Transcripts
Transcript for Figure 1.4, The Marshmallow Experiment – Instant Gratification
[Teacher]: Okay, so here’s the deal. There’s a marshmallow. You can either wait, and I’ll bring you back another one, so you have two. Or you can eat it now. So you can eat it now, or you can wait and I’ll bring you back two. Okay?
[Child 1]: I want two.
[Teacher]: Okay, I’ll be back.
[Teacher, to new group of two children]: Okay, so I have one marshmallow for each of you.
[Child 2]: Okay. One.
[Child 3]: Don’t eat it?
[Teacher]: Here’s the deal. You can either eat it now, or you can wait until I get back, and you can have two. Okay? So eat it now, or wait until I get back, and you can have two. And I’ll be back in a little bit.
[Child 3]: If we wait, will you give us two?
[Teacher]: Yep, if you wait I’ll give you two. Or you can eat it now. Whichever you want.
[Child 3]: We’re going to wait.
[Music accompanies children contemplating their marshmallows.]
[Child 3]: I wonder what we’re going to do. (To Child 2) Are you going to eat it?
[Child 2]: I just want to take one bite.
[Child 3]: Well, you’re still not going to get two…. But if you wait until she gets back, she’ll give you two…. She still won’t give you two, because you ate it. Some of it. And I didn’t eat a single bite of mine. So don’t show her, okay?
[Music accompanies children continuing to look at and play with their marshmallows. Some eat, lick, or bite their marshmallows.]
[Teacher]: Okay, so I have this marshmallow. You can eat it now, or you can wait a little bit, and I’ll bring two for you. All right?
[Music accompanies child immediately eating marshmallow.]
[Teacher, to another boy]: How are you doing, Sam?
[Child 4]: Good.
[Teacher]: Good! [__]. Okay, well I’m going to go, and I haven’t found a marshmallow yet. So I’m going to look for some more, but you stay here, and if you haven’t eaten it, I’ll bring you back another one. I’ll be right back.
[Child 3]: I’m waiting.
[Child 2]: I’m waiting too.
[Child 3]: Well, no, you’re eating, not waiting… for her to get back.
[Child 2]: I can wait.
[Child 3]: Well, you still ate some of it, so she’s still not going to give you two. (Child 2 fidgets and gets up.) No, stay in your chair. (Child 2 goes to the door.)
[Teacher]: Here I come. Oh, what happened?
[Child 3]: She ate hers.
[Teacher]: Oh! Okay.
[Music plays while children keep playing with their marshmallows and waiting.]
[Teacher]: Hi, Hunter! You waited! You get two.
[Music plays while children who waited get to eat both marshmallows.]
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 1.4, The Marshmallow Experiment – Instant Gratification
Transcript for “The Marshmallow Experiment – Instant Gratification” by FloodSanDiego is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 1.18, Craig Pinkney: The real roots of youth violence
In my line of work as an urban youth specialist, this is an image that I see quite often: young people from our communities stabbed, shot, beaten, wounded.
How I arrived at this particular point normally starts around 2:26 or 4:21 in the morning when I’m sleeping in bed. I’m next to my wife, my child is sleeping in the other direction with their toes in my nose, and I get a phone call. Generally, it’s from a private number. The call usually sounds like this:
> “You know, Craig, come to the hospital now. Someone just got shot.”
> Or,
> “Excuse me, is this Craig Pinkney? I’m the mother of Shawn. I know you don’t know me, but is it possible for you to come to the hospital because an incident took place a couple of hours ago. My son is in surgery, and all of his friends are saying that you need to come to the hospital. I know we haven’t met, but could you possibly make your way over now?”
As I do, I get out of my bed, leave my family, get into the car, and make my way to the hospital.
Even though I’m passionate about this work, there’s something that frustrates me deeply. I’m going to share it with you now.
Anytime I travel to different places around the city, around the UK, or around Europe, I always get faced with this statement:
> “It’s not my problem.”
I generally talk to people about raising awareness of youth violence, gun crime, and knife crime. And people say,
> “Yeah, but it’s not really me; it’s those types of young people,”
> or,
> “It’s them.”
In the back of my head, I’m getting a little bit angry, but I’m smiling at the same time. I’m thinking,
> “Yeah, but it is our problem—until it happens to your son, your daughter, your niece, your nephew, your husband, your wife, your partner, your neighbor, or your colleague.”
The image before you is of young people from inner-city Birmingham under the age of 21 who, in the last three years, lost their lives to violence. I could show you another two slides of young people in the last three years who lost their lives to knives or guns—wrong place, wrong time, at a party, having fun, something happens. Sitting on a school bus, something happens, and they lose their lives.
But why I show you this image is that these young people were not criminals. These young people were not gang members. When the media talks about violence, we often think,
> “Well, it’s just gang-related.”
But that wasn’t the case.
As a criminologist, part of my work is trying to understand what causes young people to be violent. Asking that most important question: **Why?** Why would a young person, 16, 15, or 17 years old, pick up a knife and stab someone they’ve never met before at random? Why would someone pick up a gun, just because someone lives in a completely different postcode, and be prepared to shoot? Why would someone be prepared to kill a child on a school bus just because that child looked at them for 10 seconds?
The fact of the matter is, there’s not one answer to explain why young people arrive at this point. There are actually a series of factors: dysfunction in families, father absence, racism, poor identities, and dysfunctional homes. But one thing that really sticks out for me when I analyze this is this one word: **invisibility.**
What I find in my work is that most young people in our society are invisible—unseen, unheard. And if anybody knows the history of cultures and communities, when people feel oppressed, invisible, or unheard, sometimes they do things to become visible.
We might not be able to understand why a young person gets on a bus one day and feels that, in order to gain credibility, they need to hurt someone or rob someone’s phone. Our young people are invisible.
You’ve probably heard the saying, *”It takes a village to raise a child.”* I’d like to extend that by saying, yes, it takes a village to raise a child, but when you don’t recognize the village, sometimes that village can kill a child. And there’s also another saying: if young people don’t feel a part of the village, they will burn it down to feel its warmth.
I’ll say it one more time: if young people feel they are not part of our village, they will burn it down to feel its warmth.
Some of you in this room may be thinking, “Well, you’ve shocked me with certain things, and yes, it could be my son, my daughter, or a relative of mine. But what can I do?”
I’m going to spend a couple of seconds speaking to those of you who are thinking, “How can I do this type of work?”
Here are four things:
1. Find out what’s going on in your community. What are the issues amongst young people?
2. Find out who the workers are—the frontline workers doing the real work in the community.
3. Attach yourself to them. Contact them. Inquire, find out, through YouTube, social media—engage with those people.
4. Create your own platform, and then call on young people, call on the community of all different ages to support you in building your own legacy.
That’s what I’m doing right now.
I did it. I was like many of you in this room right now—sitting in a conference, sitting in a course—until I met two individuals. The first was Dr. Carlton Howson. He spoke profoundly about issues affecting society, and I was taken aback by him. I wanted to meet him and learn more. When I met him, he started to challenge my mind and my ideas about what it meant to be a man, especially a Black man in Western society. He helped me understand some of the issues young people face. When they get labeled as criminals, thugs, or gang members, I understand.
I walk into work Monday to Friday with my badge, and people assume:
> “Are you a security guard?
> Are you a cleaner?
> Do you teach sport?
> Are you a musician?”
Shouldn’t the question be, “What do you teach?” rather than assuming?
Then I met another man, Dr. Martin Glynn, on a course. He said something profound that shocked me. During a break, nobody wanted to talk to him. So, I walked over and said, “You don’t know me, but my name is Craig Pinkney, and you need to be my mentor.”
I took his number, called him every day, and insisted we meet. Eventually, he said, “You know what, just come to my house.”
Every day, before work, I’d be at Dr. Glynn’s house at 7:30 a.m. with my notepad and pen, asking questions, learning concepts, and understanding his mind. I wanted to take that knowledge and implement it in my community. It didn’t require money or qualifications—just dedication, time, and reflection.
Some of you may have seen this bird before: the Sankofa bird. The concept of Sankofa comes from the Akan people of West Africa. It means we have to go back and reclaim our history in order to move forward.
How does this apply to the issues I’m talking about today? Sometimes, we as a society only respond to the symptoms, but we never look at the root causes of why people behave the way they do. We need to go back and find out what’s at the root. What are the key things in society causing these behaviors?
This also means looking within. What causes you to do what you do? How do you ignite that fire? And when that fire burns out, how do you reignite it? Because that’s what I did. And if I can do it, you can do it.
Each one, teach one—the power of us.
Thank you.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 1.18, Craig Pinkney: The real roots of youth violence
Transcript for “The real roots of youth violence | Craig Pinkney | TEDxBrum” by TEDx Talks is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 2.16, Sexual Assault and the Justice System: Why So Many Victims Don’t Report
[Faye]: I was advised that a lot of things about me would be brought up in court that I might not necessarily want people to know. That they’d bring up sexual history, they’d speak to my friends, they’d speak to my family. They’d get photos of me on Facebook and even perhaps analyze
what I was wearing in certain situations.
[Winnie]: I consider myself lucky because I’m one of the few victims who managed to actually have a conviction against their perpetrator. And so I think the statistics are 6% of reported rapes the results in the conviction in England and Wales, and actually only about 15% of rapes that are reported. So the statistics are pretty damning and actually horrifying in a lot of ways.
[Emily]: And those reasons can range from – to so many, from feeling like you won’t be won’t be believed.
[Faye]: The fear of causing a fuss or just not being believed or you know nothing’s going to come of it. And it’s quite stressful to tell people that you’re close to, let alone strangers in the police station.
[Emily]: When it happened to me I spent the first few days denying that anything bad had happened. And it wasn’t for another month before I actually thought I needed to go and report this, but of course by that point no more, no physical evidence and very much a he-said she-said situation.
[Faye]: If I were to lose the case, which they said was more likely, I would have to pay the legal fees. Which as a student I never would have been able to afford. It’s something that even two years on I’m still dealing with today. I felt like I never really got justice for myself. And this person is married and I know that he has four young children, and he’s still perhaps doing the same job. I feel like I’m the one that’s being punished.
[Winnie]: My rapist was arrested about five or six days after the assaults, and he didn’t plead guilty, so that meant that eleven months from then there was a trial that had been scheduled. So I had to kind of wait eleven months for this trial to happen and it was like my life was on hold effectively. And it was an awful experience for me because just the thought of having to – thought of having to testify in person in great detail about your rape in the same room as your perpetrator is terrifying, right? And I can’t imagine actually if you sat through that whole process and then you still didn’t get a conviction, that must be incredibly damaging in terms of it … must have an impact on your ability to recover in some ways.
[Alex]: About six years ago – and I was sexually assaulted by a very senior person and, and then reported that to the police. The power imbalances of someone high-profile – he was seen as a reliable witness – it’d been all about one person’s word against other people’s word and if someone has more power and status then the likelihood is that they’re going to be believed by the jury and get found not guilty.
[Winnie]: When I was researching for my novel I ended up observing a number of rape trials. Oftentimes when victims are being questioned, there were all these reactions from clerks, saying, you know, from clerks saying, I really don’t think she’s telling the truth, you know, and I don’t think she’s telling the truth. And I would ask her, and I’ll ask, well, why do you think that? I mean, it’s like, well she’s not really acting the way like a rape victim would act, but how do you know how victims are supposed to act?
You know I think unfortunately we go – maybe because of movies and TV – we have this image of how rape victims are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be weak and vulnerable and cry and maybe be a little bit feminine and not be too strong, but if they seem too put together, too articulate, maybe they’re not actually telling the truth, right, because you don’t seem distressed enough. It’s a little bit ignorant because in reality people react in all different ways. People of all different personality types become victims, so your personality and your attitude towards the world is going to affect the way that you testify.
[Faye]: I think that – I wish that I’d known to go to the police sooner. Although it’s really difficult to speak out especially to strangers, I think that if you feel like you can it’s so, so important because it only strengthens your case being brought to justice.
[Unidentified Speaker]: It’s not always perfect but I do think it’s important for people to be engaging with it if they can.
[Alex]: So my advice would be: seek advice from some of the people who really understand the system and really weigh up. Don’t feel that you’re in any way responsible. Don’t take the burden of you know creating a better society on yourself cuz I think your first duty is to yourself and to your mental health.
[Music.]
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 2.16, Sexual Assault and the Justice System: Why So Many Victims Don’t Report
Transcript for “Sexual assault and the Justice System: why so many victims don’t report” by The Independent is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.3, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Witch Scene
[Crowd]: A witch! A witch! A witch! We found a witch! We’ve got a witch! A witch! A witch!
[Peasant 1 (played by Eric Idle)]: We have found a witch. May we burn her?
[Bedevere, Knight/Magistrate (played by Terry Jones)]: How do you know she’s a witch?
[Man]: She looks like one.
[Bedevere]: Bring her forward.
[The Witch (played by Connie Booth)]: I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!
[Bedevere]: But you are dressed as one.
[The Witch]: They dressed me like this.
[Crowd]: No, we didn’t.
[The Witch]: And this isn’t my nose. It’s a false one.
[Bedevere]: Well?
[Peasant 1]: We did do the nose.
[Bedevere]: The nose?
[Peasant 1]: And the hat. But she is a witch!
[Bedevere]: Did you dress her up like this?
[Peasants and Crowd]: No, no!
[Peasants]: Yes. A bit.
[Peasant 1]: She has got a wart.
[Bedevere]: What makes you think she’s a witch?
[Peasant 3 (played by John Cleese)]: She turned me into a newt!
[Bedevere]: A newt?
[Peasant 3]: I got better.
[Peasant 2 (played by Michael Palin) and Crowd]: Burn her anyway!
[Bedevere]: Quiet! Quiet!
[Bedevere]: There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
[Peasant 1]: Are there?
[Peasants and Crowd]: What are they? Tell us.
[Peasant 2]: Do they hurt?
[Bedevere]: Tell me, what do you do with witches?
[Peasants and Crowd]: Burn them!
[Bedevere]: And what do you burn, apart from witches?
[Peasant 1]: More witches!
[Peasant 2]: Wood!
[Bedevere]: So why do witches burn?
[Peasant 3]: ‘Cause they’re made of wood?
[Bedevere]: Good!
[Bedevere]: How do we tell if she is made of wood?
[Peasant 1]: Build a bridge out of her.
[Bedevere]: But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
[Peasants]: Oh, yeah.
[Bedevere]: Does wood sink in water?
[Peasant 2]: No, it floats.
[Peasant 1]: Throw her into the pond!
[Bedevere]: What also floats in water?
[Peasant 1]: Bread.
[Peasant 2]: Apples.
[Peasant 3]: Very small rocks.
[Peasants]: Cider! Great gravy. Cherries. Mud. Churches. Lead.
[King Arthur (played by Graham Chapman)]: A duck!
[Bedevere]: Exactly. So, logically –
[Peasant 1]: If she weighs the same as a duck…. She’s made of wood!
[Bedevere]: And therefore?
[Peasants]: A witch!
[Crowd]: A duck! A duck! Here’s a duck.
[Bedevere]: We shaIl use my largest scales.
[Bedevere]: Remove the supports!
[Crowd]: A witch!
[The Witch]: It’s a fair cop.
[Crowd]: Burn her!
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 3.3, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Witch Scene
Transcript for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Witch Scene” by Molly E Druce is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.10, The dark history of IQ tests – Stefan C. Dombrowski
[Stefan Dombrowski, Narrator]: In 1905, psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon designed a test for children who were struggling in school in France. Designed to determine which children required individualized attention, their method formed the basis of the IQ test. Beginning in the late 19th century, researchers hypothesized that cognitive abilities like verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills reflected an underlying general intelligence, or g factor. Simon and Binet designed a battery of tests to measure each of these abilities and combine the results into a single score. Questions were adjusted for each age group, and a child’s score reflected how they performed relative to others their age. Dividing someone’s score by their age and multiplying the result by 100 yielded the intelligence quotient, or IQ.
Today, a score of 100 represents the average of a sample population, with 68% of the population scoring within 15 points of 100. Simon and Binet thought the skills their test assessed would reflect general intelligence. But both then and now, there’s no single agreed upon definition of general intelligence. And that left the door open for people to use the test in service of their own preconceived assumptions about intelligence. What started as a way to identify those who needed academic help quickly became used to sort people in other ways, often in service of deeply flawed ideologies.
One of the first large-scale implementations occurred in the United States during WWI, when the military used an IQ test to sort recruits and screen them for officer training. At that time, many people believed in eugenics, the idea that desirable and undesirable genetic traits could and should be controlled in humans through selective breeding. There were many problems with this line of thinking, among them the idea that intelligence was not only fixed and inherited, but also linked to a person’s race.
Under the influence of eugenics, scientists used the results of the military initiative to make erroneous claims that certain racial groups were intellectually superior to others. Without taking into account that many of the recruits tested were new immigrants to the United States who lacked formal education or English language exposure, they created an erroneous intelligence hierarchy of ethnic groups. The intersection of eugenics and IQ testing influenced not only science, but policy as well. In 1924, the state of Virginia created policy allowing for the forced sterilization of people with low IQ scores—a decision the United States Supreme Court upheld.
In Nazi Germany, the government authorized the murder of children based on low IQ. Following the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, the discriminatory uses of IQ tests were challenged on both moral and scientific grounds. Scientists began to gather evidence of environmental impacts on IQ. For example, as IQ tests were periodically recalibrated over the 20th century, new generations scored consistently higher on old tests than each previous generation. This phenomenon, known as the Flynn Effect, happened much too fast to be caused by inherited evolutionary traits. Instead, the cause was likely environmental—improved education, better healthcare, and better nutrition.
In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists also attempted to use IQ tests to evaluate things other than general intelligence, particularly schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric conditions. These diagnoses relied in part on the clinical judgment of the evaluators, and used a subset of the tests used to determine IQ—a practice later research found does not yield clinically useful information.
Today, IQ tests employ many similar design elements and types of questions as the early tests, though we have better techniques for identifying potential bias in the test. They’re no longer used to diagnose psychiatric conditions. But a similarly problematic practice using subtest scores is still sometimes used to diagnose learning disabilities, against the advice of many experts.
Psychologists around the world still use IQ tests to identify intellectual disability, and the results can be used to determine appropriate educational support, job training, and assisted living. IQ test results have been used to justify horrific policies and scientifically baseless ideologies. That doesn’t mean the test itself is worthless—in fact, it does a good job of measuring the reasoning and problem-solving skills it sets out to. But that isn’t the same thing as measuring a person’s potential.
Though there are many complicated political, historical, scientific, and cultural issues wrapped up in IQ testing, more and more researchers agree on this point, and reject the notion that individuals can be categorized by a single numerical score.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 4.10, The dark history of IQ tests – Stefan C. Dombrowski
Transcript for “The Dark History of IQ Tests” by TED-Ed is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.13, What identical twins separated at birth teach us about genetics – BBC REEL (Nature vs. Nurture)
[Nancy Segal]: My name is Dr Nancy Segal. I’m a psychology professor at California State University, Fullerton. What got me into twin research initially is that I am a fraternal twin and always fascinated with the similarities and differences, mostly differences, that my sister and I have. And I used to wonder as a child how this could be if we had the same parents and same environment. And when I began to study psychology at the high school and graduate school level, I learned about genetics and how we all came into the world with predispositions of our own. And that explained why my sister and I were so very, very different.
Twins raised apart
Well, I spent many years at the Minnesota study with twins raised apart, looking at identical and fraternal twins who’ve been separated at birth. It’s very important to include the fraternals because they’re the natural control group. And let’s think about the differences between those twins before looking at the insights.
Identical twins share all their genes having split from a single fertilized egg within the first two weeks after conception. Fraternal twins share half the genes on average. They result when a woman releases two eggs at the same time and they’re fertilized by two separate sperm, so they have 50 percent of their genes in common on average, like ordinary siblings. Comparing resemblance in identical twins to fraternal twins gives us a handle on whether or not genetics has an effect. It would if identical twins are more alike than fraternal and they invariably are. Studying twins gives us enormous insights into how we come to be the way that we are.
Twin studies are a natural model for looking at genetic and environmental influences on behavior, and what we are finding is that many more behaviors than we ever would have thought, do have a genetic component to them. Genetics is not everything, but does explain a great deal of why we differ one person to another.
Genetics and physical traits
Well, let’s start with looking at genetic influences on physical traits.
We find that height and weight have substantial genetic components. We find that general intelligence has a substantial genetic component, a little bit less than the sum of the physical traits like height and weight and brainwaves, but nevertheless, a substantial genetic component, as does special mental abilities. And then we drop down a bit when we get to job satisfaction. Probably the most surprising findings in the last 20 years or so had been that things like religiosity, how much you invest in religious activities and interests and political attitudes and social attitudes have a genetic component to them.
Genetics and the environment
It’s very important to appreciate that genes do not work in deterministic ways. They work in probabilistic ways they predispose, but they do not provide the final word.
Genes change in expression just because you have a gene doesn’t mean it will always be expressed. It takes a certain environment to bring that out. We all have genes that will be expressed given a particular environment. Now, with identical twins, they have the same DNA, but sometimes gene expression can occur in one twin and not the other. And this can create differences between them, and these environmental differences that trigger different gene expression might even start in the womb. The beauty of identical twins raised apart is that they share only their genes and not their environments. So any resemblance between them is tied to their common genes.
We find some amazing similarities in identical twins raised apart. Many more than we ever would have anticipated, not just in the more traditional areas like intelligence, personality, physical features like height and weight, but in some more unusual habits, such as a pair of twins who both used to scatter love letters around the house to their wives and both bit their nails down to the nub and both explain their same mixed headache syndrome in exactly the same way as if someone is beating on their head with a hammer. These are very challenging, and you can ask yourself, are they due to just random chance? My answer to that is no, they’re not. And the rarer they are, the more I believe it’s somehow tied to their genes and the way the genes interact with their environments to produce these kinds of unusual similarities.
I think that the people who find it challenging or even disturbing are those who don’t fully understand the process. They think the genes work in deterministic ways when in fact they work in probabilistic ways. And so it doesn’t mean that we’re set in stone, we can’t change. It means that we can change. We can alter environments to make behavioral expression different. We can work to prevent disease or to mitigate it, but we can’t all be the same.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 4.13, What identical twins separated at birth teach us about genetics – BBC REEL (Nature vs. Nurture)
Transcript for “What identical twins separated at birth teach us about genetics” by BBC Global is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 5.8, Kai, Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, Amazing Interview w/ Jessob Reisbeck
[Jessob Reisbeck, reporter]: (You’re) one of the heroes…
[Kai]: Yeah, what?
[Reisbeck]: You want to talk about what happened today?
[Kai]: Well, went straight out of Dogtown skateboard and surfing it up. Before I say anything else I want to say no matter what you’ve done you deserve respect, even if you make mistakes you’re loveable and it doesn’t matter your looks, skills, or age, or size or anything you’re worthwhile. No one could ever take that away from you. Now this stuff right here.
I was driving and I was in the passenger side of this [ __ ] car and he comes over on there he was over by the recycling center. He says, oh, when I was in the Virgin Islands, thirty years old
on a business trip I [ __ ] this 14-year old. I was like you what? He’s like I raped this 14 year old, starts to cry and gives me big hugs it’s like [ __ ] 300-pound guy. I’ll be like oh [ __ ] you must be [ __ ] man like what’s he talkin’ about I didn’t take him seriously at first. He comes driving down this way. He’s like you know what? I’m coming to realize I’m Jesus Christ and I can do anything I [ __ ] want to you and watch this BAM and he smashed into this [ __ ] guy right there, pinned them in between that [ __ ] truck and so I [ __ ] hop out I’ll look over. The guy’s pinned there, I mean like freight train riders know this, like if you get pinned between something do not [ __ ] move that [ __ ] otherwise you’ll bleed out like [ __ ]. I ran in I grabbed the keys he [ __ ] sitting there like nothing even happened and like [ __ ] like man if you started driving that car around again man there would’ve been a lot of bodies around here [ __ ] I’ll hop on out and so I grabbed the bag I threw it over by that pole right there and then [ __ ] buddy gets out. And these two women who are trying to help him he runs up and he grabs one of them. Man, like a guy that beat can snap a woman’s neck like a pencil stick so I [ __ ] ran up behind with the hatchet. Smash smash sssssmash, yeah.
[Reisbeck]: The lady said you saved her life.
[Kai]: She was the one who got grabbed by that [ __ ] you know what [ __ ] is cool that guy ain’t [ __ ].
[Reisbeck]: How’d you, how’d you get in his car? How, how did you – ?
[Kai]: I was hitchhiking. I was, it, well, good thing I was hitchhiking yeah. People say don’t hitchhike well it was what happens was…. Yeah, well, at least I was here.
[Reisbeck]: So he did this on purpose?
[Kai]: Dude that guy was [ __ ] cooked out man like he’s beyond holiday. I don’t even see any breath in him you don’t….
[Reisbeck]: Can I get your name and where you’re from, if you don’t mind?
[Kai]: I’m Kai, Kai straight out of Dogtown, K – I – A.
[Reisbeck]: Do you have a last name?
[Kai]: I don’t have anything.
[Reisbeck]: Where are you from, originally from, Fresno area?
[Kai]: Sophia, West Virginia
[Reisbeck]: How old are you?
[Kai]: I can’t call it.
[Reisbeck]: Have you ever experienced anything like today and what made you take the actions that you did?
[Kai]: That woman was in danger. He just finished what looked like at the time killing somebody and if I hadn’t done that he would have killed more people, so he’s dead. Good.
Well, this one time I was in an orchard and this [ __ ] guy started, starts beating on this woman who he calls his so I walked on over and I started to smash him in the head. I can’t – you see all these, you see all these teeth marks right here for the camera? Yeah I started smashing in the head and the teeth busted out, all his teeth. I’m on the [ __ ] and the sheriff’s not the policy enforcers [ __ ] show up and start like they’re like yeah so what, what happened? I mean like I just give me any old name and just give me all the [ __ ] and birthdate whatever it is yeah.
[Reisbeck]: What happened today after, after – you’re obviously free now, but were you arrested? What was the process, what did they do to you when they came out? Obviously they found out that you did the right thing but the time that from the accident to now where have you been?
[Kai]: Well you started, you started, following I’ll act I cleaned his [ __ ] head wide open with a
Hatchet. He stood up like he was pulled right up right and like [ __ ] I’m lay I was like brother if you’re [ __ ] Jesus Christ I’ll be the Antichrist man like [ __ ] that [ __ ] and he starts following me off this way so I figure I’ll lure him right away from the crowd so I’m running off this way I got I got a hatchet in one hand [ __ ] on this bag I’m carrying over with another hand. I start running off that way and so a couple of the people who was bystanders to it came over and told me to stop and I was like, why stop? They’re like the cops are on their way. I was like, is he back up and doing anything? And somebody said that he was like masturbating in front of the school and
[ __ ] whatever this place is right here yeah.
[Reisbeck]: Were you questioned by police? Were you taken into custody?
[Kai]: What happened, I was questioned I was put into the back of the sheriff’s wagon wasn’t the policies the [ __ ] and pulled I over you know what I’m saying yeah so like I got put in the back of
the sheriff’s way again. The sheriff was like what happened here, took down a statement. I told him everything I just told you and [ __ ] let me on out said I couldn’t grab all this stuff until I had finished like, they had finished with something you want to me and like brought me back on over here so I could be in front of this thing like this [ __ ] car right here it was [ __ ] gnarly man holy [ __ ]. It was like the biggest wave I’ve ever ridden in my life.
[Reisbeck]: What’s next for you?
[Kai]: Hopefully some surfing. I’m, if anybody’s watching this somewhere else and they got a [ __ ] that they could lend the guy with the wetsuit I’d love to test out [ __ ].
[Reisbeck]: Would you do it again?
[Kai]: Club him in the head with a hatchet? You know if I could go back in time I’d go back over to where I was at that recycling center and he said that he had raped that chick over in the Virgin Islands cuz it doesn’t matter where you at you can [ __ ] just spend a bunch of money and do whatever the [ __ ] you want you know that’s not right if I if I could go back in time I would have dab them up right there.
[Reisbeck]: No, you’re not, I mean, you don’t seem like you have any concern for yourself/ You’re all about, I mean, doing the right thing and not even worrying about Kai first.
[Kai]: I don’t have any family, like, as far as, as far as anybody I grew up with is concerned I’m already dead so whatever.
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Transcript for Figure 6.5, The difference between classical and operant conditioning – Peggy Andover
Translator: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Bedirhan Cinar
[Peggy Andover, Narrator]: When we think about learning, we often picture students in a classroom or lecture hall, books open on their desks, listening intently to a teacher or professor in the front of the room. But in psychology, learning means something else. To psychologists, learning is a long-term change in behavior that’s based on experience. Two of the main types of learning are called classical conditioning and operant, or instrumental, conditioning.
Classical conditioning
Let’s talk about classical conditioning first. In the 1890’s, a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov did some really famous experiments on dogs. He showed dogs some food and rang a bell at the same time. After a while, the dogs would associate the bell with the food. They would learn that when they heard the bell, they would get fed. Eventually, just ringing the bell made the dogs salivate. They learned to expect food at the sound of a bell.
You see, under normal conditions, the sight and smell of food causes a dog to salivate. We call the food an unconditioned stimulus, and we call salivation the unconditioned response. Nobody trains a dog to salivate over some steak. However, when we pair an unconditioned stimulus like food with something that was previously neutral, like the sound of a bell, that neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus. And so classical conditioning was discovered.
We see how this works with animals, but how does it work with humans? In exactly the same way. Let’s say that one day you go to the doctor to get a shot. She says, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit,” and then gives you the most painful shot you’ve ever had. A few weeks later you go to the dentist for a check-up. He starts to put a mirror in your mouth to examine your teeth, and he says, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.” Even though you know the mirror won’t hurt, you jump out of the chair and run, screaming from the room.
When you went to get a shot, the words, “This won’t hurt a bit,” became a conditioned stimulus when they were paired with pain of the shot, the unconditioned stimulus, which was followed by your conditioned response of getting the heck out of there. Classical conditioning in action.
Operant conditioning explains how consequences lead to changes in voluntary behavior. So how does operant conditioning work? There are two main components in operant conditioning: reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcers make it more likely that you’ll do something again, while punishers make it less likely. Reinforcement and punishment can be positive or negative, but this doesn’t mean good and bad. Positive means the addition of a stimulus, like getting dessert after you finish your veggies, and negative means the removal of a stimulus, like getting a night of no homework because you did well on an exam.
Example
Let’s look at an example of operant conditioning. After eating dinner with your family, you clear the table and wash the dishes. When you’re done, your mom gives you a big hug and says, “Thank you for helping me.” In this situation, your mom’s response is positive reinforcement if it makes you more likely to repeat the operant response, which is to clear the table and wash the dishes.
Operant conditioning is everywhere in our daily lives. There aren’t many things we do that haven’t been influenced at some point by operant conditioning. We even see operant conditioning in some extraordinary situations. One group of scientists showed the power of operant conditioning by teaching pigeons to be art connoisseurs. Using food as a positive reinforcer, scientists have taught pigeons to select paintings by Monet over those by Picasso. When showed works of other artists, scientists observed stimulus generalization as the pigeons chose the Impressionists over the Cubists. Maybe next they’ll condition the pigeons to paint their own masterpieces.
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Transcript for Figure 6.12, Stanford Prison Experiment
[Dr. Steve Taylor]: If you go to Google and type in the word, “experiment,” one of the first things you’ll see is the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s probably the best known psychological study of all time.
It all began in West Coast America on a summer’s day back in 1971, when college students grew their hair long, protested against their government, were Profis and totally anti Authority – or so we thought – until Philip Zimbardo.
[Dr. Philip Zimbardo]: So Stanford Prison Experiment, very simply is, an attempt to see what happens when you put really good people in a bad place. We put an ad in the City newspaper: Wanted – students for study of prison life, lasting up to two weeks. I’m going to pay you $15 a day – this is back in 1971; it’s pretty good money – and we picked 75 volunteers, gave them a battery of psychological tests, and we picked two dozen, when all dimensions were normal and healthy to begin with.
And then we did what is critical for all research. We randomly assign half of them to the role of playing guards or the role of playing prisoners. It’s a literally like flipping a coin.
And then what we did – we told the guards to come down a day early and we had them pick their own uniform, we had them help set up the prison so they’d feel like it was their prison, and that… and the prisoners were coming into their place. The prisoners we simply said wait at home in the dormitories. Well, what we didn’t tell them, which is a little bit of the deception of omission, is that they were arrested by the city police.
[Participant]: Right there, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car – was a real cop car, was a real policeman. It took me to the, to the, police station, the basement of the police station.
[Zimbardo]: I had told the police when to put a blindfold on the prisoners but since they had never been arrested they didn’t know that doesn’t happen. The reason for the blindfold is then my assistants would come, put him in our car, bring him down to our prison and they’d be in our prison now, blindfolded. The guards would strip them naked, delouse them, pretending that they were lice – it’s kind of a degradation ritual – and after the first day I was about to end it because nothing was happening.
But the next day, on the morning of the next day, the prisoners rebelled. And what the guards did, they came to me and said, “Prisoners are rebelling – what are we going to do?” I said, “Your prison. Whatever you want I will do it – you got to tell me,” and they said, “We have to treat force with force,” so they broke down the doors.
[Sounds of prisoners protesting treatment.]
[Zimbardo]: (They) stripped the prisoners naked, dragged them out. Some of them, they tied up their feet. They put them in solitary confinement which was a tiny little hole in the closet – about about this big – door and, and they said at this point everything but breathing air is a privilege. Food is a privilege, clothes are a privilege, having a bed is a privilege, and so the guards begin to hear the new rules. And the new rules are you are dangerous and we are going to treat you as such and then it began to escalate.
Each day, the level of abuse, aggression, violence against prisoners got more and more extreme and so the guards change to become more dominant and you see it’s all about power. It’s the whole institution that, that empowers the guards who are the representative of this institution called prison to do whatever is necessary to prevent prisoners from escaping, maintain law and order.
[Prisoners are forced to sing by the guards.]
[Zimbardo]: The way, the direction it took, is having them engage in ever more humiliating tests, cleaning toilet bowls out with their bare hands, taking their blankets and putting them in dirt with nettles, and the prisoners spent hours taking the nettles out if they wanted to, you know, sleep. And it’s essentially saying we have the power to create a totally arbitrary mindless environment and that’s the environment you have to live in, so some of the prisoners are now crushed.
And in 36 hours the first kid has an emotional breakdown, meaning crying, screaming, irrational thinking.
[Prisoner]: I gotta go to a doctor, anything. [Incoherent screaming.] Goddamn it!
[Zimbardo]: And we have to release him. In five days we had to release five of the prisoners because the situation was so overwhelming.
What about the kids who didn’t who didn’t break down? They became zombies. Zombies in the sense that they became almost all mindlessly obedient. Whatever the guards would say they did. “Do this” – they did. Do ten push-ups, do twenty push-ups, step on him while he’s doing a push-up, tell him he’s a bastard.
[Prisoners]: Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing.
[Zimbardo]: It was horrifying to see the kids break down. It was even more horrifying to see these other, these other kids just become mindlessly obedient.
[Prisoners]: Because of what prisoner 819 did, my cell is a mess. Because of what prisoner 819 did, my cell is a mess.
[Zimbardo]: Again, we have to keep remembering these are kids who start out being rebels against society all – every one of them – and now they are just pawns. They are, they are, they are the puppets that, that the guards are manipulating. In fact one of the guards said it was like being a puppeteer.
[Narrator]: The guards tested their control over the prisoners by making them write letters home.
[Guard]: No need to visit, it’s seventh heaven.
[Guard]: Yours truly….
[Prisoners]: Yours truly
[Guard]: Your loving son….
[Prisoners]: Your loving son
[Guard]: And put the name there that your mother gave you.
[Zimbardo]: The results were surprising because I did not expect the transformation of good kids into pathological prisoners or abusing guards to occur so quickly and so extremely. That is, we had assumed from all other research, you know, that there would be verbal abuse. They would make fun of them, there would be teasing, they would be bullying, but not this kind of – I would call it creative evil. That is, thinking about ways to demean, degrade, dehumanize other human beings. And the critical thing there in that transformation is becoming the role or the role becoming you, and suspending your usual morality, your usual way of thinking.
[Student who was a guard]: You really become that person. Once you put on that khaki uniform, you put on the glasses, you put on – you take the nightstick and, you know, you act the part.
[Dr. Taylor]: So what Zimbardo’s research demonstrates so dramatically is that situations can affect us more than we think and can often outweigh individual characteristics. So if we’re going to use psychology to try to reduce the possibility for evil, maybe we need to focus more on systems and less on individuals. But should the research ever have been done? After all, the participants suffered real harm.
[Zimbardo]: In hindsight, again, I have mixed feelings about if the study should have been done – well, not if it means suffering of anybody. Would I like my son to have been in that study, no. On the other hand, does it tell us something vital about human nature that has enduring value? There I have to say yes. It’s been used in lots of prisons, the training device to get people to be sensitized to how easy it is to abuse power, so in that sense it has, has widespread enduring value. Therefore I’m saying, well, I’m glad I did it.
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Transcript for Figure 6.13, Labeling Theory
[Narrator]: Labels, labels, labels. We give people a number of labels based on who we think they are, which is based on what society tells us is important. The labels we give to a person determine how we interact with them. This includes what we believe is deviant and criminal
Stemming from symbolic interactionism, labeling theory focuses not on the deviant or criminal behavior itself but by society’s reaction to the deviant behavior. How we respond to the behavior determines whether something or someone is deviant.
Let’s discuss an example of deviance that is not so clear in society: medical marijuana. For decades, marijuana has been listed as a schedule 1 drug, which means that it is just as dangerous as heroin or ecstasy. So for the longest time, medical marijuana was not even something to consider in treating certain illnesses. But perception and time have changed, and so have medical marijuana laws. In the U.S., medical marijuana laws vary by state and, as of the making of this video, some states have not legalized medical marijuana, so how can we relate this to deviance? Let’s say there’s a woman – we’ll call her Sarah – and she has found out she has cancer. She knows that using medical marijuana will help relieve the nausea and pain induced by cancer treatments. Simply by being in a state where medical marijuana is legal can determine whether Sarah receives a deviant label.
If Sarah is living in Colorado, where it is legal, Sarah can apply for a medical marijuana card and make an appropriate doctor-approved transaction. Now let’s say Sarah lives in a state where medical marijuana is not legal – Iowa, for example – but she believes that the benefits would help her through the treatment process. Since it’s illegal in Iowa and there are no locations to obtain marijuana, Sarah would have to get it illegally. She still wants it, although she would have to make the transaction in secret and the price is pretty steep. If her friends and family found out, they may label her as deviant. If police caught her, she would be arrested, and society would definitely label as a deviant then.
Why? In Iowa it is illegal to grow, distribute, or consume in any way. In Colorado marijuana is legal, doctor approved, and there are socially acceptable places to purchase marijuana. So Sara isn’t likely to be labeled as deviant. The only real difference is location, but society’s reaction to her behavior is very different. It’s the same person buying the same substance but in different locations.
There’s also something we call primary and secondary deviance. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term consequences and does not hurt a person’s self-image. If Sarah lives in Iowa and buys marijuana illegally one time without getting caught, she doesn’t experience any long-term consequences and her self-image is intact. If she continues to do it and is arrested, or even if society knows she continues to buy it but she’s never caught, she very likely will receive a label as deviant. This is secondary deviance. This happens when a person’s self-concept changes due to the label society gives that person.
One deviant act may not change the way society reacts or the way a person sees themselves. In fact, we all likely recall when we have engaged in some type of deviant act. But when society puts a label on us, our self-concept begins to change. Sarah starts to see herself as deviant, even though she believes there is a good reason for her to buy marijuana. She adopts the label and in essence, she begins to live that label – even if deep down she knows it isn’t who she truly is.
When someone is labeled as deviant or criminal, it tends to become their master status. A master status is a chief characteristic of an individual. When people are labeled a criminal, it’s hard for them to change that status and it follows them everywhere. When someone has committed a felony, they are labeled a felon and must report it when they apply for a job. They can’t serve on a jury or vote in many states; therefore, the master status of felon follows them in everything they do.
So, what is one personal experience where you have either been the person labeling or the person labeled because an action was seen as deviant? How did the person respond to the label or how did you respond? What is one action that society defines as deviant and has a strong reaction to? What labels to society give those that are labeled as deviant and how does what is deviant change based on what community and culture you are in?
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Transcript for Figure 6.16, Rosenhan – Being Sane In Insane Places
[Music.]
Madness has always existed, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that it came to be seen as a disease, one that required management by a new group of experts—psychiatrists. New asylums were built, their walls and bars marking the supposedly clear-cut boundary between the sane and the insane.
In 1887, an enterprising journalist named Elizabeth Cochran, who wrote under the name Nellie Bly, challenged this notion. Bly was on a mission to test the field of psychiatry. She checked into a boarding house, pulling strange faces, tugging her hair, and declaring that everyone around her was crazy. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before two doctors had her shipped off to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York.
Once inside, she behaved perfectly normally, but it made no difference. As she later wrote, “The saner I acted, the crazier they thought I was.” Her articles, later compiled into her book *Ten Days in a Mad House*, revealed just how easy it had been to deceive the doctors and how terrible the conditions were inside the asylum.
Fast forward 85 years, and a clinical psychologist named David Rosenhan conducted a similar experiment.
[Music.]
The 1960s were a time of social and cultural revolution, with established ideas, institutions, and professions—like psychiatry—being questioned. By the 1970s, psychiatry was going through a turbulent period. Some psychiatrists, even in the 1960s, labeled themselves as “anti-psychiatrists.”
This movement challenged the medical model, which claimed mental illness was primarily a physical condition. Anti-psychiatrists suggested a different approach. Thomas Szasz argued that psychiatry was a pseudoscience, and the very idea of mental illness was a myth. Irving Goffman suggested that simply being in a mental hospital could drive people insane, while R.D. Laing claimed that what psychiatry labeled as mental illness was simply a rational response to an irrational world.
Their shared objection was horror at how psychiatry was being practiced at the time. People were often just incarcerated in large hospitals—often referred to pejoratively as “loony bins.” These places were likened to dustbins for unwanted people, and the conditions were horrible.
R.D. Laing became the most famous of the anti-psychiatrists. It was while listening to one of Laing’s lectures that David Rosenhan began wondering if there might be a way to test the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Could we really tell the sane from the insane?
One evening, Rosenhan called some friends and students, asking if they would participate in an experiment. His idea was to see if they could get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Surprisingly, seven people—three women and four men—agreed. One of them, Martin Seligman, now a world-famous psychologist, explained that Rosenhan could be very persuasive. It was a tough assignment.
For the pseudo-patients, entering these institutions was intimidating. The physical experience of the place—the smell, the atmosphere—was overwhelming. None of the pseudo-patients had any history of psychiatric disorder, yet they practiced their roles, including how to avoid swallowing the inevitable mass of tablets they would be given. They stopped shaving, showering, and brushing their teeth, and five days later, the experiment began.
This would become one of the most notorious experiments ever conducted in psychology, and psychiatry never fully recovered from it.
[Music.]
Rosenhan and his confederates traveled to 12 hospitals in five different states across the U.S. to obtain a representative sample. Some hospitals were old, some new. Some were understaffed, others well-staffed. After calling for appointments, the pseudo-patients presented themselves at the hospitals. They didn’t act crazy like Nellie Bly had; instead, they faked just one symptom.
When the pseudo-patients arrived at the hospital, they reported hearing a voice saying, “hollow, empty, thud.” This was significant because it didn’t represent any known symptom of a schizophrenic disorder. Rosenhan had given the doctors a unique opportunity to diagnose correctly. Apart from hearing the voice and giving false identification, everything else the pseudo-patients said was true, including significant life events.
Yet, all of them were diagnosed as insane and admitted to the hospital.
Once admitted, the pseudo-patients stopped faking the symptom and behaved normally, which inspired the study’s title: *Being Sane in Insane Places*. When asked by the staff how they were feeling, they said they were fine, the symptom had disappeared, and they requested to be released.
Rosenhan had two aims for the study. First, he wanted to investigate whether psychiatric labels were being used inappropriately. This part of the study was a field experiment with the independent variable being the pseudo-patients’ lack of symptoms once admitted, and the dependent variable being the staff’s responses.
The second aim was to gather data on what it was actually like to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Thus, the study also became a covert participant observation of the experience of being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.
So, what did Rosenhan and his confederates discover? How long would it take for the hospital staff to detect their sanity? What insights would they gain about life inside a psychiatric hospital? How different were mental hospitals in the 1970s from the madhouse of the 1890s that Nellie Bly described?
[Music.]
Despite choosing hospitals that weren’t particularly bad, and despite the pseudo-patients behaving normally throughout their stay, none of them were ever detected by any hospital staff. Even Rosenhan was surprised by this outcome.
He later admitted, “I told friends, I told my family, ‘I’ll get out when I can get out, probably in a couple of days.’ Nobody knew I’d be there for two months.”
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Transcript for Figure 6.19, Street Codes — Code of the Street, Elijah Anderson
[Music.]
Now we’re down to Broad Street in Germantown. As we get to the very bottom of the hill, we get into distressed neighborhoods—crime, alienation. The civil law in the minds of people becomes weaker and weaker. The code of the street becomes more and more prominent: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And where the civil law is weak, street justice often fills the void.
**Tell me your story.**
My story? Yeah, your story. The story of the young Black man in the urban environment. His perspective is often missing from any discussion. I grew up in a family of four. Like my brothers, they in and out of the streets and stuff like that. My mom was there as much as she could be. She worked, but she also had her habits—like drinking and stuff like that, which made it harder for the kids.
For you to be your age and me to be mine, I’ve probably seen a little more than you. Yeah, on a violent perspective. We met Mustafa on the street about three weeks ago. He’s a self-described entrepreneur, selling whatever he can to make money. As far as seeing people get shot, watching dead bodies lie on the ground, seeing friends of mine die off—it’s just killer be killed.
Now in the community, people divide themselves up into street and recent. Probably Mustafa, however he was raised, had access to the street. That experience created in him a deep sense of alienation. Anything can happen at any given time, but his dream is about decency.
**Decency.**
You only get cash two ways. I always tell folks, legal businesses—you own and operate your own business or work for someone—or illegal, where you do drug trades or steal or whatever. Those are the only two ways you make money in this country when you break it down. Drugs are everywhere, and guns are everywhere. It’s easy to get drugs. You go to any corner and get drugs, almost any corner. Things get bad, I stand on the corner of a block and sell drugs if I had to. It’s not something that, oh yeah, I’m proud of this, yeah, look at me, I do this. It’s just literally a way of life.
**What kind of money do they make?**
I mean, standing on the corner, if you’re doing it right, you can make like $1,500 a day.
**Manhood.**
If you’re a man and you feel no hope, or you sense no future, you become destroyed as a person. Then you don’t care what happens to you. If you don’t care what happens to you, you certainly don’t care about people around you.
**I respect you.**
You get enough, enough. You have to be respectful. You’ve got to be respectful. You have to be—no, you have to be respectful. Street credibility is essential, and street credit is high maintenance.
In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s in the city of Philly, we had gang killings. This violence now is on a whole other level. Most of the homicides in the city for the last 10 years or so have been argument-related. Guys are frustrated.
**What are the fights about?**
Most of the fights in Philly are about nothing. About nothing. About nothing. Stuff like me and you talking now, we disagree, and you can look at somebody’s girl wrong, and it escalates. It escalates. And you’re packing, and I’m packing. Right, somebody’s going to get shot.
**A lot of people say that fighting is going out—fist fighting.**
Yeah, ain’t no fighting no more. Can’t nobody take an ass-whooping. Yeah, nobody wants to get beat up in front of people. People gain reputations for having the ability and the inclination to pay back, to seek revenge.
**How easy is it to get a gun?**
A phone call and a couple of dollars. A couple of dollars is all you need. You got the little green dead people on a piece of paper, and you can get whatever you want. So, I ain’t going to fight. I’m just going to shoot.
The code of the street is a peculiar form of social exchange that allows for a certain order in the community. It’s even something of a self-policing mechanism, one might say. It’s not pretty, but this is one of the ways the community functions. You see, if you’re walking across a cop car, you’re walking across the street—get the fuck out the street.
**Not a lot of respect for the police in the community?**
No. If somebody broke into my house, I would go grab a gun and start shooting before I called the police. The code of the street is that you don’t call the police because you protect yourself. They don’t trust the police, they don’t trust the system, because maybe they had an experience where they did the right thing, and it didn’t work out the way they expected.
The police don’t respond to gun calls—it takes them five hours to get there for that. But you tell them somebody’s on the corner selling a bag of weed, here they come, 50 cars deep. But tell them someone’s lying there dying, it takes the cops four hours to get there. This guy’s been shot four times, he’s laying on the ground.
**Is he breathing?**
Why are you asking me questions? Didn’t I just say the man’s been shot four times? Why not rush and find out if he’s breathing?
It’s the wrong mindset. We all know that. But how do you get into the mind of a juvenile or a young adult to tell them to do the right thing?
**Would it be different in a white neighborhood?**
Of course, it would. Of course. You get an automatic response. Automatic response.
As we move up the class system, as we see people who are less alienated, the code of the street is not so prevalent. The civil law comes into play. One of the things the street has taught me in the last four or five years is that a lot of young folks really don’t want to be doing this crazy stuff they’re doing—they just don’t have someone showing them how to do something different. So, you become a creature of your environment because you’ve got to survive.
I can’t keep talking about wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. I can’t say I’m going to own a car dealership if I don’t get some money. Ain’t no money going to come in. If you’ve got to kill somebody to survive, if you’ve got to rob somebody—and it’s surviving right now—it’s hard.
And I think this really gets right at America’s racial divide.
[Music.]
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Transcript for Figure 7.9, DUI Probationer Participates in Restorative Justice Mediation Program
[Jonathan Rasmussen]: My name is Jonathan Rasmussen. I’m a music student here at Southwestern College. Music has always been important to me. It can convey feelings and expression and emotion.
Music has definitely been an outlet for me to help with the feelings and what I’ve been dealing with from the accident as well too, for sure.
The morning of the accident, I had gotten off of a graveyard shift. I went to get a burrito, had a couple drinks, couple beers with it and I was, I was going back home – driving back home – about a 5 minute drive back to my house.
[Donna Schneider]: We were hit from behind from a high rate of speed with someone that had double the alcohol limit.
[Jonathan]: They moved over into my lane and being impaired I just didn’t have the reaction to be quick enough.
[Carl Schneider]: The bouncing way up in the air and down again then over the median and facing the other direction.
[Donna]: The car was crushed. The back seat had less than 5 inches left in it.
[Jonathan]: I got out of the car. I made sure they were okay until the ambulance and the cops came.
[Carl]: The window was down and he reached in and took my hand and asked my name.
[Donna]: And we just thought this was a really nice young man so when the police officer that came the next Sunday was asked about it she just looked at me and she said that’s the one that hit you.
[Carl]: We were both recovering mentally, I guess, as well as emotionally.
[Donna]: Well he had Physical Therapy up through May, eight of them. I had a lot of emotional problems. I just couldn’t be in a car, it was so hard.
[Jonathan]: It was very surreal. It just didn’t feel like it was happening. It is such a big thing – I’d never seen myself or foreseen myself in that kind of situation before you know but had my life had just led me to be making that bad decision and I’m going to jail.
[Donna]: Well, from the beginning we felt very sad. From the very beginning, that this was a 23 year old and we thought we just hated to see him giving up his life.
[Jonathan]: They didn’t know who I was. For all they knew I was some reckless young man who didn’t care about their feelings, didn’t really care for them.
[Donna]: We could give forgiveness but we didn’t know we really were puzzled. Is this some guy that drinks and doesn’t care? Or is this somebody that has any feelings – did he even care that he hit us?
[Jonathan]: I wanted them to know – to put a face, first of all, to the person that hit them – and for an opportunity to be able to apologize to them and let them know how I feel.
[Music.]
[Mary Acosta, Restorative Justice Mediation Program]: Our primary program is victim offender dialogue which involves face-to-face meeting between the person who committed the harm or the offender and the person that was harmed the victim, for a conversation about what happened, how it impacted them, and how together they can move forward in some way.
[Jonathan]: The most impacting thing that came from the dialogue was the healing that came from it. I mean the first thing I did when I went in there and saw him I gave them all a hug, said I’m sorry you know for everything and it’s almost like they wanted that so badly, cuz they, they both came in tears.
[Donna]: Jonathan walked in and walked right over to hug me and said he was so glad that we were all right and went right to Carl to hug him so the feeling immediately was very grateful for what we were going to have ahead of us.
[Carl]: We were not antagonists but we felt as though we were now meeting on mutual ground and we could share some feelings of his as well as ours and feel as though we wanted to mend the situation better.
[Jonathan]: Being able to talk it out so I could actually know what happened to them. I wasn’t really aware of everything that fully happened to them and how it fully affected them.
[Donna]: His whole position was one of sorrow. He didn’t ever ask for any pity or anything; he told us about his part of it, what had been happening to him.
[Jonathan]: They all forgave me and that was huge to me cuz then at that point I could forget myself.
[Donna]: And there’s no way that this could have happened without this program. It’s something that I would recommend for anyone.
[Acosta]: The ultimate goal is to not recidivate to not, you know, do the crime again to learn the lesson.
[Jonathan]: The hurt that I felt from that and the hurt that I’ve caused has now been able to be healed and forgiven through this program.
[Donna]: The biggest thing to us was when he said that he and his girlfriend have vowed never to touch alcohol again and we were just so grateful to think that this man – he said he wants to make something of himself and we just dearly love him, we feel like he’s going to be a good citizen, he’s going to make a good life for himself and we support him in that.
[Jonathan]: With the accident and everything it’s helping me to be more of a standup
person and example to others around me and what I ultimately hope to do with all that is to give back and help people find their purpose in life and get back on the right track in their lives.
Licenses and Attributions for Transcript for Figure 7.9, DUI Probationer Participates in Restorative Justice Mediation Program
Transcript for “DUI Probationer Participates in Restorative Justice Mediation Program” by countysandiego is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 9.7, Environmental Racism
[Narrator]: Many times when we think of racism we tend to think of direct actions of people of a dominant group towards a subordinate group. These actions tend to cause physical, mental, and emotional harm, but perhaps one of the most subtle forms of racism is environmental racism.
Environmental racism is the way in which minority groups are burdened with a disproportionate number of hazards, including toxic waste facilities, garbage dumps, and other sources of environmental pollution. This type of racism is quietly practiced through the passing of bills and laws that allow companies such as coal plants, landfills, and toxic waste facilities to be built in places that are disproportionately in areas where low income and people of color live. These facilities fill the air with harmful contaminants and lead to health issues.
But what does this really look like? Environmental racism can be seen in people drinking contaminated groundwater, children playing on school playgrounds next to a plant producing toxic emissions, people being exposed to asbestos and lead in older homes, and schools or corporations attempting to build nuclear waste dumps on protective native lands because those lands are not protected by tough state environmental regulations. Coal power plants are some of the worst offenders, and according to a recent NAACP report, 39% of people that live within 3 miles of a coal power plant are people of color. And those coal plants that are in urban areas are
overwhelmingly placed in communities of color worldwide.
The dumping of toxic waste in developing countries is prevalent due to lower environmental standards in developing countries, the power of multinational corporations, the lack of power in developing countries, and putting corporate profit before people.
E-waste or the dumping of discarded and used electronics is causing a global concern too. Twenty to 50 million tons of e-w are generated each year globally and approximately 80% of
e-waste is exported to Asia each year. The Environmental Protection Agency or EPA estimates that only 15 to 20% of E-waste is recycled yearly.
Examples of health issues related to environmental racism include asthma and respiratory illnesses, lead poisoning, and higher rates of lung cancer for those living within close proximity to coal producing plants. The highest rate of asthma tend to be in low socioeconomic communities and communities of color. Asthma results from exposure to air pollution, cigarette
smoke, dust, and pesticides, according to the Center for Disease Control or CDC. Asthma is most prevalent among multi-racial populations at 14.8% Puerto Rican Hispanics, 14.2% non-asian blacks, 9.5% while asthma rates among non-hispanic whites is at 7.8%. When it comes to exposure to air pollution that can contribute to asthma and other respiratory illnesses, the CDC found that racial and ethnic minority groups who tend to live in urban areas experience greater disparity and illness. Toxic facilities tend to be built in environments that have little resources and political power to protect their communities. The Environmental Protection
Agency is meant to help protect the environment and people from the harmful effects of facilities but has proven to be unresponsive. According to the Center for Public Integrity, more than nine of every 10 times that communities have turned to it for help, the EPA has either rejected or dismissed their title VI complaints. Title VI is part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that states public
funds cannot be used to encourage discrimination. In the EPA’s 22-year history of processing almost 300 environmental discrimination complaints, the office has never once made a formal finding of a title VI violation and 95% of the time communities of color that live in communities with polluting facilities have their filed claims of civil rights violations denied by the Environmental Protection Agency.
This is a complicated picture and our dependence on energy production and electronics makes it difficult to walk away from but that shouldn’t mean that disproportionate numbers of lower socioeconomic groups and people of color should have to pay the higher price. So what other examples of environmental racism can you think of that impact you or your community? What
is a long-term impact on society when groups of people continue to experience environmental racism and how does our current lifestyle contribute to environmental racism? Is change possible?
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Transcript for “Environmental Racism” by Sociology Live! is included under fair use.
