A.J. Schultz
Prof. Krueger
Psychology 202
February 21, 2002
Social Norms
I chose to break the social norm in an elevator as my experiment. I chose this so that I could actually combine two social norms into one. I chose to stand backwards in the elevator and when there were numerous people in the elevator, but I thought it would be more interesting if I stood very close to the person instead of facing backwards when there was just one person in the elevator. The independent variables in my experiment were gender of the person that I stood close to, the amount of time we had together in the elevator, and of coarse the number of people in the elevator and how many stops were made. I began to measure the way people reacted to when I invaded their space in an elevator, which was nearly empty. I also measured what would happen when a person would be just getting on and my back would be towards them. My hypothesis was that the people that I stood close to would actually move because they had space to, and could actually ask me what I was doing. My other hypothesis is that no one would react to my facing the opposite direction but they would stare and stare hard.