Topic Proposal

        I have decided to focus my research on the socialization through social classes and what the main affects that come out of that are, focusing more on how it affects people in terms of their quality of education and different mindsets? What are the specific things that make you part of a social class/ Is there a way to switch social classes without any scrutiny of their credibility compared to people born into that social class? What are the latent functions behind socialization through social classes? Would creating a more loose socialization between social classes affect the stability of social structures in our society and would it be positive or negative?

The Zimbardo Experiment

      My first perspective is going to be the structural- functional approach because despite the experiment ending due to unethical reasons, it started off as a social structure with parts that were suppose to support each other. As a structural- functionalist  i would focus on the stability of the prison, to start analyzing the experiment, and to look at what parts of the prison were affected when the stability was an outlier. I would also try to figure out how big of a part each part of society played in trying to reach a level of stability? What are the separate parts of the society and what is the society's main purpose? Why did the society seem dysfunctional to one group of people, but to others it seemed to simply be a way to further the solidarity of the experiment? How are all the parts helping the society as a whole and how are they interconnected? What are the latent and manifest functions of the Zimbardo experiment? The two main groups of people are the prisoners and the prison guards and their form of stability is based on power dynamics and the idea that the prison  experiment is working and "stable" if the prisoners lose there sense of individuality and start to simply follow the prison guards' orders like any other prisoner would. For example, when at the start of the experiment their behaviors were already directly related to this purpose by belittling the prisoners on their way to the prison and while changing clothes. Whenever the stability decreased due to a certain prisoner's rebellion, for example, when on the second day they barricaded themselves in their room and taunted the guards. Through that taunting the power shifted from the guards to the prisoners and the guards had to increase their forms of humiliation in order to recover from the momentary embarrassment they had endured. The guards stripped the prisoners who rebelled and took away their beds and at one point chained a prisoners' feet. Both groups played equal parts in the stability because they both participated in this struggle that consisted of playing their roles or not, the guards had the choice of giving into what the experiment required and negating their moral beliefs in order to increase the degree of harassment needed to keep controller all of the prisoners. While prisoners had the choice to keep their sense of self and to keep rebelling in order to not give in to the experiment, they also had the choice to simply get through the experiment by forgetting the hold any power and simply following the rules, which in turn was them giving up on themselves and the freedom they tossed as being classed as prisoner. But if the prisoners followed orders and guards kept their power they were both helping each other create a new reality, that soon all were blinded by. In the end their were still a few prisoners that could not except that they were powerless and that increased the inhumane ways of the guards which then led to social dysfunction because the prisoner saw that as unnecessary harassment for a simple human right, while the guards saw it as just following their assigned roles and what expectations came with them.
      My second perspective is the symbolic interaction approach because the whole experiment dealt with this idea of trying to simulate a actual prison by using symbols that were prevalent in the actual prisons themselves, which is how the power dynamic came into play. How were the groups of people experiencing this certain experiment and the society built? How does the shared reality of the prisoners and the guards change from the beginning to the end of the experiment? What were examples of symbols throughout the society? Did  a person from one group ever show that they were trying to understand the point of view of the other group? How much did each group of people depend on an interaction to gain or lose something? Could the groups of people have shaped their reality in a different way? To start off I want to give examples of symbols which were the chains that represented loss of freedom, going to the bathroom represented privilege, a guard uniform represented power. Throughout the beginning their is still a sense of questioning the seriousness of the situation because it is an experiment and that is their shared reality between the groups, this feeling of  control because they knew it was an experiment and that is supported by the behaviors in the first days, the prisoners laughing and pointing out that it is an experiment,as an argument to support them disobeying orders, while the guards were still trying to fit their roles and were still questioning the degree of severity of their harassment and if it was going too far. But as the experiment progressed, the reality seem to morph and the society created throughout the experiment turned into their actual reality. Prisoners no longer identified with their names and guards went through levels of humiliation and abuse of power without any observed view of remorse. I don't think the two groups ever tried to trade roles and see how their realities changed because throughout the whole experiment that rated themselves as having anything in common. They just saw each interaction as a way to earn more power or  to lose it and maybe if they had realized that both groups of people where still people that had the capacity to coexist without the need of one group to be inferior then the experiment might have prevailed. But instead they lost themselves in how real it resembled a prison and than their reality turned into a way of just surviving.
       In the end a development of social imagination or just a brief knowledge of sociology would have benefitted the groups of people in the experiment very much because then they would have been able to distance themselves from a personal viewpoint and focus less on how they felt and the unfairness and focusing more of the structures, development and functioning of the experiment. Then both prisoners and prison guards might have stayed rooted on the idea that it was an experiment and that their personal losses was to benefit the experiment and there was no need to take the loss of freedom so personally when it was a simulation and that it was needed because that was the purpose of the  whole experiment. Or the guards would have understood that the experiment called for some form of regulation and punishment , but not to enable their own pursuits of revenge against embarrassment or indulge their crave for power and control: and lead to lengths of  an inhumane society. This experiment contributes to my own social imagination because it represents a real life effect of not being able to look at situations from a broader view and the degree of it's effects. The Zimbardo experiment showed me that social imagination is needed in order to not let the circumstances of a situation define who I am and let myself lose sight of the reality and to reveal that no one is outwardly trying to affect you, but there is a society that follows certain structures in order to function that may affect you unintentionally.

Socialization Project

I'm kind of lost on where to go with this project because of the wide range of topics and I was thinking of focusing my ideas more on the justice system or something that has to deal more with why their is so much dismissed unfairness in society. But then I looked up a little more on what socialization is and how it affects individuals and I really wanted to just learn more about the depths of it and how big of a part, it plays into who we are as people and if we can go against it. Can we even call ourselves individuals, because of how conditioned we have all been in order to fit in? I think i picked this topic because i hadn't even realized how involuntary socialization is and i really want to find out how it interconnects with how we see the world and how it shapes our bias. Could we change the degree of rigidness of socialization, into one more"loose or free"? Is repressive socialization a good thing, or needed at all? If you are aware of the socialization is there a way to go against the social order, even though the beliefs are already instilled in you? How would I pick a specific question, with such a broad topic, and how could you create a answerable question, if so many people still aren't aware? Is there a possibility to make people aware and give them a choice or is that another form of socialization?

Who I Am

I don't know who I am. I use to not think of who I was and was just focused on " being somebody", someday, constantly trying to reach straight A's and study the hardest, but I am somebody at this moment and it took me a long time to realize that. All I know is that I am no longer trying to fit a certain mold and I will constantly change, so nothing is a constant.
I am made out of my preconceived notions, bias, and the lies I tell myself, but those are just the factors that affect how I perceive the world. I don't have answers to what I am made of or who I am because I don't think I have even reached that point of being able to boil it down to a set number of values, traits or beliefs. Even if I did, my behaviors would probably not add up to the things they are based off of because I am constantly contradicting myself.