Conducting The Breaching Experiment: The Outcome And Result

The social norm that I chose to violate was answering the phone but waiting for the other person, the caller, to speak first. I came up with this idea since it is a social norm that I have unintentionally and unknowingly been violating recently when receiving phone calls from unrecognized phone numbers. After doing a google search, it seemed apparent that the social norm was that the person receiving the call should always be the first to answer the phone with some sort of greeting(“hello”) rather than the caller. I learned that it was a social norm violation through the google search engine. I thought this would be a good social breaching experiment given that I would always speak first as soon as I answered the phone. Since I had already been violating this norm recently I decided to pay close attention the next time I violated this social norm. Everytime I received a phone call from an unknown number, I would pay closer attention to the reaction. This was done everywhere from home to public places like school and other public outings. I just built off of the reactions I had already been receiving from doing this for several months.

Expected Outcome (Hypothesis):

Before the experiment was implemented, I thought most people would hang up the phone or simply be the first to speak despite them being the ones making the phone calls. This is due to the idea that the person receiving the phone call always has to be the first one to speak to acknowledge that he/she is on the line. A violation of this norm would make people uncomfortable and thus terminate the call.

Observations:

The experiment was conducted using thirty phone calls that were mostly from unrecognizable phone numbers. While conducting the experiment, I noticed that most callers hung up the phone after an approximate average of five to seven seconds. One person hung up the phone after ten seconds which was the maximum number of seconds that the phone call lasted without a response from the receiver, myself. However, only a handful of those callers either called again or left a voicemail. The minority of callers simply just identified themselves after greeting me by saying “hello” and the conversation carried. This experiment was also conducted with a close friend who was calling me for the first time using his new cell phone number that I did not recognize. When I conducted the experiment on him he ended the call after approximately five seconds before making a second phone call where I decided to introduce myself to see if I would get a reply which is indeed what I received. During this phone call, he mentioned that he was questioning whether this was my actual phone number since I couldn’t respond to his previous phone call from a couple of days earlier or to his text messages due to the fact that I was attending to other personal matters. This also occurred with other callers who decided to try again and make the second attempt. However, some of those callers making a second attempt were callers who had the wrong phone number and thus were not necessarily intending to speak to me. Overall, the majority of people didn’t seem comfortable that I wasn’t picking up the phone with a “hello” type of greeting which is what they most likely expected from me. Instead some of those people kept saying “hello” multiple times to see if I was on the line. I eventually replied.

Analysis:

I strongly believe this social norm exists as a way for the recipient of the phone call to acknowledge his/her presence on the line. This social norm helps create phone conversation etiquettes. It is not a formal law for the phone call recipient to answer the phone with a greeting, however it is a norm that society accepts as being the correct action to take when answering a phone call. However, since it is not a formal law there are no consequences involved. In the place of consequences, there is just discomfort among those who are witnessing a violation of a social norm. In this case, those who witnessed a social norm violation were the callers. I believe that most callers reacted by hanging up the phone because they may have thought it was the right thing to do or they simply didn’t know how to react “appropriately” to my actions that seemed out of the norm. If the latter is the case, then I predict that if the recipient of the call does not speak first shall become the social norm, people will know how to react. It is only when a social norm is established that people know how to “properly” react. I believe that only by breaking the norm I just broke did the callers/witnesses become more aware that it is just a social norm that is universally accepted as a “law” despite it not being a formal one.