A song for America.

Being a pretty big fan of and having a firm understanding of british humor, I found "Hugh Laurie's song for America" to be pretty funny. You can watch it here if you haven't seen it yet. It's pretty obvious that they tend to to think we are pretty full of ourselves. And I would have to agree with them. We Americans definitely are. I don't think this is a problem usually though. It has helped us in many ways but this video definitely makes you think about our music. After watching the video I went through my iTunes and looked at the songs I have on my computer. I listen to a lot of different music but I would have to say that I tend to listen to more country music than any other genre, and the theme of "America rocks" is definitely prevalent in country music more so than anywhere else. Just scanning my playlists i can see that a good 30%-40% of country music is written about how great it is to live here, or in one of Toby Keith's songs, about how if you mess with us we'll put a boot in your @#$. Our culture is by far the most individualist culture I can think of. We value the exceptional. We strive for it in everything we do. We try to get it on an individual level as well as a national level. We want to be the best in everything and anyone that isn't, well, they just don't quite match up to how awesome we are. This desire for greatness can be both a good and bad thing. It can do great things when we focus it and use it to better ourselves and in doing so help others. But it can be very bad if we focus too hard on it to the detriment of the world. Many other countries see us as bullies or self centered. Rightly so. We act as such often and vocally. But at the same time we do it out of a desire to excel. We would love the whole world to be successful. To be powerful and wealthy. But you know...not as awesome as we are. So we'll keep singing songs about how great america is, the Bruce Springsteens and Toby Keiths of america with continue to spout endless pro america songs and the rest of the world will sit back and say "Those Americans...so full of themselves."

Experimental Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment

I just finished watching the documentary on the Stanford Prison Experiment that was done in 1971 by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. I remember hearing about this experiment during one of my Psychology classes and it seemed pretty interesting but I never really spent much time looking into it myself. However, having taken another look at it because it has come up in our Sociology class, I find it much more fascinating than I previously did. It's amazing how much each of the participants changed, both the guards and the prisoners, in just a few short days. Not only did the participants of the actual experiment change, but in this video Dr. Zimbardo speaks of how his girlfriend went down into the basement to observe on the sixth day. Upon seeing what was happening to the "prisoners" she became distraught and fled the building. Dr. Zimbardo followed her and she proceeded to tell him that he had changed from the person she thought he was if he was allowing the experiment to continue. He quickly realized how he had allowed the power of the situation that he had created, solely on an experimental basis, had transformed him into a completely different person. Many people argue that this was an unethical experiment to perform. Stating that the participants were not given enough information on what they were consenting to and that they were not given enough protection from physical, mental or emotional harm. I agree with a lot of the arguments but I can also see it from the side of the professors who were conducting the experiment. Yes, the subjects were not informed enough on what they were going to be subjected to. But at the same time, the professors didn't think that the experiment would spin so out of control. The students that volunteered were told that they would be part of an experiment on prison life and that there would be guards and prisoners. The professors tried to bring in the most mentally healthy, "normal" people they could because they wanted to see what would happen. In my opinion they took a bit too much of a risk. But again, they honestly seem to have had no idea that it would get so intense. Luckily, though many of the participants that were acting as prisoners had mental breakdowns during the experiment, I haven't found any information stating that any of them suffered permanent disabilities due to the experiment. Because of this, and a few other questionable experiments, the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association was updated. The rules regarding informed consent have been tightened in order to prevent individuals from consenting to unethical experiments.

Week One: Better late than never I guess...

So, how to begin. I guess the first step would be to say hello to all my new classmates. So...Hi! I'm Adam and I'm in my last semester at NVCC. I plan to move on to GMU like so many other students at NOVA. I spent a lot of my life growing up in Germany because my father was in the military so I luckily got to see quite a bit of the world. I recently moved back to the area after leaving school down in Charlottesville and moving out to California. I got the chance to figure out what I really want to do with my career and so I moved back and changed my major to IT and so here I am. Not much else to say really. I am excited to be moving on to Mason in a few months if all goes well and look forward to reading everyone's entries and learning about each other's points of view on the topics we will be going over.