Social Science Knowledge: Do Connections and Situations Make Humans Bad?

We learned in the humanities that society has an effect on human interaction, because it is a factor in the development and growth of an individual. There are a variety of variables or factors that make up a person and set them up to follow the path that they are going down. Social Scientists must look at the facts that they gather during experiments and come up with a conclusion based on the findings.

To take a Social Scientists look at the question and come up with a conclusion to the questions "what makes humans bad?" and "do connections and situations make humans bad?" I would like to take the psychological perspective. I have a mere true belief that humans are bad and can become bad based on the factors of race/ethnicity, gender, interaction, and influence that they have been given or earned through hard work. The factors can be described and placed into a single factor called situation because every human is different based on the situation they are placed in and how they decide to react to that specific situation.

Starting at an early age people are put in situations where they make the decision to be bad or good. Bullying does not only occur in childhood, but it usually begins in a school setting with young children. In Parenting Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years Dr. Shetgiri, Dr. Lin, Dr. Avila, and Dr. Flores discusses the psychological outcome of bullying and how the parents perceive their children and what that means to their possible position of them being bullies. The research for the article entails 91,642 parents across the nation with children from the ages between 10

and 17 being interviewed on their relationship with their children and how much they knew about them and their friends. The experiment is a social science experiment because the doctors gathered evidence based on the facts that the parents supplied and then came to a conclusion that the odds that children were bullies were lower if there is a strong level of communication between the parents and children, if the parents meet and know their children's friends, and if the parents encourage their children academically. The doctors did not just see the information and make a decision. They also looked at the age, gender, race, language, family income, number of parents in the house, extracurricular activities, and the parent's actions in the home to make informed decisions about the possibilities of children being bullies. The experiment is not to form a position of blame onto the parents or the children, but to find the causes and likelihood children being bullies. Based on the article and the experiment that it discusses, I have come to the true believe that people can become bad in life based on the different variables that make up their life.

Bullying is a form of oppression which is when people subject other to cruel and unjust treatment or control. Bullying can occur in more than a school setting, but in a work setting where a person of authority will exert their ability to perform ill treatment onto others because they believe that they could do so. The Department of Psychology at Stanford University ran an experiment where twenty-four people were assigned the position of guard or prisoner at random and given the training, experience, and a list of instructions of what their role entailed. The participants were given uniforms to give them the appearance of the position that they held. The experiment was "to assess the power of the social forces on the emergent behavior in this situation, alternative explanations in terms of pre-existing dispositions were eliminated through subject selection" (1). Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo wrote the paper on the experiment and how it did not end up going as they hypothesized with more aggression from the guards onto the prisoners. Even though the participants were regular college students some accepted and embraced the roles that they were given. One third of the students that were the guards were thought to be more aggressive towards the students that were the prisoners than they had predicted which ultimately caused the experiment to be canceled part of the way through. The students that were given authority as guards took on their role seriously and began to become bad toward the other students, treating them as if they were not humans. The experiment was a psychological one that was developed to see how people reacted to the situation that they were placed in and the power that they were given.

Both articles Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison and Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years looked at how the situation that a person is placed in can have an effect on their life and can make them commit bad actions and even become bad people. Not all of the situations that people are put into are malleable especially for the children who are becoming bullies because of their situations on the home front. The children might not be able to change all of the variables in their lives like their parents can, but they are still conscious human beings that make decisions on who they want to be and what path they are following based on the situation they are dealt. The situation is different for the Stanford students only because they are older and have more experience in their lives, but based on their lives as children they might have been in the same living situation as the children discussed in Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years. Social Science knowledge complements Humanities knowledge because they both look at humans and their connections to others. While humanities knowledge looks at society's views on humans they social science knowledge looks at society's views and takes it into account when making conclusions based on the experiments they do. To get a non-biased look at the findings to come up with a conclusion that does not blame but explain why humans are bad.

Haney, Craig, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1973. PDF.

Shetgiri, Rashimi, MD, Hua Lin, PhD, Rosa M. Avila, MSPH, and Glenn Flores, MD. “Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years.” Parent Characteristics and Bullying. American Journal of Public Health, Dec. 2012. PDF.

Humanities Knowledge: In What Ways Are Humans Bad?

When looking at how humans are bad we are also deciding what is bad and if a bad thing makes humans bad. To make those kind of decisions we need to look at the humanity aspects of life and think critically about actions and what is said. The academic disciplines of the humanities are human history, linguistics, literature, arts, philosophy, and religion. I will focus on linguistics, philosophy, and the arts.

I have believed that humans decide what they want to become with each action and step they take in life because we are constantly choosing what path to take and consciously deciding where that path will take us and how it will affect us. That is a mere true belief because I believe it and do not have any facts to provide as information to back-up my beliefs, but I hope to provide evidence here to make it a true belief. I choose to live my life following my beliefs, I will constantly take my future and what I want into account when deciding what to do. Based on that mere true belief I established a second one, depending on what one’s environment one might have a different sense of paths possible and then what is bad, good, or possible.

Linguistics is more than just the words we use it is “the science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics” (“Linguistics”). In Montgomery’s fifth chapter of An Introduction to Language and Society he takes a look at the study of linguistics specifically focusing on the outsider form of language used in the world. Montgomery provides insight on the creation and variation of words used in society by showing the differences in words used in subcultures. “Often the subculture or group (the ‘anti-society’) has an antagonistic relationship with society at large and their natural suspicion of outsides makes it difficult to study their language” (Montgomery). These anti-societies use “anti-languages are basically created by a process of relexicalization – the substitution of new words for old” (Montgomery) or will also make up new words. There is an invisible line that separates the ordinary society from the anti-society, but the language used in the subcultures is created by them to make that separation apparent when you hear the way that the same words would be used for different meanings.

The expression of language used in societies and anti-societies are different and can be told based on the manner that the words are used and the reasons that they are used for. By explaining the “slang” that the subcultures created Montgomery hints at the evolution of language from a parent language to the establishment of anti-language and how the languages developed based on the environments alone. Montgomery fulfilled the area of linguistics with the fifth chapter of his book by explain the background of words and how the slight changes can be understood because of the science of language.

A touchier attribute of linguistics in today’s society is what words are acceptable to be spoken and where it is acceptable for them to be spoken. Bowers and Pleydell-Pearce did a study and wrote Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity to explain their findings on participants and their neural stimuli when they would say swear words and euphemisms. “Past accounts of linguistic relativity and thinking-for-speaking tend to focus on how structural features of a language encourage specific lines of thought…in this current paper we consider a situation in which structural features may discourage specific thought” (Bowers). “Our key claim is that the phonological form of a word can directly evoke a negative emotional response, via verbal conditioning”. 

During the study consisted of participants who were a group of twenty-four volunteers between the Age of 18 and 26. The participants were informed of the swear words, euphemisms, and normal words that they would be reading aloud and given the chance to recuse themselves from the study and then they were recorded and monitored while saying them. The recording and monitoring of the sessions were to get results and see the amount of electrodermal activity or emotional impact measured by a physiological response from saying the three kinds of words. In the end, it was found that saying euphemisms was less stressful on the participants than it was to use the swear words. We might be used to hearing and using swear words today, but the effect we feel using them is still existent. When I read that I was curious if the readings result would have changed in a four year difference because they seem to have become more of a norm as of late. Montgomery wrote in An Introduction to Language and Society that the use of swearing stems from anti-societies making up words that the normal society did not know the meaning of, but today swearing is used in our normal society.

From the humanity study of linguistics societies are divided into the original one and the anti-society that built off from originals comes the idea that the original society must be made of good people that wanted their society to follow that path without varying. The anti-societies or subcultures could be seen as the people that wanted something different and different could be seen as bad. The words that the anti-society use are not the proper usages, so they could also be seen as bad because they have an unknown and potentially scary meaning to them. Swearing is seen as bad in society because the words are bad, so the connection that people that use them must be bad is used. Euphemisms are used and seen as better than swearing, but because it is commonly known the swear word that they replace they are also frowned upon in most professional and critical situation. Society deems words bad and good and we as people must follow those decisions or we could be placed in those boxes without question or a second thought to it.

From a philosophical perspective, John Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding takes the view similar to the one I have lived my life by, that we start of life as a blank canvas and as we grow we are creating art. Everything we know comes from our personal experiences and those experiences we decide to go through and in turn give every person the opportunity become a good or bad person. In the film Pulp Fiction, we watch the main characters commit crimes and do what society says is bad, and at the end Jules played by Samuel L. Jackson has come to conclusion that he might have done some wrong things that got him to where he was at that point in life. Life is always changing and we each grow every day, we grow from the experiences we partake in our daily life whether it is trying something new or taking a step further towards the future we have planned our whole lives.

Locke’s perspective falls under philosophy because he is explaining to his readers his knowledge about the mind and how we as humans act. His theories might have flaws or holes in them, but he is talking about the nature of knowledge itself which is what philosophers do. A common form of art we are used to today is film, and it gives humans a visual way to see the different kinds of societies and hear how people from different social classes, locations and upbringings speak. The broad range of humanities shows each side of the debate of humans being bad and adds a personal question of what is bad. Bad is subjective, and connects to the idea of how and the need for deeper explanations of the human mind and how it works and the development process that we each as human beings make our own decisions on what is good and bad and how to be good or bad.

This is a scene from Pulp Fiction that depicts the humanities. In the scene there is swearing, but it is also shows how words can change meanings based on context and the type of way it is perceived. The linguistics aspect is versatile, with the intonation, pronunciation used, and the growing escalation of the scene. God is seen as a pure topic, and by a murderous man saying a quote it can be questioned if he is bad or if the people he killed are.

Bowers JS, Pleydell-Pearce CW (2011) Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity. PLoS
ONE 6(7): e22341. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022341

“Linguistics.” Dictionary.com. N.p., n.d. Web. Oct. 23 2015 <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/knowledge>.

Locke. John. (1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 38th Edition from William Tegg, London.

Montgomery. M. (1995). An introduction to language and society, 2nd ed. Routledge: London.