Reading Summary 2 PDF

Title Reading Summary 2
Course Introduction To Sociology
Institution Cornell University
Pages 1
File Size 43.3 KB
File Type PDF
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Summary

Summary of assigned reading 2...


Description

“If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably” describes the Stanley Milgram experiment where a "teacher" participant were instructed to administer electric shocks to the "learner" to study the level of obedience people would follow. He discovered that people were much more obedient than he thought and would continue to shock the “learner” even when confronted with exclamations of extreme pain. An interesting observation he made is that when the experiment was done at Yale versus in a more untrustworthy place more people tended to obey to extreme due to the prestigious reputation of Yale. In “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, discusses how people act in different ways in society to present a version of self in different situations. While in some ways we present ourselves in a way the situation calls for, like taking on a professional manner at work; sometimes people carefully cultivate a certain aura by purposefully using their actions to show the social world an appearance that may not be true. For example, a girl may arrange for calls to be made to her phone in order to show her friends that she is popular enough for others to want to call her. In “The Importance of Being Beautiful”, discusses the phenomenon of more attractive people being able to advance easier and faster than less attractive people. Different examples are used to explain this; one is "person perception," which is the ways that physical attractiveness affects all parts of your life. One study that was described I found particularly concerning. University students were asked to be “evaluators” and were given a scenario were a young child had hurt a sleeping dog and a picture with either an attractive or homely child. Based on just the picture the responses were found to describe the attractive child’s cruelty as a “bad day” and the homely child as regularly misbehaving and a “bratty” child. I feel it’s important to think about how society’s expectation make us more obedient to societal expectations leading to our increased obedience to perceived authority. In some ways it seems harmless, like changing your behavior to be more attractive, but as seen in the Milgram experiment it can become harmful. Another question to think about is how we as a society should try to decrease the bias of assuming that more attractive people are more successful, smarter, and have more good qualities than homely people, especially since oftentimes it is not true....


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