An Assignment Report on the Responses of People to the Breaking of a Social Norm Regarding Space between Strangers

For this assignment, I went to the mall with a friend of mine because we figured that it was the best place where a bunch of people would be and we would get good responses. The social norm we violated was sharing a step on the escalator with a stranger. Typically on an escalator most people don't stand on the same step because there's so many steps and people like their personal space. My friend and I assumed that standing on the same step as a strange would be uncomfortable for both us and the stranger. Not to our surprise, we were correct.

I made my friend make the first move. At first it was a little nerve racking. She went back and forth trying to decide if she was actually going to do it or not. There was an older woman who just gotten on the escalator, so what my friend did was walk right on behind her and stop on the same step the woman was on but before the woman could react, my friend kept walking up. When I asked her after why she had done that, she said it was because she was overthinking it. She knew that she had to do this so I could write this assignment but she felt too awkward and therefor she just kept walking up so it would get rid of the awkward feeling she had. This showed cognitive dissonance because she knew it was going to be awkward and uncomfortable for the both of them. Cognitive dissonance, according to the textbook, is the theory that we act to reduce the discomfort we feel when two of our thoughts are inconsistent. (Myers 759)

After this first try didn't go as well as we wanted it to, we wandered around until we could find a perfect opportunity to try again. This time it was my turn. This time I did it to a boy who just walked out of GameStop he seemed around my age. I didn't immediately do it, but when we were about half way up, I started to walk up. He started to move to the side because he was aware I was coming, but most likely assumed I was in a hurry and was just going to walk right passed him. But to his surprise that's not what I did. When I stopped on the steps he was on he glanced over at me, giving me a puzzled looked. I think he expected me to say something to him but once he realized I wasn't going to, he walked up the rest of the steps. Based on his response, I was led to assume that he does not have trust in strangers. To relate this to Erik Erikson's principle of basic trust, which is, a sense that the world is predictable and trustworthy, I assume that he did not have any.

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We live in a society where at a young age you are taught not to talk to strangers therefore we tend to stay away from people who don't know. So when going to places that can get crowded with people, individuals typically like to stay in their own bubble, only speaking to those they know or keeping to themselves. Therefore, the responses we got from these people are seen as justified and they make sense. Overall, the results were fairly easily predicted. As stated previously, it is not normal for two people to stand on the same step of an escalator, so it is not surprising that each of the people we chose to include in our experiment were incredibly confused when we stood next to them. This conclusion is very characteristic of the hindsight bias, or the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it. (Myers 31)

The most common reaction was to wonder why we were doing this and why we couldn't just stay on our own step, and they definitely considered the fact that we were just weird people who wanted to make other uncomfortable. Regardless, they would be using the attribution theory, suggesting that we explain someone's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition. (Myers 745) In this case, they would be attributing our unusual actions with either what they believed to be our everyday personalities or perhaps they thought, "this must be some kind of joke or experiment". But with the fundamental attribution error, people tend to, when analyzing others' behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition. (Myers 754) In our situation with our subjects, this would mean they would be leaning more toward the fact that we were just interesting people who have no sense of personal boundaries or were just raised differently than they were.

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