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  • Essay / Elevator Experiment Essay - 1581

    As meanings, social contexts, and the informal rules of society are created by people, they can then be changed by those same people. In an alternate universe where stretching on the elevator floor is considered a normal aspect of "elevator etiquette", I could not have broken a social context in this way, simply because the inhabitants of this universe would take it for granted. that an elevator is the appropriate place to stretch. This is the perfect illustration of the “power of the situation”, what we can commonly call the “social context”. By changing the social context and introducing behavior that was not considered a social norm, I elicited negative sanctions and challenged ideas of social control. Ultimately, this experiment revealed that much of human behavior is dictated by an infinite set of unspoken rules, most of which are never questioned, that members of a society are held captive to its every whims and irrational values. I now believe that individuals should frequently question the artificial constraints placed on them by society and seek to better understand why they act in certain situations, even if that means presenting their yoga routine to the nearest audience..