The assigned readings for tomorrow’s class truly led me to question the degree of my own free will and free thinking. Goethals and Allison did this by explaining how our internal associations can often dominate our perceptions of others. This often causes us to have certain opinions\/views on others mainly because of the position they hold, or group they belong to. One example that they briefly mention that I remember discussing in other classes is that of the election of Warren G. Harding, who embodies stereotypical leadership qualities. His election is believed to have been guaranteed by his physical features, in a time when safe and sane policy could not be undervalued. His victory was, very much so, not what was best for the country, yet his assuming of office strangely made people comfortable. This exemplifies why we need to be better at identifying and studying more typical biases that humans have. If we can see where the human mind fails to be rational, we can supplement our decisions with a dose of reason.<\/p>\n
The Stanford prison experiment further illustrates the idea of Goethals and Allison. This famous study assigned people to be either prisoners or guards, and recorded the degree to which people played their roles. The extreme nature of this experiments results reveals a great deal about how our associations affect our behavior. This has major implications for how we should treat people. If all it takes for one to believe they are authoritative is to grant authority, and all it takes to be powerless is to be assigned to such a role, then we ought to be more careful with how we classify people. Based on this study, there is good reason to believe that individuals will be more successful and less apathetic in life if they are simple, somehow, led to believe that they are capable of such agency. Our human psyche deserves a great deal of attention when studying leadership, as it is clear that perception is not just the product of reasoned viewing. With greater attention to this, maybe some day we will size up to the elephants we all ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The assigned readings for tomorrow’s class truly led me to question the degree of my own free will and free thinking. Goethals and Allison did this by explaining how our internal associations can often dominate our perceptions of others. This often causes us to have certain opinions\/views on others mainly because of the position they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4693,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4693"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}