Artifact 1

For Module 4 we had to watch a video of news coverages, take screenshots, and write about how the news and media play a major role in representing and availability heuristics. The first part of the video I saw was the segment about kids getting kidnapped and murdered. Of course, this being a serious and important topic parents would of course want to find a way to protect their kids. However, seeing the news and these reports did create a distorted perception in their heads on how to protect their kids. The video shows that parents were putting identification numbers on the teeth of their children in the case they were kidnapped or murdered. With this, you are putting more fear into the children because you telling them we need to put this in your teeth in case you are found dead. It is better to just tell your children to be careful when they are around strangers.

The second part of the video showed that schools in New York were getting shut down due to asbestos. Parents were going to meetings to discuss the solutions to asbestos in order to keep their children safe. Asbestos is a type of mold that affects and tears the lungs but the asbestos at school was a different type and was not harmful at all. The video said the children were more in danger playing in the streets than going to school. Experts say no scene in shutting down schools but parents were still superstitious because of the media and what they heard. Even a parent told their child that if they scratched the walls then the asbestos would go into their lungs and kill them. I screenshotted a kid getting his identification into his teeth and a letter in front of the school saying that they are closed.

Artifact 2

Module 8 had us taking a survey on Stereotyping, Prejudice, & Discrimination. Here we had two adjectives that best describe the groups that were given. I believe that stereotypes have changed over time. However, people still use horrible stereotypes of back then even if they don’t make any sense today. Although stereotypes have changed over the years they have most of it has not changed for the better. Stereotypes of other races such as black people are still negative and used to degrade the race involved. An example of a positive stereotype is that all black people are athletic and good at sports.

This module really just opened my eyes to stereotyping and how it hasn’t changed much. Still, people use them to identify an entire race. Also, try to use them to insult those people and degrade them as a person. Also forcing younger kids of these races to fit those molds of those stereotypes because they believe that is what they are. It’s important the know that each person is their own individual and we can’t categorize them because of an experience with someone else. The image below is my results of the survey of module 8.

Artifact 3

For this artifact, I decided to do the Subjective Happiness Scale where we had to scale our happiness on the questions that they provided for us. For my results, I got the average amount of happiness that person my age would have. However, in the survey, they explain how the average happiness goes up once the person is out of college. The way that I see happiness is that it is subjective meaning that it’s different for everybody. Something that may seem to bring happiness to one person may not bring happiness to another person. Also don’t believe that surveys like this could truly capture how happy a person can be. The reason for that is that not everybody is happy all the time and just but that doesn’t mean that they are sad all the time too. A person could take this survey and fill it out based on the emotions they feel at that moment but that could quickly change.

I enjoyed this artifact because it really opened my mind to what happiness is and what it could mean for a person. Also just like many of the other assignments for this course it helped me better understand myself. It expanded my way of think by really making me wonder how we can tell if a person is truly generally happy or if they are putting on a mask to hide their true happiness. Also understanding that it’s okay not to be happy all the time but it’s not ok to hold all that sadness in and not talk to someone. Below are my results of the Subjective Happiness Scale