Breaching

In the fields of sociology and social psychology, a breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms. Breaching experiments are most commonly associated with ethnomethodology, and in particular the work of Harold Garfinkel. Breaching experiments involve the conscious exhibition of "unexpected" behavior/violation of social norms, an observation of the types of social reactions such behavioral violations engender, and an analysis of the social structure that makes these social reactions possible.The idea of studying the violation of social norms and the accompanying reactions has bridged across social science disciplines, and is today used in both sociology and psychology.

The assumption behind this approach is not only that individuals engage daily in building up "rules" for social interaction, but also that people are unaware they are doing so.The work of sociologist Erving Goffman laid the theoretical foundation for ways to study the construction of everyday social meanings and behavioral norms, especially by breaking unstated but universally accepted rules. Garfinkel expanded on this idea by developing ethnomethodology as a qualitative research method for social scientists. Later, in the 1970s and 80s, famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram developed two experiments to observe and quantify responses to breaches in social norms to empirically analyze reactions to violation of those norms

Erving Goffman on social interaction

Goffman published two seminal works related to this domain: Behavior in Public Places in 1963 and Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, published in 1971. Goffman draws on his earlier studies of individuals in mental asylums, as well as other stigmatized social groups, in order to highlight the often taken-for-granted rules of social interaction, as well as the results when rules are broken. He argues that the most common rule in all social situations is for the individual to "fit in".He defines norms as a kind of guide for action supported by social sanctions or reactions, in that there are penalties for infraction, or breaking norms, while individuals are generally rewarded for compliance. If an individual breaches a social norm, the act is often attributed to some property of the individual, such as that the person is sick or mentally ill. For example, a person who is observed talking to himself in a public place is assumed to be mentally ill by any strangers who may notice.

Goffman further states that social gatherings have significant importance for organizing social life. He argues that all people in a social setting have some concern regarding the rules governing behavior. Infractions, or violation of an unstated rule, may be "taken as a sign that the offender cannot be trusted" not to take advantage of the situation "even though the original infraction itself" may actually be harmless. Individuals come to "feel that rules for participating in gatherings are crucial for society’s well-being" and that these "rules are natural, inviolable, and fundamentally right"