Saturday, March 30, 2013

Power

       This chapter, reading and video were very interesting. First of all, the milgram experiment is a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.The experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Power has been involved in our lives since we were born. For example, children. They are powerless. Therefore, if a parents raise their kids in a restrained circumstance, these kids might not grew in a normal way. Other example is a violence. kids who used to get violence from their parents or see the violent situation of their parents s' fighting are likely to be violent to their future family as well. There is a statistic of the reality. When I was a junior high school student in Japan, there was a serious issue of bullying in my school. I wasn't the part of members of the bullying but I witnessed the situation that a girl from other class was attacked by bullies. There was bullies who had power to control their classmates.They were the cultural imperialism of the class. If their classmates opposed what they said, these classmates could have been a target of being bullied. Once a student became a target of bulling, he or she was marginalized from the class and friends. Mostly the student who was powerless could be a target of bullying. What these bullies did to the girl was that they forced her to buy foods for them or let she do their homework. She was exploited. Moreover, when the gym class was took place as a part of class, the bullies did a violent behavior to the girl, such as throwing a ball to the girl on purpose. The bullies were all girls and one of the girl was treated like a queen by other bullies. I had talked to the one of bullies, she told me that she didn't want to bully anyone but she had to, otherwise she could have became a target. As long as she acted a supporter of the group, she could be a center figure of the class. It was just like a people who acted teacher in the milgram experiment.Some of them didn't want to continue the torture but they continued the experiment because the authority figure of the experiment told them to do it strongly. It tells us that people can't be against powerful people. Besides, the circumstance which is unfamiliar lead people to act the way which is required in the circumstance. A fear is the one of factors to control the individual conscience. According to the experiment, the fear of electric shock determines how the participants should act. My experiment could be explained by the reading and this chapter about power. Actually I had experienced in doing milgram experiment at my college in Japan, because my major was psychology.

4 comments:

  1. It was very interesting to read how bullying not only happens here in the US but also in other countries such as yours. I would think because Japan is one big country it would be more united school wise but I guess that comes to show about assumptions. The Milgram experiment was all due to power as you mentioned. Some of the participants did not want to continue but did because of the authoritarian figure, in this case the actor professor, who was a symbol of power. This was a interesting blog entry, good job !

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  2. Thanks for the real-life experience. I think bullying is the issue not only in US, but in all the countries around the globe. It is so fearful when it comes to power because sometimes we will do things we don’t wanna do but we still do it just because of the symbol of power. I’m not surprised by the result of the milgram experiment that most of the participants chose to continue the experiment when they knew they could potentially kill the victims because power really makes people blind. There are so many bullying, hate crimes and corruptions in the society; all of these happen are all due to power, because they want authority, they want money. You mentioned that you’ve done a similar experiment like the milgram experiment, I’m kinda interested to hear it from you.

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  3. Thanks for the real-life experience. I think bullying is the issue not only in US, but in all the countries around the globe. It is so fearful when it comes to power because sometimes we will do things we don’t wanna do but we still do it just because of the symbol of power. I’m not surprised by the result of the milgram experiment that most of the participants chose to continue the experiment when they knew they could potentially kill the victims because power really makes people blind. There are so many bullying, hate crimes and corruptions in the society; all of these happen are all due to power, because they want authority, they want money. You mentioned that you’ve done a similar experiment like the milgram experiment, I’m kinda interested to hear it from you.

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  4. I really liked how you wrote about the video and the article. how you explained what they were about and how they related to each other, and mostly how they related to your life as well. i love how you gave examples of your own life and talked about what happened in japan. those bullies happened everywhere, not only in your school, but everywhere. I remember when in middle school there would always be bullies, high school as well but college people understands better and they are more mature about everything. I was surprised when you said the girl dont like bullying but she did it so she dont be the target, thats actually so true, because most bullies dont like what they doing, but they dont want to be the target either so they do whatever they have to.

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