A Gaffe a Minute

By Jonathan Fox; illustration by Jonathan Fox

Thieves, chickens and drag queens hit the campus of the University of Richmond this spring. Yeah, so what else is new?

Actually, this small group of misfits were committing social gaffes for a class project. It’s the sort of thing a lot of VCU students do on a regular basis, but it just doesn’t happen often at the traditional and well-groomed UR. Fellow students were shocked when two students began snatching food from people’s trays in the dining hall and devouring it on the spot.

“People couldn’t believe it was going on,” says James Rhodes, who did the project with fellow Spider, Rich Koll. “One guy was really anal,” Koll says.

The social gaffe project is a required part of an Interpersonal Communications class. “My favorites are those that don’t intrude on anybody else’s life,” says faculty member Linda Hobgood, who has taught the class for five years. The only limitation, she says, is that the projects can’t be illegal or immoral, which just makes the class that much harder.

Interactions in everyday life, she says, are composed of episodes in which people react differently according to experience and social influence. There are, of course, situations where some people have no experiences on which to draw, such as alien abductions. This is where the social gaffe project fits it, Hobgood says, and the purpose of the project is to observe the influence of both verbal and nonverbal communication in these types of situations.

In other words, the projects are done to see how people will react when they are put into a really bizarre and unusual predicament. Reactions to social gaffes can vary according to race, age and gender, Hobgood says.

When a student dressed in a chicken suit went to the Capitol and screamed “The sky is falling” to people walking by, black males were the only people who laughed openly at the student, she said. Governor Allen’s staff members and other white males ignored the chicken, while women only laughed if they were in a safe situation, such as on a bus or a car.

Another group of three students did their project in a local mall. Jeff Dausch dressed up in full drag and walked from store to store trying on clothes and buying CDs.

“I looked pretty good,” the demure Dausch says. “Seven girls helped put me together.” Dausch wore a pink sweater, a pleated skirt, a black wig and panty hose. Most of the people he passed, both male and female, looked away.

“The people who were younger were more shaken,” says Andrea Stigall, Dausch’s partner. “In the Limited, they couldn’t tell if he was joking.” In fact, the sales clerks refused to help him until he asked at the counter. Most people that he encountered tried to ignore him, she said.

Are these experiments helping UR students spread their wings? “I think that they learn it takes a lot of courage to violate a social norm,” says Warren P. Hopkins, another faculty member who assigns similar experiments in his Abnormal Psychology class. “Being different can be judged in a moral sense as bad.”

“It would be nice if people who see social norms violated would see it as being different,” Hopkins said, but instead, “they morally evaluate behavior they consider abnormal.” People who have some sort of disorder or abnormal characteristic may feel stigmatized by others’ perception of their differences, he said, because they do not fit in with the majority of society.

Stand out in a crowd? Welcome to the 90s, the Age of Stigmatation.