Editing Breaching experiment (section)

==="On maintaining social norms: a field experiment in the subway"===
[[File:NYC subway riders with their newspapers.jpg|thumb|A busy New York City Subway train]]
Milgram defines "residual rules" as rules that fulfill two criteria: 
# People must substantially agree on them.
# People don't notice them until a violation occurs.

A residual rule of everyday interaction on the New York City Subway is that seats are on a [[first-come, first-served]] basis and individuals are not supposed to talk to one another in such close quarters.<ref name="onmaintaining" />

The experimenters violated this implicit rule by asking people to give up their seats.  They then measured the responses as the number of times individuals consented or refused to give up their seats, and also noted people's verbal and physical reactions to the request.  Experimenters approached individuals under three conditions:

# The experimenter approached the subject and said, "Excuse me. May I please have your seat?" No justification was offered.
# The second condition tested the hypothesis that subjects gave up their seats because they assumed the experimenter had some important reason for requesting it.  To rule out this assumption, experimenters were instructed to ask "Excuse me.  May I please have your seat?  I can't read my book standing up."
# The third condition was included because the experimenters believed that subjects might have been so startled by the request that they didn't have time to think about an adequate reply.  Therefore, in this condition, to alert the subject that a seat might be requested, two experimenters entered the subway car from different doors: one would say "Excuse me. Do you think it would be all right if I asked someone for a seat?" and the other "I don't know."

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; margin:1em auto 1em auto;"
|+ Results
|-
! Condition !! No justification !! Trivial justification !! Overheard condition
|-

! Subjects who gave up their seats
| 56% || 37.2%|| 26.8%
|-
! Subjects who slid over to make room for experimenters
| 12.3% || 4.7%|| 9.8%
|-
! Subjects who did not give up their seats
| 31.7% || 58.1%|| 63.4%
|}
The experimenters reasoned that subjects in the no justification condition engaged in normalization of the breach by attributing a meaning to the violation that would make it seem not to be a violation at all. An example of such a normalization would be "he is asking for a seat because he is sick." Since the second condition, the trivial justification, prevented the process of normalization, subjects could not as easily imagine an appropriate justification for the request, and therefore, a much lower number gave up their seats. In the third, overheard condition, the experimenters reasoned that the warning of the pending seat request allowed subjects to be better prepared to refuse the request.

An important aspect of the maintenance of social norms is also revealed in the emotional reactions felt by the experimenters.  Most of the experimenters reported great difficulty in carrying out the task. They reported that, when standing in front of the subject, they felt anxious, tense, and embarrassed. Many felt unable to verbalize the request for a seat and had to withdraw. They sometimes feared they were the center of attention in the car and were often unable to look directly at the subjects. Once they made a successful request for a seat, they felt pressure to act in a way that would actually justify the request, such as pretending to be ill. Milgram proposes that the experimenters were playing the [[role|social role]] of subway rider, and they felt an extreme emotional reaction as a result of breaking implicit rules for that role.  These extreme emotional reactions reflect how important it is to people to engage in routine, everyday activities.