Happiness

Today in class we started watching a new documentary on the study of happiness and what it truly takes for an individual to be "happy". What I thought was very interesting was that the more money one earns, does not necessarily make the individual more happy. Once one earns enough money to pay for living expenses, the persons average happiness does not vary much no matter how much more wealth they happen to acquire. In fact some of the wealthiest people are less happy than people who have a substantially less amount of money. This is because there are two kinds of life goals. There are interior personal goals, as in building upon yourself and then exterior goals such as social status and money. Many who only work for these exterior goals, may have a lot of money but then never build on themselves, so in turn end up not as happy. The happiest people are the ones who have a job doing what they love everyday, not necessarily one that makes a lot of money but one that fulfills their true life aspirations.

10/10/14

Today in class we watched another case study. This one was especially interesting because it involved the spouse actually being responsible for the murder of her husband. Even though she had an alibi and wasn't home she was still responsible for her husbands death. She had an affair with one of her students whom she convinced to kill her husband. He did it because he was scared that she would break off the relationship. This shows how you can never discredit a suspect even if it seems like they would never be capable of the crime. 

10/09/14

Today, in class we watched another case study. I thought it was an interesting case, because it had to do with a 12 year old boy killing a 6 year old girl very violently. The big question was if it should be dealt with in juvenile court or in actual court that usually deals with people that are 18 and above. They decided not to put him on trial in juvenile court because of the degree of the murder. During the case, the biggest question was if this murder was involuntary man slaughter or in fact, first degree murder. The boy claimed that him and the girl were wrestling and that he was trying out wrestling moves that he had seen on tv. His story was questionable, because he never mentioned any of that in his original statement that he gave right after the girl got hurt and the consistency of the injuries on the girls body could not have happened, unless he actually tried to hurt her. She had 40 different blunt trauma injuries which said that this must have been a very violent beating. I definitely think that his trial went well, except the fact that his mother did not take the plea bargain the first time around.

10/07/2014

Today in class we continued watching the documentary on the way people are wired mentally from a social point. I was really surprised when we watched the clip of the woman getting stabbed to death in front of her apartment building because no one helped her even though they all knew that there was something wrong. The person who lived on the bottom floor even opened his door and saw what was going on but still did nothing. From this scene I concluded that the reason why this happened was because if there are a lot of people witnessing an incident then they all assume that someone else has already called 911 and won't do it themselves anymore. This relates back to the office fire experiment. In this experiment people take a survey and smoke starts coming from under the door. When there was only one person taking it he got up right away and told someone about the fire. On the other hand when there were 3 people in the room taking the survey, the smoke started to rise from the door but no one did anything. They all looked like they assumed that the other person would take action for what was happening.

10/06/2014

Today in class we started discussing the effect that people of authority can have on an individuals behavior. I thought it was very interesting how in the shock experiment ruffly %66 of the people who were tested would shock the victim until they had hit the highest voltage. They had to shock the victim every time he gave them a wrong answer. They kept going even though they knew they were hurting someone. They even continued after the person stopped yelling which meant they knew that there was something wrong. The reason why they went so far is because the experimenter overseeing everything said that he would take full responsibility if anything happened to the person. Many of the people reacted to the screams of the victim with laughter and other kinds of behaviors that indicated that they were uncomfortable with the situation. They concluded that the reason why the germans had committed the Holocaust was because they were all under a certain figure of authority which made them feel like it was okay to do so. People tend to think that they are not responsible for their actions if someone of authority tell them to do so.