Violate The Social Norm Of Walk Essay

1162 Words5 Pages
The group decided to violate the social norm surrounding simple walking – we decided to walk backwards for a period. It’s physically the best way to walk, with regard to keeping balance and watching where one walks. As such, everyone walked in this manner, save for the occasional Purdue Office of Admissions tour guides. Nobody thinks twice about how to walk. Our research, then, seeks to violate the norm of walking “forward” and observe the reactions of individuals, both strangers and acquaintances, who encounter our “walker.” In our efforts, we chose a large, public space in which we could have one group member walk backwards for an extended period within eyesight of a large number of subjects. We chose the Purdue Memorial Union given its…show more content…
The remaining group members stood inconspicuously along the hallway, ready to record observations of individuals the “walker” passes while moving down the hallway. Each time, the group member walked down the same hallway and around the same time so as to maintain a sizable population. The independent variable in this study is the way in which our group member walked; the dependent variable is the set of reactions of individuals exposed to our “control” walk or our “treatment”…show more content…
So we would essentially be facing strangers, going the same direction, only they were walking “correctly” and we were walking backwards. These strangers were forced to observe our behavior for a longer period of time, so we gained stronger reactions. These participants seemed really confused as to why we would be doing this, and the prolonged potential to make eye contact with us clearly made some people uncomfortable. We even had a participant abruptly change her route because she was tired of facing us while she walked
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