A crazy character named Andrew Hales, a student at Utah Valley University, has put up a series of You Tube videos in which he — knowingly or not — does a classic Sociology 101 experiment called “norm breaching”: break a simple social rule and see how people react to you. I’ll put my favorite first, but they’re all worth a chuckle:
Holding the door open for people that are (too) far away:
Walk (too) close to people and get in their way:
Staring at people:
Some of his transgressions are more out there than others, but these experiments show how uncomfortable others can be made by even mild norm breaking.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
