Saw Yesterday in the Huffington

¶ … saw yesterday in the Huffington Post (UK) about an Orthodox Jewish man from some cult who boarded a plane wrapped in a plastic bag. The plastic bag was knotted at the top of his head in a triple knot. Media speculated that his reason for placing himself inside the bag was to protect himself from female passengers. The reason, however, was rather different. The man would be flying above cemeteries and he didn't want the impure spirits of the cemeteries to contaminate him. He therefore packed himself inside a 'barrier'.

I decided to use that social breach for staging my experiment of social breach but in a decidedly less dramatic fashion.

There was a flood today. Heavy rain pours that left my vehicle rocking in three feet of water. I wrapped my feet and legs in 2-ply think black garbage bags walked down the stairs, outside into the street, and entered the car still wrapped in these bags. Once inside the car, I removed them and stashed them away.

I noticed others looking, but then the spectators, mainly children, were fascinated by the entire spectacle outside -- the lake on the streets and washing-up their lawns, the floating debris, the propeller boat that an adult was operating on the water, that my action seemed to appear normal to them given the situation. One of the kids did point; two of the others looked, but then their attention was shortly after distracted by other equally unusual and interesting occurrences.

The man in the plane, on the other hand -- his appearance was 'abnormal' (literally against he norms) in a time and place where ritual, mannerism, dress, conduct and so forth cohered to norms. Were more to dress like him; he may not have aroused that degree of attention. The burka for instance is a similar type of dress; it grabs little attention today. It is precisely because he dressed that way in a context where everyone else dressed different and where the context at the time was stable and consistent that his dress evoked the amount of attention and ridicule that it did.

The fact that he was a male or that I a particular gender violated rules did not, I think, make any dress. Violation of social rules catches attention regardless of the sex.

Milgram (1978) observed that people would feel a nauseous sensation when violating social convention in even an innocuous way, and indeed I felt that, having to force myself into going down the stairs and into public dressed the way I was. I relied on the stormy situation to buoy me. This again was another of Milgram's observations: that his students, when implementing breaching experiments, often gave themselves 'crutches'.

I noticed too that it was easier to 'socially breach' when others were engaged in similar acts and socially breaching too.