I thought that the piece by Goethals and Allison, “Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains” was so interesting. I had not known how big of a part mystery and the unknown play in our everyday lives and our decision making. I found it fascinating all of the different motivations that humans have for the desired conclusions about mystery. When I read that waitresses and waiters often remember the orders that did not get made or did not get paid the most because it did not have the usual ending and therefore caused tension in their minds because they did not get closure. I can relate to this because in high school I worked as a hostess at a restaurant in my town and I can remember all of the times when huge parties of people would come in without a reservation, or when reservations never showed up. Also, I had talked a lot about the image of a leader and how people are more likely to choose a leader based off of looks and how their voice sounded in my 101 class, and I thought that it was so interesting that Harding was an awful president but he got elected openly because his looks “fit the bill”. One thing that I was surprised to learn concerning looks of a leader, was how similarly people choose mates in such a similar possess as they choose leaders, “we want them to be attractive and attracted to us, just as we want leaders to be great and  to signal that we have value to them” (24). I found this whole article to be so interesting because it pointed out things that I can recognize myself doing in regard to mystery and the unknown that I had never realized before.

I have learned about the Stanford prison experiment in a few of my other classes at Richmond and each time it is brought up, it never gets easier to read about. I think that the way that this experiment was conducted was not ethical at all and caused much more harm to the participants than getting any results. First, one of the biggest problems that I have with this experiment is the fact that the people chosen to be guards were not trained at all, and the people chosen to be prisoners were innocent people. I think that by making a simulation that produced actual psychological impacts on the people in it was not the way to go about seeing what prison life was like. I think that creating the fake prison with the real power dynamic was much more harmful than helpful. I thought that the way that the prisoners were treated and the power that the guards got in their heads were similar to what Goethals and Alison were talking about in that when there is mystery you use looks and stereotypes to judge people. If a prisoner looked a specific way, they were treated much worse, only because of how humans deal with the unknown. I thought that it was very interesting to look at this experiment when thinking about why people are judged based off of how they look and what attributes and characteristics that we assign to people when we assume things about their background and history.