Kiara Norris
Draft
March 11, 2013
African Americans & Prison The number of African Americans in prison is at an all-time high. Many people aren’t aware of the staggering rate at which African American’s are incarcerated. The effects are best seen from those who are affected first hand. The families of these prisoners are the ones who suffer the most. There are many reasons why African Americans are imprisoned. The main reason is the new war on drugs. This is a “war” implemented by the government to remove drug trafficking. The problem is this “war” is only going on in impoverished neighborhoods, primarily neighborhoods with African Americans in it. Another reason could be the attitudes that African Americans take toward life. Often times we are born thinking that the cards are stacked against us. We feel defeated before we even try. Lots of things can contribute to these attitudes. The way we were raised or the things we see as we grow up. Can the words we use to ask for something effect the answer we receive? Or could the answer be a result of the emotion one may be feeling when a request is presented? Maybe the answer we receive will depend on the gender of the one we are asking and the place we ask it in. in search of answers to such question a group of students from University of South Brittany decided to conduct a study on the affect unlived emotions can have on one’s actions. Past studies have proved that good moods and bad moods could be linked to the helping behavior. It’s to be said that “people engage in helping others in order to maintain their good mood, or repair their bad mood.” Although the past serve to be right thus far, the students wanted to investigate how the activation of an emotional or nonemotional concept could guide helping behavior. Their experiment was conducted in Paris on Boulevard Haussmann. The method‘s participants consisted of 227 passerby (90 women and 137 men), age ranging from 18 to 75 years old. To start the procedure the researchers did a pilot study to determine the degree of arousal and valence induced by the three words (love, distress, and solitary). For this procedure they used 60 women passerby and 60 men. On a seven point scale the participants were to estimate the amount of positive or negative emotions the words love, distress or solitary give off. The scale had anchors of -3(very negative) and +3 (very positive). To both male and female love and solitary was associated with positive emotion. And for distress women lined more with a negative emotion then man. To further their study they used five female students, from Department Of Business at the University Paris-sud, aging from 18 to 19. The young ladies were to request money from passerby in hopes to realize a project that would help hospitalized children. They told the passerby the funds would be used to buy toys and finance leisure activities for children in the Beclere Hospital near Paris. The situation they presented to the passerby was not real, but when asking for the money the five confederates made it their duty to sound sincere. Which each experimental condition there was a change in the fraise of words. To test how one would act when primed with love the young lady would say “Excuse me, I am a student at the IUT of Sceaux, I work for the project Love Hospitalized Children. We are collecting funds to buy toys and to organize a show for the children hospitalized at the Beclere Hospital at Clamart; would you agree to give money to restore a little love to these children?” And for those participants who were being primed with distress or solidarity, they used the same format but changed love to one of the other words. This experiment was done three times, along with recording the responses to each word fraise, the confederates were to also record each participants age and gender. The results showed that when they used “love” more people gave (37.7%), 24.3% gave when