The social norm my group and I chose to violate was offering people a piece of gum, but then offering them the chewed gum from my mouth. The primary way I expected people to respond to deviation from this norm was laughing, or finding it humorous. I measured their laughter on a scale from a slight smile, to a silent laugh, and finally a guttural laugh. I predicted that most of the responses would be a mixture between laughing and confusion. I measured their level of confusion by their facial expressions, if they furrowed their brows, and also if they gave any verbal cues that hinted confusion such as asking why we just offered them chewed gum. When I broke the norm on my own, outside of section I asked students in my Arabic class and also in …show more content…
A few of the people around that knew me said yes, and when I offered them my chewed gum they just laughed and commented on how gross it was. The rest of the people I asked just turned down the gum. I think the responses are similar to what I expected. The one thing that surprised me was the number of people I didn’t know who were still willing to take gum from a stranger, because growing up I had always been taught to never take food from a stranger. In our campus study, most of the individuals said they didn’t want gum, didn’t like gum, or just plain ignored us. There were a few people that actually accepted our offer and when we offered them chewed gum, they either laughed, walked away, or seemed grossed out by what we were doing. One person actually looked at is in disgust. They made it seem like we were violating a major law. The only surprising case we had was when a guy actually put his hand out to take the gum, only realize seconds later that we had taken the gum we were about to hand him, from our own mouths. Two changes that I would make to improve this study is increasing the amount of time to perform the experiment, because many people were