Assignment Takeaway

ATA5

I had a lot of fun with assignment 5. In this assignment we did 1 good thing every day for 5 days. Because this is something that try to do, it wasn’t hard for me to complete. Something that was different than the usual was having to write about it. I normally just do whatever it is, feel good about doing it, and then go on with the rest of my day. I really liked writing about it step by step what I did and people’s reactions. And even though I wasn’t thanks every time, being able to just write it and read it felt good. I may start journaling my nice things.

Something that this idea reminds me of is the act of paying it forward. I am a firm believer that happiness and good have a domino effect. I see something that needs to be done, someone that needs help, or something that I can have a positive influence on, and I just do it. Imagine if the whole world was this way. People just do nice things because they want to be nice, not because they want something in return, but because they want you to pay it forward. This particular assignment is relevant to me currently because for lent, I chose to have a more positive outlook. Since I was writing things down for a week I was able to keep track of my positivity.

ATA4

In assignment 4, I learned about love styles and the way we express ourselves to our significant other. We examined, to an extent, personalities when it comes to a romantic relationship with another person. We also compared our results to that of other females or males. We used a questionnaire that ranked us by our scores in the different levels.

I learned a lot about myself in this assignment and my results were conclusive to what I would have picked for myself. I feel that these qualities go hand in hand with our personalities. I think that very strong traits reveal themselves in the way that we express our love for people and the way we treat others that we care about. I have a very strong and deep relationship with my fiance and the results showed that. I grew up secure and independent which play a large role in how I am able to love. People who are less confident in their relationships may have a past where their relationships were not as secure. This assignment is probably my favorite this far and I found it very informative.

ATA3

For assignment 3, we examined the thoughts versus the behavior of two men who had outbursts and turned it into a racial outburst. In this module I learned about prejudice behaviors and how they show themselves through different behaviors and relationships. Through the assignment, I learned that prejudice thoughts and ideas have an influence on behaviors based on situations such as the conflict between Richards and his heckling audience member.

In this paper and in the module I also learned that there are a lot of factors that can remove this bias such as growing up in a population that is diverse in nature. If I had to make an inference on Richards without the use of the internet, just by his conflict. I would think that maybe he grew up in a less diverse community. And, maybe the people who grew up around reinforced this behavior. Personally, I grew up in a very diverse community and then went to a predominantly white university. There were multiple times where I saw discrimination of others and I was very uncomfortable at the school. I then transferred to ODU where I definitely feel more comfortable. I believe this had a lot to do with my upbringing as well. Overall, I felt that I knew a little about this topic but I do believe that I learned a substantial amount as well.

ATA1

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In the chapter, we discussed heuristics and how they play rolls in our lives. Before this chapter, I had no idea that there was almost a system in place that helps us make our decisions based on past experiences, inferencing, and essentially guessing. I chose this image because I learned that without heuristics, we would have to debate on every choice and action we had to make. This image shows the use of heuristics in our daily life with the yellow arrow, versus our lives without the use of heuristics with the black arrow. Now that I understand what they are, I understand that my fear of the ocean is a heuristic. I have never been attacked by a shark or taken off by a riptide. I have also never been on a sinking ship or almost drowned in the ocean. However, I did watch animal planet growing up, I do see the shark attacks on the news, and I did have a. father in the Navy who has seen and told me stories and I believe this is how my heuristic is formed.

            In the assignment we discussed heuristics used in media and their application to terrorism. Now that I know about heuristics, it makes sense, in some way, the fear that people have due to the presentation of terrorists and their relation to countries that other innocent people are from. Something else I learned was that a specific event doesn’t have to happen to you for you to form a heuristic. For example, you may have never come face to face with a terrorist, but because your country was attacked and it was all over the news, you may form a heuristic about terrorists and innocent people from the same country.