Sadie Burton

Sorensen

SOCI 101

16 September 2019

Ethnomethodology Project

Ethnomethodology was a sociological theory and practice originated by Harold

Garfinkel. Ethnomethodology suggests that in order to understand how social order

works, it is necessary to disrupt it. Ethnomethodology experiments are also known as

breaching or norm-breaking experiments. In these experiments, the researcher or soci-

ologist goes out into the world to violate the social norms and pays attention to how they

feel doing it as well as how others react. When social norms are disrupted, there can be

confusion and discomfort, and even a type of punishment for breaking the norm. A suc-

cessful social interaction, however, would require that everyone involved would comply

with the rules of the normative behavior.

After reading the PowerPoints for this section and watching videos, my group and

I were required to design our own simple Ethnomethodology experiment and carry it

out in the real world, outside of the classroom. We had to make sure that we would be

able to record our performances in some type of way.

To begin, I compiled a list of possible social norms that my group and I could car-

ry out. I googled breaching, social norm violations, and ethnomethodology in order to

understand the concepts of what this project would entail. These ideas consisted of:

walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk, greeting everyone, wearing my clothes back-

wards, asking random people if I could cut in line simply because I don’t like waiting,
asking other people in the bathroom for their toilet paper, solely using the opposite gen-

der’s bathroom, eating dessert first, eating off other people’s plates, driving backwards

through the drive through, and asking for and ordering off of the kid’s menu at a restau-

rant. I planned to share this list with my group members and listen to what ideas they

had so that we could pair the experiments down.

The next step in the project was for each member to give their top 5 ideas in

hopes that some of our ideas would be the same, or at least similar. My choices were to

walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk, to greet everyone I pass, to eat dessert first, to

eat off of other people’s plates, or to wear clothes either backwards or inside out. One of

my group members, Kirstin Comer, chose greeting everyone you pass, wearing clothes

backwards or inside out, whispering when you talk, and trying to eat off of the kid’s

menu. Helen Frazier’s and Evan Duncan’s picks overlapped with ours.

In the end, the girls and I decided that one of us would put on our clothes inside

out before a soccer practice. If I’m being completely honest, one major reason I chose to

do the experiment in the soccer setting was because I didn’t think that my teammates

would judge me as harshly as someone outside of the team setting would have. Addi-

tionally, I was nervous about performing a social experiment for this project, and I

thought that wearing my clothes inside-out was something subtle, something that some

people might not even take notice of and could be perceived as a simple accident. I was

the one to do the experiment. I expected my teammates to either not notice my clothing,

or to nicely point it out. We were getting dressed in the locker room at 6:30 a.m., so my

teammates could also have just assumed that I was too tired to notice the “mistake.”
 Almost immediately, a teammate in my year, Caroline Copeland (who has also

taken Sociology 101 before!) pointed out to me that my clothes were inside out and actu-

ally asked if I was feeling okay. She asked me if I knew that both my shirt and shorts

were inside out, and I told her that I did. She put two and two together, and asked if this

was for Sociology 101. I told her the truth. I asked her how she was able to notice so

quickly, and she told me that the tag of my shirt caught her eye. Caroline is a very obser-

vant person, so this didn’t surprise me.

I believe that performing this experiment in front of people I know well and am

comfortable with made it more likely for someone to point out the social violation, and

in Caroline’s case, be concerned for my well-being. I think that if I had been in another

setting, people might have noticed it but would not have asked about it or let me know.

Additionally, another reason that Caroline might have asked me about it was out of fear

that our soccer coach might have taken it as the team not matching, which is required,

and there could have been a possibility that we would be punished for it.
 Group Member Tasks

Sadie Burton- research/google, voting, carried out task

Kirstin Comer- research/google, voting

Helen Frazier- research/google, voting

Evan Duncan- research/google, voting