Robert Knapp has come up with some ways to identify different types of rumors in his writing called A Psychology of Rumor. Knapp says, “In practice it has been found that the emotional needs most frequently served by rumors are wish, fear, and hostility” (496). Knapp uses the name Pipe-dream and Wish Rumor to describe the rumors that contain wishful thinking. He also uses the name Bogie Rumor when describing a rumor that comes from the fear and anxiety of the people. Knapp lastly uses The Wedge-driving Aggression Rumor when describing a rumor that is made out of aggression or hatred. One of these names will be chosen to categorize the reading called Paul is Dead by Alan Glen. The name that will categorize the rumor is the Bogie Rumor. In
In Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” Milgram explains his own study on the effects authority has on levels of obedience. Milgram designed the experiment in order to recognize the subjects as “teachers,” and actors as “learners,” with another actor posing as an "experimenter.” (Milgram 78). Milgram required the teacher to read a list of word pairs to a learner and to test their remembrance afterward (78). As Milgram explains in his essay, each time the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is required by the experimenter to flip a switch on an electric shock generator. The author illustrates that the experimenter implies that the teacher is electrically shocking the learner; however, no shocks are actually inflicted. Diana Baumrind
Perhaps some of the best stories told are classified as urban legends. Urban legends have become a part of culture, and a way to tell stories. They can tell us things about ourselves and about how we lead our lives. They serve to entertain us, but can also teach us lessons, such as morals to live by. Urban legends are passed on between generations, and become a part of the oral history of a place. Whether the stories are true or not, urban legends are often taken to hold at least some truth about a culture. No matter how radical some of the stories may be, people often take the urban legends to be true. People may take these stories to be true simply for entertainment purposes, but mostly because the morals the stories teach are important. Urban legends can become a part of the place where they originate, and can help define a culture, and shape its history.
Judith Viorst is an American journalist. Her essay “The Truth about Lying”, printed in Buscemi and Smith’s 75 Readings: An Anthology. In this essay, Viorst examines social, protective, peace-keeping and trust-keeping lies but doesn’t include lies of influence.
Do we control the judgments and decisions that we make every day? In the book,
The existence of the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw has always been in debate. Instead of directly discussing whether the ghosts are real or not, this essay will focus on the reliability of the governess, the narrator of the story. After making a close examination of her state of mind while she is at Bly, readers of The Turn of the Screw will have many more clues to ponder again and to decide to what extent the governess can be believed. While critics like Heilman argue that there are problems with the interpretation that the governess was psychopathic, textual evidence incorporated with scientific research show that the governess did go through a period of psychical disorder that caused her insomnia, out of which she created hallucinations.
In life, many people strive to find a person that is reliable and to separate the people that are unreliable. Unreliable can be defined as an adjective meaning not dependable. Having read through the short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King, it is reasonable to conclude that each of these stories has its own unreliable narrator. The most unreliable narrator, however, is the narrator/killer Springheel Jack from “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King due to the narrator’s cognition problems and the violent nature of the murders.
Down the street, in our workplaces, seemingly under our beds- Harvard Medical Professor Martha Stout’s Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. The Rest of Us sends the reader into a state of frightful paranoia when she mentions that a staggering 1 in 25, 4%, persons is, in fact, a sociopath. A sociopath, as Stout asserts, is a person with the lack of a conscience, thus a person not concerned with the suffering of others, to worry only about itself. She goes on to tell us that, because the rate of sociopaths in our society is so high, we must have already met hundreds without knowing it, due to the elusive and enigmatic nature of this psychological disease.
The Insider, an award winning film directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, tells a story about a "whistle blower" that works for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson (B&H) teaming up with a CBS 60 Minutes producer/journalist. Working together they bring to light the fraud and health risks that the Tobacco industry knowingly commits on the general public. Based on a true story, Jeffrey Wigand, a senior scientist originally employed at B&H (played by Russell Crowe), and Lowell Bergman, a respected CBS 60 Minutes producer (played by Al Pacino), take on enormous personal and professional risks fighting their respective corporate employers to bring the truth to the world. Having worked for B&W as Head of Research and Development and as a corporate vice president, Wigand has the key information to bring down the company, and being an esteemed producer of CBS 60 Minutes, Bergman possesses the ability to inform the public of Wigand’s knowledge. However, the journey to reveal the truth is not so easy, as the two men are set against CBS corporate’s unwillingness to air the story and B&W’s ironclad confidentiality
Is there anything that you’re hiding that you’re even afraid to tell your best friend? Just walking in the halls and not knowing who you can talk to about your situation due to the pressures from society that may restrict you from acting the way you want or do what pleases you in order to meet social standards of status, success, gender roles, etc. It can cause us to lie in order to meet society's expectations and feel dignified or proud in society. Sometimes society tries to influence so much that we rebel against it, and do what isn’t “normal” anymore.
is now seeing that she is being followed by men who work for Fenston finance and she is
Richard Gunderman asks the question, "Isn 't there something inherently wrong with lying, and “in his article” Is Lying Bad for Us?" Similarly, Stephanie Ericsson states, "Sure I lie, but it doesn 't hurt anything. Or does it?" in her essay, "The Ways We Lie.” Both Gunderman and Ericsson hold strong opinions in regards to lying and they appeal to their audience by incorporating personal experiences as well as references to answer the questions that so many long to confirm.
Urban legends are the supernatural folklore of our modern society. From one generation to the next, they orally travel throughout the world, constantly changing from one region to the next. Although cultural variations exist, the core of all these urban legends remains the same, to unveil the universally known individual and societal fears. “The Graveyard Wager” is a timeless urban legend told again and again, and the one of which I will explore more in depth.
Lies and Mendacity run rampant in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. They help keep the play going and keep it interesting. The play shows us the lies that people tell themselves and other instead of the truth that is hard to accept but must be said.
What role does gossip have in society? What significance does it have in the formation of both disputes and disclosures? Gossip is commonly believed to be a cause of conflict between individuals in society; however, one can assert that it can also be beneficial via means of influence. In being influenced, people can harness the gossip for their benefit. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility approaches gossip in a way that shows how it can both resolve and initiate conflicts within the novel’s plot. By exemplifying gossip from this approach, Austen’s novel encapsulates it’s both detrimental and beneficial uses. Gossip exacerbates emerging conflicts because of the both positive or negative influences it has on characters’ perceptions of each other. I will argue that the novel uses conflict-causing and conflict-resolving properties of gossip as a device for moving and turning the plot, demonstrating that to understand the novel, we have to also understand that social conversations, even the most idle and frivolous ones, are what push the plot; the things that are most important in Austen’s world — reputation, marriage, social relationships — are extremely vulnerable to influence by gossip. In this essay, I will analyze three moments of gossip that exemplify consequences of conflict-causing, conflict-resolving, and both, respectively.
We live in a world full of suspicions. We constantly make accusation in our mind, and judge. That is how our world has become. We someone tells us that there is a spy or saboteur among us we immediately take any mistakes and dislike to a person and blame them. We take our dislikes to a person and spread the thought to other people that the saboteur is this person.