One Big Crazy World

I went to my usual morning lecture today and learned about how we react to various things and what can affect our reactions. Different things that can affect our reactions are our feelings toward the situation and subject and the timing of the entire situation. These varying things that affected our reactions are systems that we use to help us categorize our feelings and create order within ourselves.

During my discussion group we talked about how people form stereotypes and prejudice. This was super interesting because as human beings it's natural for us to categorize different things and people into certain feelings within ourselves yet people are constantly saying how these classifications on groups are bad and why they shouldn't exist. So going against stereotypes is essentially going against our own human nature, but we go against stereotypes because we value what is considered morally right and can respect that other individuals have the same rights and feelings as we do. 

We also talked about a way we can combat stereotypes of different groups of people which is to get to know various individuals' stories. It's a lot easier to understand and feel empathy for an individual rather than thinking about the entire group. Understanding these individuals can lead us to better understand all the others that are like that individual. This was also really interesting because previously we had talked about how we're much more detail oriented when we focus on the smaller things and events while larger pictures are much more abstract to us. Thinking about all these different interactions that we have within ourselves and how they're affected by other people really makes me think how crazy this world is since it is really twisted to think about how we need racial stereotypes and prejudice for us to create a sense of order within ourselves. 

After my lectures and discussions, I went to lunch and took a nap. I woke up around 4:00 PM and started reading some articles for tomorrow's class. I spent some time with my friends before going to dinner and talking to a girl from my floor. She was really happy because she was feeling homesick, but started talking to lots of nice people that made her feel better. This made me think back to my class and how despite thinking that we're very in control of ourselves, in reality we're actually easily affected by those around us.