MY SENIOR PAPER
References
http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/social_norms.htm
http://ivanpavlov.com/
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychology101/u/psychology-theories.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/f/cogpsych.htm
http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/social_norms.htm
http://ivanpavlov.com/
http://psychology.about.com/od/psychology101/u/psychology-theories.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/f/cogpsych.htm
Human Social Functions
I was standing in the hall at my high school when mike, one of my teachers asked me if i had started my senior paper. Casually i said no. he went on about some old procrastination jazz but to be honest i was not really paying attention. This was because i hate lectures that everyone has heard one thousand times like it was a child's fairy tale. He also asked if i knew what the paper was going to be about. I do not remember what i told him at that moment but it fell short of his standards. He told me that it had to be an analyzation of something. This kind of made me angry because i feel like this paper is a sentiment. But whatever. I am not the one in control, am I? I don't even know who made the standards for this paper that i am writing. I don't think that anyone really knows. Yet we don't even think about it. So i think my senior paper is going to be an “analyzation” of people, the way they act and social norms that no one questions. So basically psychology, of which i have grown a strong interest.
My inspiration for this paper was the night i just had. I was chillin' with two kids who had just moved into their own place. They are really cool kids but their situation sucked. They shared one bedroom that they payed $300 a month for. They were living in a dump. They had food in their closet for lack of a fridge. They put mattresses leaned on the wall during the day and layed them down in an awkward way at night when it was time to sleep. Wrappers and trash were all over the floor. Not only did they smoke inside but they ashed their cigarettes on the carpet. But the worst was their roommate that they had. She was just some bitch who was unbelievably disgusting and strange. When we were chillin' in their room she came in. she asked me for a cigarette and i was running out but she wouldn't take no for an answer. So reluctantly i gave her one. Then she took my seat. I was getting distressed. She smoked that cigarette way past the filter. It was disgusting. I told her what i was thinking and she just stared at me for a long time with the most stoic facial expression i had ever seen. It really made me uncomfortable. There was a chihuahua on the floor and she picked it up and held it up to her face and opened her mouth. The rat dog started licking the inside of her mouth and still she held it there, content with this disgusting behavior. I was so appalled at this creature who was pretending to be a human that i felt like puking. I snatched the dog away from her and conveyed my thoughts about how she was acting and what kind of person i thought she was. She showed no emotion. After a few minutes she left the room. Immediately everybody started telling me about how she steals their food, fucks ridiculous amounts of people, and that she has a yeast infection. I was skeptical about believing them because people say ludacris stuff like that all the time. But then they sprayed where she was sitting with Lysol out of fear of germs like she was oozing S.T.D.'s or something. So i sort of believed them about the yeast infection. Then i was told some first hand accounts of her sex life. It was disgusting.
The only point i am trying to make is that their situation would be a lot better if they had more money. When i left there about two hours ago i started to think about all of the things that they have to deal with. The issues they go through that spawn from money. Which made me wonder about where i will end up.
The School System
I definetely do not want to end up like them. I do not want to end up like my parents with 5 kids by the time they were like 23. That would suck. I don't want to end up like most of the fuck ups around here. Right now i fucking hate my job. And that can make anyone dread waking up in the morning. Like most people i want the finer things in life. I want to live with every luxury i can. Stuff like television, a dope ass phone, internet, a pool side mini bar, an Asian slave boy to massage my feet when i feel it necessary, and shit like that, you know? I want to live comfortably. And in our era we have to go to school to get a good job to support things like that. Which is the only reason i am writing this paper. So i can graduate and be one step closer to being an aristocrat. Which we all want to be whether we know it or not. That is why humans made the school system. So that we all have a chance to be a millionaire. So i am going to write about the school system for a little while.
I am about to graduate from high school. Just like millions of sheep like people have done before me. I have a lot of choices to make in my life right now. I could further my education or i could get stuck with a terrible job for the rest of my life. Now a lot of people say that it is possible to get a good job without going to college but i think that it is highly unlikely. Most good jobs require a higher education which i think is so not cool. College is expensive and it takes a lot of time. From the ages of 18 to 26 you should be taking advantage of your youth, not spend it in a classroom learning to be a slave for someone else. I also find it a hair queer that no one has noticed that schools only teach you to be an employee, not an employer. I think that everybody wants to be their own boss in one way or another. Is that not the American dream?
I remember watching barrack Obama's address to the students. He said that a high school diploma is near worthless and that everybody should further their education. A very respectable thing to say. But then he went on to say to the gym full of students that he was in that none of them would grow up to be celebrities, athletes, or rockstars. This really made me kind of mad. Why would you say that to every kid in America? I mean every kid in school was required to watch that, right? I just thought that that was really mean to say to the students of America. I thought that a person should follow their dreams. I was a junior when i watched that and i had just blazed some fucking dank weed right before i watched it so at the time these thoughts did not stand very prevalently in my mind. But i recently remembered that day and was said by the president and it did not stomach well with me. I thought that everyone should do whatever is most appealing to them. You only live once so if you want to be a professional athlete then i think you should. Someone has to do it. Sure, there are probably a million more people who want to do the same thing but there is a chance that it might be you. I will admit that it is a very biased game to play. What i mean by that is that the people who are athletes or celebrities had connections to the top. A bum on the streets probably will not ever get famous but a filthy rich kid living in beverly hills will without trying.
What a fucked up world we live in.
Social Norms/Social Psychology Theories
People have always had certain things they do or surround themselves with. A lot of these things they do because so many people around them do it. Who am i kidding, everything anyone does they do because everyone else is doing it. These things are social norms. And they are very natural to humans as a species. Like a flock of birds that fly south for the winter, they don,t really know why they do it, they are just accustomed to it. And flying south for the winter is a good thing to do. Birds would die in the cold. It is very comparable to humans wearing clothes. I assume that people started wearing clothes to protect themselves from the weather or the sun or something of that nature. Then as people began to grow in numbers they just got used to seeing other people wearing clothes. I do not think that it had anything to do with their sexual organs, it was just what people were used to.
To me this is the biggest social norm in all of humanity. And there is nothing wrong with social norms. They keep people happy. They are kind of just unspoken rules. And breaking the rules can result in the worst punishment of all; exclusion from the group. And no one wants that. Everyone strives for social acceptance but to get there you have to follow all of the unspoken rules that every person does not always know that they know about. Some of these basic social practice's is spitting. If a person who has never seen another person in his life before meets someone and they spit on him, he probably will know that the said person is hostile.
There are several types of social norms. They are injunctive, implicit, explicit, and subjective. An injunctive social norm is a behavior that everyone seems to accept like wearing clothes or not burping in a restaurant. An implicit is one that is unspoken but everyone knows it. Kind of like spitting on someone and such. Explicit norms are openly spoken. They are like having good manners. Subjective social norms are pretty much how you think that you are coming off to other people. So basicly what you expect yourself to be like in public. Like how you start to act if you are trying to impress someone.
No one is original. No matter what you say to try defy that statement. Everything we do has been or was influenced by someone else. Most of the people who think that they are original are the most zombie like. Teenagers, who i am talking about, cling to one another in an anthill sort of way. This is where peer pressure comes into play. If a kid goes to college thinking that all the kids there drink more than he does, he will start drinking more. If a kid in middle school has friends who all start smoking pot then he is very likely to start as well. The same goes for every other drug that there is. No one is just going to start doing them, they have to be introduced. Yet you always here people say 'i was never peer pressured into it, i just decided to do it.' everyone was peer pressured into it, even if no one even offered them the drugs. They just knew that others were doing it and that made them think it was okay.
A lot has changed through high school. Two years ago i would have never written that paragraph. Mostly because i was one of those kids smoking pot.
Behavioral Theories
Behavioral theories are the idea that everyone is born with a blank mental slate. That people are conditioned to accept social norms as they are. I think that this is true but at the same time i believe that everyone is naturally instilled with morals. Basic morals like don't fight and be kind and stuff. A baby who was just born knows what pain feels like. They also know what causes pain. Therefore they should naturally know that other people can feel pain and that they can inflict it on others. So i think that no one is born with the urge to be mean. They just are conditioned to do so. A serial killer was not born with the need to kill people. None of the serial killers you hear about are killing to kill. They have alterior motives. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual cannibal necropheliac, killed people for his sexual urges, that he may or may not have been born with. The only time that people kill to kill is either to show dominance or out of resentment of the person he/she killed.
Behavioral theories are some of the more popular areas of psychological study. Some famous behavioral psychologists were John Watson and B. F. Skinner. The man who discovered classical conditioning was not a psychologist but a physiologist. His name was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. He was a Russian son of a priest who became a man of science after reading The origin of Species by Charles Darwin. He deducted that every living creature is born with a certain amount of instincts but all of those instincts can be diluted by conditioning.
Cognitive Theories
Cognitive theories are the theories that try and explain depression and everything it entails. Such as motivation, problem solving and critical thinking. It was the most popular area of psychology before the 1950's when behavioral psychology took over. Ulric Neisser wrote the book Cognitive Psychology in 1967 in which he sums up this area of psychology by saying 'Cognition involves all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved with everything a human might do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.'
Personality Theories
Personality theories are theories about each persons train of thought or way of thinking and habits that make each person unique in their mannerisms. It also studies emotions and their affect on people. I agree that everyone thinks in their own way. A way to prove this is to play that game where one person says a word and another person says whatever comes to mind when they hear that word. Most of the time everyone will say some thing different. This theory then falls under behavioral theories in a way. In what way were these people conditioned to think the way they do.
The study of emotions is very complicated. From what i have read every emotion, from a scientific point of view, comes from fear and pleasure. I can understand how this is thought. You get angry out of fear or you cry out of fear. Or laugh out of pleasure or smile etc. but then again if you feel love does it fall under pleasure? I do not think so. I think that love is so profound that it is it's own category. And this category cannot be explained by psychology or science. This is what makes people the way that they are this, to me, is having a soul.
I think that i am done writing this paper. I covered all that i could. I am also sorry that my intro was so long it is just that when i started writing this i was filled with emotions. So i wrote it all down in a semi-sentimental way. I was mad at the way the the human world worked so i wrote this paper on psychology because it is what i have been interested in and it fit for what i was feeling that fateful night. So this is David Goodwin signing out.
I was standing in the hall at my high school when mike, one of my teachers asked me if i had started my senior paper. Casually i said no. he went on about some old procrastination jazz but to be honest i was not really paying attention. This was because i hate lectures that everyone has heard one thousand times like it was a child's fairy tale. He also asked if i knew what the paper was going to be about. I do not remember what i told him at that moment but it fell short of his standards. He told me that it had to be an analyzation of something. This kind of made me angry because i feel like this paper is a sentiment. But whatever. I am not the one in control, am I? I don't even know who made the standards for this paper that i am writing. I don't think that anyone really knows. Yet we don't even think about it. So i think my senior paper is going to be an “analyzation” of people, the way they act and social norms that no one questions. So basically psychology, of which i have grown a strong interest.
My inspiration for this paper was the night i just had. I was chillin' with two kids who had just moved into their own place. They are really cool kids but their situation sucked. They shared one bedroom that they payed $300 a month for. They were living in a dump. They had food in their closet for lack of a fridge. They put mattresses leaned on the wall during the day and layed them down in an awkward way at night when it was time to sleep. Wrappers and trash were all over the floor. Not only did they smoke inside but they ashed their cigarettes on the carpet. But the worst was their roommate that they had. She was just some bitch who was unbelievably disgusting and strange. When we were chillin' in their room she came in. she asked me for a cigarette and i was running out but she wouldn't take no for an answer. So reluctantly i gave her one. Then she took my seat. I was getting distressed. She smoked that cigarette way past the filter. It was disgusting. I told her what i was thinking and she just stared at me for a long time with the most stoic facial expression i had ever seen. It really made me uncomfortable. There was a chihuahua on the floor and she picked it up and held it up to her face and opened her mouth. The rat dog started licking the inside of her mouth and still she held it there, content with this disgusting behavior. I was so appalled at this creature who was pretending to be a human that i felt like puking. I snatched the dog away from her and conveyed my thoughts about how she was acting and what kind of person i thought she was. She showed no emotion. After a few minutes she left the room. Immediately everybody started telling me about how she steals their food, fucks ridiculous amounts of people, and that she has a yeast infection. I was skeptical about believing them because people say ludacris stuff like that all the time. But then they sprayed where she was sitting with Lysol out of fear of germs like she was oozing S.T.D.'s or something. So i sort of believed them about the yeast infection. Then i was told some first hand accounts of her sex life. It was disgusting.
The only point i am trying to make is that their situation would be a lot better if they had more money. When i left there about two hours ago i started to think about all of the things that they have to deal with. The issues they go through that spawn from money. Which made me wonder about where i will end up.
The School System
I definetely do not want to end up like them. I do not want to end up like my parents with 5 kids by the time they were like 23. That would suck. I don't want to end up like most of the fuck ups around here. Right now i fucking hate my job. And that can make anyone dread waking up in the morning. Like most people i want the finer things in life. I want to live with every luxury i can. Stuff like television, a dope ass phone, internet, a pool side mini bar, an Asian slave boy to massage my feet when i feel it necessary, and shit like that, you know? I want to live comfortably. And in our era we have to go to school to get a good job to support things like that. Which is the only reason i am writing this paper. So i can graduate and be one step closer to being an aristocrat. Which we all want to be whether we know it or not. That is why humans made the school system. So that we all have a chance to be a millionaire. So i am going to write about the school system for a little while.
I am about to graduate from high school. Just like millions of sheep like people have done before me. I have a lot of choices to make in my life right now. I could further my education or i could get stuck with a terrible job for the rest of my life. Now a lot of people say that it is possible to get a good job without going to college but i think that it is highly unlikely. Most good jobs require a higher education which i think is so not cool. College is expensive and it takes a lot of time. From the ages of 18 to 26 you should be taking advantage of your youth, not spend it in a classroom learning to be a slave for someone else. I also find it a hair queer that no one has noticed that schools only teach you to be an employee, not an employer. I think that everybody wants to be their own boss in one way or another. Is that not the American dream?
I remember watching barrack Obama's address to the students. He said that a high school diploma is near worthless and that everybody should further their education. A very respectable thing to say. But then he went on to say to the gym full of students that he was in that none of them would grow up to be celebrities, athletes, or rockstars. This really made me kind of mad. Why would you say that to every kid in America? I mean every kid in school was required to watch that, right? I just thought that that was really mean to say to the students of America. I thought that a person should follow their dreams. I was a junior when i watched that and i had just blazed some fucking dank weed right before i watched it so at the time these thoughts did not stand very prevalently in my mind. But i recently remembered that day and was said by the president and it did not stomach well with me. I thought that everyone should do whatever is most appealing to them. You only live once so if you want to be a professional athlete then i think you should. Someone has to do it. Sure, there are probably a million more people who want to do the same thing but there is a chance that it might be you. I will admit that it is a very biased game to play. What i mean by that is that the people who are athletes or celebrities had connections to the top. A bum on the streets probably will not ever get famous but a filthy rich kid living in beverly hills will without trying.
What a fucked up world we live in.
Social Norms/Social Psychology Theories
People have always had certain things they do or surround themselves with. A lot of these things they do because so many people around them do it. Who am i kidding, everything anyone does they do because everyone else is doing it. These things are social norms. And they are very natural to humans as a species. Like a flock of birds that fly south for the winter, they don,t really know why they do it, they are just accustomed to it. And flying south for the winter is a good thing to do. Birds would die in the cold. It is very comparable to humans wearing clothes. I assume that people started wearing clothes to protect themselves from the weather or the sun or something of that nature. Then as people began to grow in numbers they just got used to seeing other people wearing clothes. I do not think that it had anything to do with their sexual organs, it was just what people were used to.
To me this is the biggest social norm in all of humanity. And there is nothing wrong with social norms. They keep people happy. They are kind of just unspoken rules. And breaking the rules can result in the worst punishment of all; exclusion from the group. And no one wants that. Everyone strives for social acceptance but to get there you have to follow all of the unspoken rules that every person does not always know that they know about. Some of these basic social practice's is spitting. If a person who has never seen another person in his life before meets someone and they spit on him, he probably will know that the said person is hostile.
There are several types of social norms. They are injunctive, implicit, explicit, and subjective. An injunctive social norm is a behavior that everyone seems to accept like wearing clothes or not burping in a restaurant. An implicit is one that is unspoken but everyone knows it. Kind of like spitting on someone and such. Explicit norms are openly spoken. They are like having good manners. Subjective social norms are pretty much how you think that you are coming off to other people. So basicly what you expect yourself to be like in public. Like how you start to act if you are trying to impress someone.
No one is original. No matter what you say to try defy that statement. Everything we do has been or was influenced by someone else. Most of the people who think that they are original are the most zombie like. Teenagers, who i am talking about, cling to one another in an anthill sort of way. This is where peer pressure comes into play. If a kid goes to college thinking that all the kids there drink more than he does, he will start drinking more. If a kid in middle school has friends who all start smoking pot then he is very likely to start as well. The same goes for every other drug that there is. No one is just going to start doing them, they have to be introduced. Yet you always here people say 'i was never peer pressured into it, i just decided to do it.' everyone was peer pressured into it, even if no one even offered them the drugs. They just knew that others were doing it and that made them think it was okay.
A lot has changed through high school. Two years ago i would have never written that paragraph. Mostly because i was one of those kids smoking pot.
Behavioral Theories
Behavioral theories are the idea that everyone is born with a blank mental slate. That people are conditioned to accept social norms as they are. I think that this is true but at the same time i believe that everyone is naturally instilled with morals. Basic morals like don't fight and be kind and stuff. A baby who was just born knows what pain feels like. They also know what causes pain. Therefore they should naturally know that other people can feel pain and that they can inflict it on others. So i think that no one is born with the urge to be mean. They just are conditioned to do so. A serial killer was not born with the need to kill people. None of the serial killers you hear about are killing to kill. They have alterior motives. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual cannibal necropheliac, killed people for his sexual urges, that he may or may not have been born with. The only time that people kill to kill is either to show dominance or out of resentment of the person he/she killed.
Behavioral theories are some of the more popular areas of psychological study. Some famous behavioral psychologists were John Watson and B. F. Skinner. The man who discovered classical conditioning was not a psychologist but a physiologist. His name was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. He was a Russian son of a priest who became a man of science after reading The origin of Species by Charles Darwin. He deducted that every living creature is born with a certain amount of instincts but all of those instincts can be diluted by conditioning.
Cognitive Theories
Cognitive theories are the theories that try and explain depression and everything it entails. Such as motivation, problem solving and critical thinking. It was the most popular area of psychology before the 1950's when behavioral psychology took over. Ulric Neisser wrote the book Cognitive Psychology in 1967 in which he sums up this area of psychology by saying 'Cognition involves all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved with everything a human might do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.'
Personality Theories
Personality theories are theories about each persons train of thought or way of thinking and habits that make each person unique in their mannerisms. It also studies emotions and their affect on people. I agree that everyone thinks in their own way. A way to prove this is to play that game where one person says a word and another person says whatever comes to mind when they hear that word. Most of the time everyone will say some thing different. This theory then falls under behavioral theories in a way. In what way were these people conditioned to think the way they do.
The study of emotions is very complicated. From what i have read every emotion, from a scientific point of view, comes from fear and pleasure. I can understand how this is thought. You get angry out of fear or you cry out of fear. Or laugh out of pleasure or smile etc. but then again if you feel love does it fall under pleasure? I do not think so. I think that love is so profound that it is it's own category. And this category cannot be explained by psychology or science. This is what makes people the way that they are this, to me, is having a soul.
I think that i am done writing this paper. I covered all that i could. I am also sorry that my intro was so long it is just that when i started writing this i was filled with emotions. So i wrote it all down in a semi-sentimental way. I was mad at the way the the human world worked so i wrote this paper on psychology because it is what i have been interested in and it fit for what i was feeling that fateful night. So this is David Goodwin signing out.