GCOM Social Norm Project

Our mission: to break social norms in a span of 40 minutes. From what started off as just walking close to people, evolved into an elaborate scheme of trying to bewilder as many people as possible. Here are some highlights of our endeavor.

Linking arms we blocked off the doors to D-hall. Although most people were extremely frustrated by this inconvenience, they avoided confrontation and just proceeded to go underneath our arms. One girl pleaded to me about how she “just wanted some ice cream”. Some assumed we were protesting some big issue, and wished to know what it was. Others just rolled their eyes, gave strange looks, or muttered cuss words under their breath. However, most avoided eye contact and any other form of confrontation.

Another instance involved standing on top of a table outside of PC Dukes. This just so happened to be one of the only available tables outside, so we received a lot of strange looks. After getting everyone’s attention we started to do circles, hopping from one seat to the next, following each other. One person in particular asked, “Why are you standing” and we replied with, “why are you sitting”. In response to our socially unacceptable question was, “we are conformers”. Most people just ate their dinner and tried to pretend we weren’t there.

One of the other more amusing situations was when we all crowded around this man working at a computer. We were looking over his shoulder and invading his “personal bubble”. At first he just looked at us funny and gave an awkward smile. Then he started to try to make small talk to ease the situation asking, “ Have you been to Long Island?” (seeing that he was looking up information about Long Island). He started to scroll through his window rather fast, while closing others. Then he told us that there were other computers there and asked why we wanted to use this particular computer. “This computer is special,” we replied. Glancing around, he could take it no more. “I can take a hint,” he said, and started to hurry out of the building.

Whatever the case, breaking social norms put people in awkward situations in which they didn’t know what to do. There was no set way of reacting to what we were doing because it was out of the realm of what is “acceptable” and “normal”. Most people avoided confrontation and eye contact of any sort, others resorted to humor (just merely laughing at the situation), while other people were flustered (but did nothing about it!); Each person had different ways of dealing with their social discomfort.