Norms Breaching Paper

Norms Breach Paper

Quick question!   Do you like when someone stares at you, and not someone you know, a total stranger?   If you said no, well then your not alone, in fact more than half the people I did my test on had a negative sanction.   Now the norm I chose to break was staring at random people.   The way I would do this was I would go to a random place, preferably with a lot of people and just stare at random strangers and I would see how they reacted.   Being a easy folkway to break and simple to experiment I was able to try several different locations but the best ones were a Mall, Park, and a Restaurant.

The majority of most of the people I experimented on had a negative sanction toward me staring at them.   The first staring test took place in the morning at a Denny’s which only had senior citizens in it at the time, and they did not take kindly to me staring at them what so ever.   Every single senior citizen I tested at Denny’s gave me a dirty stare, or they would gossip/talk about me amongst themselves.   Also this one old lady actually confronted me for staring and in her own words she said, “you’re being a disrespectful young man…and didn’t your mother teach you not to stare”.   The next place I tried my experimenting at was a local park.   The park was pretty much the same as Denny’s, I had gotten negative reactions from everyone I had stared at.   However there were some slight differences, for instance, at the park it was mainly children and their parents.   I still had negative reaction but they didn’t seem as harsh or severe, when I stared at some of the parents I was ignored and when I tried some of the children they either ran in fear to there mom or dad or they would just stare right back at me which was amusing at times, but when they ran away that made me feel weird, It made me feel like a stalker.   Now the mall was the most intense but it was also the best place I went because it was the only place to give me a negative and a positive...