table directly without their permissions. At the beginning, the two guys just stopped talking to each other and one of them suddenly speeded up eating his food. However, I could not help laughing when I looked at Viola. Because I think it was very strange for us to sit across them diagonally and  stared at them without a worthen the guy sat next to Viola asked them whether they know eah other or not. And Viola answer yes, and while asking we saw that those two guys just ate so fast suddenly and looked confused. The time to breached their personal space was quite long, around 2-3 minutes, and finally they left too. But basically the reactions is almost the same, the guys had a chit chat a bit and smiled to Viola and Lily.