The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay
The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay
Evaluating a Major Social Event. You are asked to write at least a 1500-word essay analyzing, from a social psychological perspective, 1 of 5 recent major social events (listed below) and how that event impacted society. In other words, you can explore how people are reacting to the event (e.g., fear leading to extreme behavior) or how other people’s behavior regarding the event are affecting others. For instance, using the persuasion chapter you could analyze how the messaging surrounding or during the event was effective or ineffective (e.g., whether people changed their behavior or opinions). Using the chapter on group influence you could analyze how the people around you or even those in virtual spaces influence your own actions regarding events (e.g., seeing others responding to the event influences your own behaviors or attitudes about the event) The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay. Using the stereotyping and prejudice chapter you could explore the motivations underlying the event or how stereotypes guided your judgments or opinion of those involved in the event. These are just a few of the ways to analyze how the particular social event has impacted society and people’s behaviors or attitudes. There are, of course, a multitude of other ways to analyze the impact of these social events, so feel free to choose any way that interests you. Your grade will be based on how well you link social psychological to the event, NOT on whether you think the event was right or wrong or whether or not it fits with your political ideology. Any editorializing or personal opinions included in your paper may lead to a loss of points. The 5 recent major social events from which to choose are listed below The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
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The Black Lives Matter protests
The riot on Capital Hill
The COVID-19 pandemic
The Climate Strike protests
The March for Our Lives (i.e., anti-gun violence demonstrations)
Requirements:
There is the PSY 340 book for you to use
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B3_nxxcAlnvE46hBvdPSAeOqyPqUy0-A
Evaluating a Major Social Event: The Black Lives Matter Protests
Introduction
Social psychologistsexamine how our continued interaction with other individuals or groups within social situations progressively shape how we think, what we feel, what we believe, our intentions, as well as our goals. Social psychology acknowledges that social behavior is a product of how humans construe the situations they face as opposed to the situations themselves. For instance neither laboratory interventions nor exposure to high-status exemplars could effectively contribute to shifts in attitudes on racial prejudice. However, as recently observed, social movements such as the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) are observed to potentially contribute in alleviating the extent and impact of racial bias in the United States and beyond. Established only as a social media hashtag following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, BLM protests in June 2020 attracted more than half-million in the United States and more across the world. The current analysis examines the social psychological premise upon which the growing incidence of Black Lives Matter Movement protests have in the long run led to the racial bias landscape among U.S communities The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
The influence of BLM on Attitudes, Behavior, and Persuasion
According to Myers & Twenge (2019), the processes involved in attitude formation and attitude change holds both short-term and eventual impacts on individual behavior towards certain issues in our environments. An overview of the history of the United Statesreveals that transatlantic slave trade and the arrival of Africans in the U.S as slaves working in cotton fields resulted into the construction of Black versus White mindset and resultant attitudes. Over the last decades, the ideology of race in the U.S have been extensively based on the conflict between whites and African Americans and mainly mirroring the supremacy of whites and the inferiority of blacks. The emergence of a recent series of BLM protests following the brutal killing of George Floyd in 2020 touch on both aspects of attitudes of White and black communities towards equality and hence their behaviors The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
Myers & Twenge (2019) delves deep into the link between attitude formation and change, behavior, and persuasion in group communication According to the text, a single piece of message be manipulated to create diverse impacts depending on the abilities of the communicators to deliver the message as well as the type and abilities of the message recipients. Implicit attitudes are those that emerge from the conventional interaction that we have with relevant stimulus, and which one can harbor against or in favor of an ethnic group (Myers & Twenge, 2019). Among whites, for instance, there may emerge increasing trends of negative association of blacks despite an individual’s explicit attitudes towards black people. While both aspects of attitude operate through complex and distinct psychological bases, the text argues that they emerge from formative experiences on issues such as interracial interaction. In changing attitudes around political issues such as racial equality, communication should be tailored to influence persuasion. Persuasive information tailored in pursuit of widespread attitude change should focus on achieving credibility and trust The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
The 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement protests successfully initiating extensive political conversations on racial prejudice and widely changed American attitudes on racial bias through persuasive communication. BLM activists have influenced change in both implicit and explicit attitudes of American communities towards racial bias across the American ethnic profile by implementing a unique communication design to disseminate their goals to specific target audiences. A unique aspect of BLM’s communication framework, particularly during the protests, is how activists leading the protests adopted complementary dimensions of online and physical presence targeting all sections of each community. The main advantage of this binary framework of communication is that it helped to catch the attention of everyone, reducing the age, gander, and ethnic bias in passing information. Unlike previous civil rights movements in which marginalized communities were systematically barred from accessing revolutionary communication, the BLM’s use of social media platforms helped create a widespread appeal that contributed to its massive success. Through strategic integrationof technology-based communication and physical protests, the 2020 BLM protests gathered both attention and credibility across the U.S, leading to widespread participation, leading to change in attitudes towards racial bias The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
BLM protests as an outcome of continued stereotyping and prejudice
Prejudice and stereotype are two instrumental elements of social psychology that emanate deeply from attitudes formed over extensive interaction with other members of the community (Myers & Twenge, 2019). Superficially, stereotype simply translates to the generalized belief concerning the personal attributes of members of a large group of people, which may be inaccurate. Prejudice, on the other hand, are judgments that are preconceived about an individual or groups to which they belong. Both prejudice and stereotype extend from political, religious, ethnic, religion, or physical conformity, and may inform discrimination. Myers & Twenge (2019) explains that being a psychological aspect linked to attitude, humans can either practice implicit (unknowing) prejudice against other races, or extend explicit (conscious) prejudice against people of other races. While increased human mobility and globalization have led to more knowledge on racial labelling and prejudice, social psychological research imply that both situations are still happening at considerable rates The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
Myers & Twenge (2019) attempts to review the link the social psychological elements of prejudice and stereotype with political outcomes such as racial and ethnic conflicts and resultant ethnic violence in multiethnic settings such as the U.S. The text explains that the two concepts relate in the way that they affect personality constructs, in the sense that stereotyping leads to a form of tough-mindedness or closed-mindedness that facilitates prejudice. The historically adverse interaction between White and African American populations has led to some of the most pervasive stereotypes, mostly of them promoted during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade and during the segregation era. Far as stereotyping and prejudice seem widely spread, Myers & Twenge (2019) intimates that the concepts are less structured, hence attracting the least endurance from either subjects. As a product of limited endurance by individuals and groups against who pervasive stereotypes and prejudice work, potential ethnic rebellion may result, resulting to violence The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
The historically adverse interaction between White and African American populations has led to some of the most pervasive stereotypes, mostly of them promoted during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade and during the segregation era. Since the era of slavery and slave trade, Blacks in the U.S have been assigned the stereotypes of crime, aggressiveness, backwardness (uneducated), lewdness, dishonesty, violence, and treachery. Such stereotypes have in the past led to the dehumanization of Blacks, a thought that led to widespread prejudice against blacks and denial of their human rights. The police, for instance, reportedly stop more Black motorists for checks than their white colleagues. Based on the stereotype of crime, police have advanced more violence towards black people. The U.S judicial system has also failed in its role to foster equality, an issue that lead to the eruption of BLM protests in 2013. The accumulated impacts of progressive stereotyping and prejudice against black people bears leads to ethnic conflicts, which may spur violence as observed in the recent BML protests, boycotts, and marches across U.S cities The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
Group Influence and BLM protests
Each one of the 7.5 million global citizens live in distinct countries, families, school or work environments, and communities. All these entities constitute groups in which people undertake their day-to-day events, interact, and communicate. Aside from the fact that humans derive psychological motivation from merely being members of groups while undertaking day-to-day tasks, the concept of social arousal idealizes that people tend to participate in group actions to establish and sustain optimal soothing and relaxing effect and enhance effectiveness (Myers & Twenge, 2019). Besides, Festinger’s social comparison theory articulates that people are continually participating in group events to pursue frameworks that best describe them through those around them. Myers & Twenge (2019) explains that social influence through comparison with other members of group provides individuals with platforms upon which they access comparative information to create and build their social and emotional realities. Theories inclined towards self-categorization and self-identity have also explained how individuals establish themselves in specific groups, and how they progressively accrue good feelings and satisfaction from being members of groups through participation of group activities The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
A theme cutting across most group influence theories is that each individual accrues not only a sense of belonging and emotional unity, but also a sense of safety and protection from perceived enemies. Black Lives Matter protests derived its success partly due to social influence. One way in which BML’s collective action spread throughout the United States in a record timeline is that thousands of young black people and other ethnicities rarely engaged in racial conversations associated with the group to accomplish their need for belonging. By participating in the intense political conversation triggered by the protests both on social media platforms and through their active indulgence in physical protests, young black people found a place to lay their emotions and express their anger and disappointments with ongoing incidences of inequality. Myers & Twenge (2019) explains that such active involvement in sociopolitical conflicting involving groups fosters a sense of belonging through shared emotions and intentions. Apart of black people, the BML accrued an unmatched support from majority White Americans under 30 and other American minority ethnicities who equally shared into the problem of racial bias. The shared problem of racial bias and the resultant landscape of emotions facilitated individual readiness and coordination of actions across the U.S The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
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Conclusion
The May 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement protests, boycotts, matches, and violence following the murder of George Floyd by the police offers a real-life social event upon which various social psychological concepts can be dissected. Emanating primarily from historically sustained incidence of stereotyping and prejudice against U.S Blacks, the recent BLM protests is an unquestionable proof that ethnic intolerance and inequality, if uncontrolled, eventually leads to unprecedented ethnic conflicts and violence. Besides, BML protests reveal the influence of social groups, both in the contexts of shared problems and shared emotions, in shaping one’s identity and worldview. Lastly, the integration digital and physical mediums of communication during the recent BLM protests is sufficient proof that initiating and sustaining strategic and persuasive information is highly effective in changing community-wide attitudes towards sociopolitical issues such as racial bias. Along with consistent systematic observation of social events, social psychologists should incorporate these elements to analyze and formulate solutions to inherent sociopolitical issues within the broader society.
References
Myers, D. G., & Twenge, J. M. (2019). Social Psychology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education The Black Lives Matter Protests Evaluation Essay.
