The Power Of The Situation Essay Research

The Power Of The Situation Essay, Research Paper

The Power of the Situation

A week of urban mayhem was ignited by the April 29, 1992 jury acquittal

of four white police officers who were captured on videotape beating black

motorist Rodney King. The angry response in South Central produced its own

brutal footage, most dramatically the live broadcast from a hovering TV

news helicopter of two black men striking unconscious with a brick, kicking, and

then dancing over the body of, white truck driver Reginald Denny. The final

three-day toll of what many community activists took to defiantly calling an

uprising, revolt, or rebellion, was put at 53 dead, some $1 billion in property

damage, nearly 2,000 arrests, and countless businesses in ashes. These two men,

Damian Williams and Henry Watson undoubtedly committed a heinous crime, but

thousands more looted, burned, and destroyed property with the same disregard

for life and property. Were all these people criminals who used the verdicts as

an excuse to commit crimes, or was the nature of the social situation the

primarydeterminant of this nefarious behavior. In the course of this paper, I

plan to explore this question from a psychological perspective with an emphasize

on conformity and social norms, bystander intervention, social perception and

reality, and finally, prejudice. Generally looking at the Los Angeles riots,

and specifically drawing upon the Reginald Denny beating and subsequent trial,

the power of the situation becomes evident, as thousands of people living in an

extremely poor and crime-ridden area of Los Angeles, lashed out against a

perception of injustice through violence.

The conditions that lead people to perceive themselves as victims of

unjust actions are rather complex. In this case, the favorable verdicts towards

the officers who beat Rodney King was the “unjust action”, not only for Rodney

King, but for the community he came from. The perceived damage to desired

social identities and justice led to resentment on the part of a historically

poor and underprivileged class of citizens. The individual attempts to explain

the event (the verdicts) by processes of attribution in which grievance may or

may not be formed. (DeRidder, Schruijer, and Tripathi, 1992). The attribution

of responsibility and blame is activated when confronted with unexpected

behavior, unwanted consequences, or stressful, puzzling, and important events

(Wong & Weiner, 1981). Thus the attribution process may be activated either

when the individual experiences harm, or perceives an anti-normative action by

another person or group.

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone residing in south-central Los

Angeles looted. Instead the majority stayed in their homes until the

participants ceased their destructive activities. This does not take away from

the validity of the attribution theory due to the individual differences in

attribution. These differences correspond with discrepancies in how one copes

with a perceived injustice towards them. In the case of the rioters, they

overestimated the dispositional factors and underestimated the situational ones

(the fundamental attribution error). They saw the verdicts less as an

explainable, rational decision by a jury of their peers, under the laws of

California (situational), and more as a direct consequence of “the white man’s

power over the black man” and the failure of the American legal system in

general (dispositional). But although attribution process plays a significant

role in the motivation and rationalization of the rioters, it is only one of

many factors that eventually led to the infamous Los Angeles riots.

It is safe to assume that for the most part, the individuals

participating in the riots did not have a history of criminal activities. Yet

why did they act upon their grievances in a matter totally unacceptable in their

society and step beyond their social roles. The answer can best be illustrated

by considering at an experiment preformed 20 years ago in Stanford, California.

“The Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney & Zimbardo, 1977) created a new

“social reality” in which the norms of good behavior were overwhelmed by the

dynamics of the situation.” (Zimbardo 586). In the same sense, the outcome of

the verdicts, which was totally unexpected by those who most identified with

Rodney King, created a new social reality, a society which does not deliver

justice to blacks and minorities in their minds. Just as the Stanford students

radically altered their mind-set to adapt to the situation, the rioters

disregarded the norms of society because they were overwhelmed with the new

social reality created by the outcome of the Rodney King case. Once a few

members of the community began committing crimes, those who identified with

their view of social reality and shared the same

Внимание, отключите Adblock

Вы посетили наш сайт со включенным блокировщиком рекламы!
Ссылка для скачивания станет доступной сразу после отключения Adblock!

Скачать