Breaching Experiment - Harold Garfinkel and "Making Commonplace Scenes Visible"

Harold Garfinkel and "Making Commonplace Scenes Visible"

Garfinkel suggests that each member of society uses "background expectancies " in order to interpret and decide how to act in a social situation. However, individuals are unable to explicitly describe what each of these expectancies, or rules, are. One way to help make background expectancies more visible is to be a "stranger to the life as usual character of everyday scenes" Although the term "breaching experiment" developed as a result of Garfinkel's approach, he warns it should not properly be called an experiment, but more accurately, a demonstration to produce disorganized interaction in order to highlight how the structures of everyday activities are ordinarily produced and maintained.

Some examples of everyday scenes include the home, school, or workplace. One task Garfinkel assigned to his graduate students was to challenge everyday understandings by frequently asking for clarification during a normal conversation with a friend or family member. Below is an example of an except quoted in Garfinkel's text, Studies in Ethnomethodology:

Case 2:

S: Hi Ray. How is your girlfriend feeling?

E: What do you mean, "How is she feeling?" Do you mean physical or mental?

S: I mean how is she feeling? What's the matter with you? (He looked peeved)

E: Nothing. Just explain a little clearer what do you mean?

S: Skip it. How are your Med School applications coming?

E: What do you mean, "How are they?"

S: You know what I mean!

E: I really don't.

S: What's the matter with you? Are you sick?"

This is a breaching experiment in the form of interpersonal conversation. The violation of the expectancy of shared verbal understanding between friends results in the subject expressing confusion and irritation. Garfinkel instructed his students to treat such everyday, implicit understandings as problematic phenomena to be studied. Breaching experiments reveal the resilience of social reality, since the subjects respond immediately to normalize the breach. They do so by rendering the situation accountable in familiar terms. It is assumed that the way people handle these breaches reveals much about how they handle their everyday lives.