Why People do what they do in their Day to Day Life? (Essay Sample)

Why do People Do What They Do?
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Introduction
In everyday life, every single human being is faced with a multitude of decisions to make. Some decisions have larger impacts in the course of people’s lives while others may seem subtle and apparently have little impact in the life of an individual. It is from these decisions that actions follow as a consequence. The seemingly small decisions and consequent actions when repeated over and over again in a long period of time, then their impacts are then really felt in an individual’s life.
When one wakes up in the morning for example, they have to make a decision of whether to get out of bed immediately or stay in bed for some time. After that decision which people make almost subconsciously depending on their situation, a multitude of other decisions have to be made and actions follow suit. An individual for example has to decide whether to have breakfast that day or skip it altogether. Skipping breakfast for one day may not have such a large impact in a person’s life. However repetition of this action over the course of a month may result in serious physiological changes on the individual.
Other decisions and consequent actions have an impact immediately and can even affect the rest of an individual’s life. The choice of a spouse for example has an impact for the rest of a person’s life although the course of action which is validating the marriage happens over a very short period of time.
What then influences the decisions to undertake a certain action for different individuals? Why does one individual prefer on course of action over another while another individual have different preferences? This essay attempts to answer these questions comprehensively from a psychological point of view.
Many experiments have been done in the past to try and understand why an individual takes the courses of actions they do in different situations. The major factors that influence an individual’s course of action are: past experiences which determine their personality and also the specifics of the situation an individual is facing. The combination of these two factors in different magnitudes therefore result in the individual preferring a specific course of action which they inevitable take.
Situation
A Yale assistant professor of Psychology by name of Stanley Milgram in the year 1961 wanted to study obedience to authority as a course of action by different individuals. In the experiment he organized two actors; one who would play the role of an experimenter and the second who would be a victim. Hundreds of volunteers were then recruited to deliver what they believed were lethal levels of electric current to the victim from the orders of the experimenter. These volunteers were then observed as the victim feigned a lot of pain and even death. CITATION Sla04 \l 1033 (Slater, 2004)
People were trying to understand how SS officers could commit brutalities to approximately twelve million people who were not in any way posing as an immediate threat supposedly from the orders of their commanders. The above experiment and others like it were therefore some of the endeavors in trying to understand the Holocaust.
Milgram believed that the action taken by the individual in obedience to authority depend more on the specifics of the situation than in the personality of an individual His findings further backed up this claim and in his own words:
"In a naive moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could find enough moral imbeciles to meet the personal requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in Germany. I am now beginning to think that the full complement could be recruited in New Haven. " CITATION Sla04 \l 1033 (Slater, 2004)
Milgram discovered that an individual can become a killer is a situation which killing is called for. This was evident from scores of volunteers who described themselves as humanists but applied dangerous levels of electricity to the actor according to the orders of the experimenter. CITATION Sla04 \l 1033 (Slater, 2004)
On the 13th of March 1964 Catherine Genovese, a bar manager, was going home at 3 a.m. from work. She was then attacked by a man later identified as Winston Moseley as she walked to her apartment from the parking lot. Winston stabbed Kitty (as Catherine was known) who screamed for help and several lights went on in the apartment building. Someone actually shouted at Moseley to stop assaulting Kitty. CITATION Rac07 \l 1033 (Manning, levine, & Collins, 2007)
The lights then went out in the apartment as Moseley headed out to his car so he decided to go back and finish the job. Catherine screamed again and lights went on in the apartment causing Winston to retreat but they went off again and Winston finally killed Catherine in cold blood.
This incident was then later described by A. M. Rosenthal who wrote a book with the title Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. A multitude of people actually stood peering from their windows and watched as Catherine Genovese was murdered in cold blood. It is in the reference of this murder that John Darley of New York University and Bibb Latane of Columbia University started carrying out experiments to determine why the residents of Catherine’s apartment block acted in the way that they did.
The first experiment was one whereby they hired and actor who posed as an epileptic and faked a seizure. This experiment was similar to the Genovese case in that the witnesses were able to see each other but they could not communicate. Subjects who believed that they were alone with the epileptic sought help faster than those who believed that there were others present. The experimenters discovered that we are unlikely to help others more because of the presence of other observers than because of ingrained apathy. CITATION Bib68 \l 1033 (Latane & Darley, 1968)
Bibb Latane and John M. Darley also carried out an experiment in the pursuit of understanding how individuals would react in the situation of emergency in which there is imminent danger. In this experiment, a volunteer would be shown to a room where they were supposed to fill questionnaires then thick white smoke was made to puff into the room. The experiment had two conditions set; one where the individual was alone while in the other condition there are two passive confederates.
In the alone, condition, most volunteers acted as they were predicted to whereby they would try investigating the smoke then would get out of the room to look for someone to report the unusual occurrence. In the condition involving two passive confederates the volunteers would stay in the room with the two passive confederates coughing and even trying to open windows to let the smoke out instead of reporting the occurrence. Only one out of ten individuals would report the incident.
In this experiment Bibb and John proposed that diffusion of responsibility was the logical explanation to the results of the experiment. The individuals present at the time hold other bystanders in the case of an emergency also responsible and expect them to take action. CITATION Bib68 \l 1033 (Latane & Darley, 1968)
The experiment vividly shows how the situation specifics affect how an individual acts in a certain situation. When certain aspects of a situation are changed, as expected most individual acts in a different way.
Personality and Past Experience
Although the setting of a situation has a great influence in how an individual acts, we cannot simply ignore how the personality and past experiences of an individual also affect the course of action. Most people would act in situations in a similar manner but not in exactly the same way. This can be attributed to the different personalities and past experiences that come into play.
In the smoke experiment by Bibb Latane and John Darley, in the condition where subjects are alone, some would report the smoke immediately while others would first investigate the smoke to determine whether it was a cause of alarm. This cannot be explained in any other way apart from the personality and past experiences of the subjects.
Some personality types happen to have the characteristic of curiosity and risk taking which is in contrast to others. There are people who are generally considered as cowards while others are considered brave. This aspect cannot be said to be a decision that one makes consciousl...