Assignment 5 - Act of Kindness

For most of the past week, I've been struggling to think of an act of kindness to perform, but when I got the news that my roommate Eric hadn't gotten the summer internship he had been hoping for, I thought I should do something to brighten his day. As small and strange as it was, I decided to make him a cup of hot chocolate. It was certainly unexpected, and he thought it a little strange, but I could tell it brightened his day! Despite living in a house with a lot of friends, I don't feel like we all make much of an effort to outwardly show that we care. If one of us makes a conscious effort to make everyone else's day just a little bit better, that culture could spread and really have a larger impact than you'd initially expect.

Assignment 4 - Moral Muteness

I feel we all experience some degree of moral muteness in our lives, as the pressure to help others and do what's right is often overshadowed by the social pressure to conform, to not make a fool of oneself and to not anger others. I am certainly no different. I remember a few weekends back, I was hanging out with my friend group, when a few of my buddies were really tearing into another one of my friends who was there. Now like many groups of guys, we often give each other hard times and roast sessions, but this friend gets more than his fair share, and seemed visibly upset during this instance. Instead of standing up for him, I just let it happen. I know there's no real harm done, we're all just as much friends as before, but sometimes it's good to put yourself out at risk to make an improvement, however small, in someone else's life.

Assignment 3 - Biases

After taking three of Project Implict's bias tests, I was lead to some interesting discoveries. The first test I took was the Weight IAT, which compared fat and skinny people. I'd like to think that I don't hold people's size against them regarding how I see them as people, despite this I scored a strong negative association with fat people. I found these results to be challenging, but understandable. I can still hold larger people with esteem, but view the intrinsic adverse heath risks in a negative light. Regardless, it's interesting to see that your opinion of individuals can be swayed subconsciously without really getting to know.

Because of this previous score, I was worried about the next one, the Weapons IAT, which checked for mental correlations between black people and weapons. To my relief, I received a slight association of white Americans with weapons as compared with black Americans. Having grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood and attending private Catholic school, I was worried I could have developed subconscious biases simply from not getting to know many people from other races on any level. However, I consider myself to be fairly open minded, which showed in the results.

The third test I choose was the Age IAT, which indicated no preference for young or old. I felt this was accurate, I don't feel like I feel any inherit value to age or lack thereof. I was surprised that the data skewed so heavy towards young people though, I understand that people are more likely to have positive opinions towards attractie people, and young people are more attractive, but there is something inherently nice about the elderly, perhaps a mental association with grandparents that makes it hard not to associate the good words with them.

In conclusion, I thought the activity with pretty interesting but to me it seemed there could be a lot of error, in particular which association pair comes first which effects speed simply because your mind associating the different sides to different things. Secondly, I felt like it was easy to make small mistakes that could have a large effect on the results.

Assignment 2 - Independence Day

In one of my favorite classic movie speeches, which can be seen here in this Independence Day clip,
The president of the United States is forced to rally a group of people to prevent the human race from being annihilated by an alien threat.

The speaker employs some of the concepts of the relational leadership theory to inspire a group of people who are all probably in pretty low spirits. One tenet of this relationship theory that can be seen is Inclusiveness. The president takes the takes the ideal of the 4th of July holiday, the day that originally celebrated American independence, and deconstructed it. Instead of using the holiday as a symbol of national pride, he states that in the future it would be remembered as the day petty nationalism and politics were thrown out in favor of everyone banding together to defeat a common threat. this scene always hung with me for the way it encourages the listeners to look at the big picture, and convinces everyone to stand together as equals.