Katherine Frances's Blog, page 169
August 31, 2017
"But I fear the last of her miracles occurred on that hill where the great stag made its break east..."
- Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris, from Queen’s Own Fool: A Novel of Mary Queen of Scots (via the-final-sentence)
"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in..."
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
(via wnq-writers)
kaylapocalypse:
thatadult:
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them...
The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
I both agree and disagree with this. On one hand, I am fully aware of the sociatal role of white men. What I mean by this is, society suggest to little white boys that it’s okay to be demanding and its okay to be cruel (boys will be boys) and therefore that is what they become.
However, it is also dangerous to assume that we ourselves are above sociatal pressures and are keener to our own psychological tendencies. The prison expirement shows us the danger that roles present; that if your role is to be the ass hole guard, that is what you will become. This expirement is not unlike the milgram expirement, which was done with woman and men originally. Gender had no affect on whether or not a person decided to electrocute another to death because they were told to do so. I am unaware of a similar expirament that had a wide base of racial diversity tested, so I cannot say if there is an effect. My point is simply, we may be treated very differently by society and are very different people, but all of us are, at our core, animals governed by the same principles of psychology. Everyone thinks they are their own and are above these invisible laws. To think you are above it is to fall unknowingly into the same trends.
That being said, I’m by no means a defeatest. It has even been shown in recreation studies of the milgram expirament that as people become more aware of the follies of man, they are less likley to make the same mistakes in the same situations.
