Garfinkeling - A Social Experiment

Do you know anything about Garfinkeling? 

Garfinkeling - A Social Experiment

According to sagepub.com it is «…when a researcher knowingly violates a social norm while interacting with other people to reveal how commonly accepted social knowledge is left unquestioned in everyday life».

Our daily life, including online, is a routine. Everything that we do purposefully is accompanied by a large number of actions, the meaning and principles of which we do not think about. An important element of these actions is the background expectations of other people regarding possible reactions to our behavior. For example, there is a repertoire of acceptable answers to the greeting. And any deviation from this repertoire will cause surprise or stress of a person, which means to show the structure of this practice and the rules by which it is implemented. So, breaking the rules of greeting, you can understand the boundaries of this repertoire and formulate a hypothesis about the social functions that this practice has in our society.

I’m a student of faculty of media communications in HSE and during this month we need to do a social experiment called Garfinkeling. The task is to experimentally study a certain social rule around which our everyday life, the “world of common sense,” is built. The rule may apply to different groups of people: visitors of a particular site, students of HSE, relatives or friends, followers on Instagram, those with whom you match in a tinder, etc. This activity is very opportune and you can have a lot of fun making it during self-isolation, so I will introduce you some experiments of my fellow students.

1. Four students violated the unspoken order on woman.ru and discussed topics unusual for women's forums: what is the time, spoilers for the finale of the «Game of Thrones» and the dangers of artificial intelligence. It is important to say that the researchers did not try to disrupt the “female” conversations with clever questions. It’s just that the forum initially developed a common language with life examples and personal opinions. Researchers, on the contrary, acted as if they wanted to learn rigorous scientific facts.

Results: Despite a specific request for a scientific fact, the forum participants responded with philosophical reasoning (“There is no time, there is only here and now”), metaphors understandable to the audience (“Now this is a vacuum cleaner”) and philistine knowledge (“as I understand it, as long as the star burns and exists planetary system, then there is a time ”). That is, the questions themselves do not turn the forum with their traditions into the conditional The Question. Any conditional commentary on the topic either remained unattended, or still passed into everyday reasoning - artificial intelligence will replace women, so that they will not have much time.

2. New Instagram features - new ways of interacting with subscribers. Well, or another thing that can be ignored, as Zhenya usually did. For Garfinkeling, she answered the story of each person in the tape for 24 hours. "In order to encourage me to write a person a comment or a message on Instagram, the post must either really impress me, or I must understand the issue, or I sincerely care where and what a particular person is doing, and I did not find out from other sources».

Results: The experiment got a little out of control. There were too many reactions and comments, and Zhenya began to get annoyed and worried. The amount of messages was so large that it seemed to her that they were bombing her personal space. Messages didn’t end with the end of the experiment, and many wanted to continue the conversation - “With each new notification and my answer to it, there was a panic in me that these 77 comments would “go around” for at least another week.”

3. Anya decided to communicate with all her interlocutors only by voice messages: “I was wondering if there are “rules” for voice messages: with whom they can be used, when, in what situations and even how often.” If, before the Garfinkeling, Anya used voice only with very close friends or a boyfriend, then during the experiment she did not type a single text message, and everyone in the messengers heard her voice - from parents to bosses.

Results: If voice messages are usually used to spell out what is inconvenient to write, I wrote down every word, either it is “hello” or “yes”. During the Garfinkeling, Anya identified three types of behavior in response to her experiment.

Acceptance without questions. Friends and relatives were ready to listen and send voice messages in response, although dad called back immediately after receiving such a message: “If you want to talk, talk.”

Chain reaction. The voice message from Anya, as she writes, “worked like pressing the «you can» button: Anya, sending a voice instead of a text, opened the door to this method of communication, allowing herself and her interlocutor to use it.

Anger. There were those who did not like the voice at all. At first, people related to Anya's passion for voice with enthusiasm, but after the tenth message, the joke for them was delayed and irritated.

4. Serezha decided that his calm chat in Vkontakte with school friends should be invigorated. Usually there they are exchanging news from life, memes and discussions of everything: “from sowing fields to the political situation,” Serezha says. He decided to add high culture to the chat, raising the themes of art, architecture and addressing all participants exclusively by name and patronymic in the tone of a well-educated intellectual, as part of a Garfinkeling.

Results: “On the first day, the members of the group took my behavior as a joke and played along with me. This was a kind of new element in the norms we adopted, and therefore, at first, such communication attracted, ”Seryozha describes. On the third day, the chat participants studied Seryozha’s behavior enough to take measures to restore the accepted order: “When I turned to someone from the group, I was relatively politely asked to finish this performance.” Soon, Sergei began to be ignored, and on the fifth day, he had to confess to the experiment and complete it, because his school friends were seriously planning to exclude him from the conference forever.

What is the purpose of the experiment?

It is difficult for many students, and then specialists in media production, to think through issues that are really important for the public, and at the same time they are personally are hurted by. Indeed, the best media projects, photographers and galleries can do just that - to relate their pain, inspiration or joy and what is understood and expected by other people. Garfinkeling is a cool tool to develop this skill.

Text by
Alita Rudnitskaya