Magical Motivations!

So while examining the magic cable case in class. It dawned on me that a lot of different methods could be used to evaluate one situation in terms of motivation. This is an average garden variety issue for people job hopping and being able to identify and analyze their motivations is key to understanding what drives them. I really liked this exercise because it showed me motivations that I would not have otherwise seen. In knowing these theories and the situations they can be applied to it can helpful within my own life as well. Taking the hertzbergs theory of motivation for a minute. Lets apply this to my college life and see what we get. Motivators for this theory inclde challenging work. Seeing as how I am double major I a definitely challenging myself to do the very best I can under such conditions. I have been participating in many clubs here at ship and that investment gives me a sense of responsibility, especially when I am elected to leadership positions within that organization. Some hygiene factors would be my status as a student, it is something that is basic when you are attending college. Another hygiene factor would be the level of work I am assigned. If I am assigned a low level of work I may become demotivated to do anything else or to do the assignments well. Using these theories within our own lives as evaluative tools can be crucial to seeing our motivations through objective eyes. I think this is something that I will use going forward for myself and others along the way.

Hedonism, In Theory

I'd like to take a moment and talk about the motivational theories that were discussed in class on Monday. Motivational theory I find to be interesting and applicable to the real world and thus it holds my interest. The first aspect of motivational theory we talked about really wasn't anything to complicated. That is the hedonism theory of motivation, which says that humans beings will always seek out what is pleasurable to them. In motivation this may be such a thing as a reward system that leads you to perform a certain task. The reward is the motivator and it drives the individual to feel he needs to complete the task at hand to achieve a state of well being. It seems that this first theory could be applied to almost anything in our lives. If we are forced to perform a task or job that we find unpleasant, or if the reward is not great enough we will reject it. I believe to a certain extent that hedonism is involved in all our decision making. It may take a back seat to some of the other aspects of motivation or decision making, but I believe that it is still their guiding our hand in our motivational behavior. I chose to talk about and explore hedonism because it was the theory least discussed in class. Understanding it better and how it functions in our lives may lead us to understand and make better decisions with or without it. I believe this is a important part of understanding what motivates us and how we can continue to have that motivation throughout our lives.

Good Job, Now Stop!

Our lecture on motivation I found interesting and that is why I am going to explore a certain article a little more in depth. 5 reasons to stop saying good job really gives me a good insight into motivation. We start off by examining none other than the parent child relationship. We see that praising a child for some tasks can be good, however praising a child all the time would can have the negative effect of manipulation. A praise may feel empty and not earned which will leave the child feeling a sense of frustration and confusion. The second reason discussed would be misleading a child's perception about how  they feel about a certain accomplishment. Parents may praise their children for legitimate reasons, but this may be minimizing how the child really feels about the achievement. Inadvertently we may be imprinting our own feelings on the children which may look more for outside feedback rather than relying on themselves. Building on this idea we are also telling a child how to feel. This can create more confusion in the child's mind that they may feel like they want to feel disappointed but then they are praised. This may even cause frustration, and it goes back to the parents abuse of praise for our convenience. Praise may also be to much of a factor in motivating children to perform a certain activity. Children are performing tasks for praise instead of their own sake or even to explore it. So it is harmful because the children miss the entire point of performing a specific activity. This may have consequences later on as a child raised this way may be more reward focused than driven by exploration and knowledge. This leads into the final point made by the article which was the falling of achievement by the child. Continued praise on everything from the parents may give the child a feeling of superiority and thus may leave the child feeling like he is good at everything when in fact he is not. The fact is that continued praising by the parents of children everywhere is something that should be toned down. This is the wrong way to motivate children and should not be continually used. I'm not saying never praise your children just be aware that to much praise can possibly have a harmful effect on them, and all parents never want to harm their children, so keep a mindful eye.

Book Report-Entry 5_Freakonomics

Parenting is a complicated issue that we all will eventually grapple with. In this portion of the book we will take a look at some aspects of parenting that may or may not be effective in influencing success in a child’s life. The first thing that the chapter looks at is risk. As parents we tend to assess risk for our children’s activities. Even the most mundane and everyday task is assessed in terms of risk and potential for harm. The example the book illustrates is a risk assessment of letting your child with a friend in a house with a gun versus playing at a house with a swimming pool. Parents tend to evaluate situations based not on statistics but on a magnitude of how horrifying a situation can become. Having a child, especially your child getting shot versus drowning will make you think of the most vivid outcome. In this case it is or would be the bullet wound from the gun. This is a fallacy that is explained away by statistics, and we see that childhood drowning’s a much more likely occurrence than getting shot with a gun. Parents tend to evaluate situations risk based on the worst possible outcome. We then take a look at another important aspect of parenting, and that is raising your child. Parents always want to raise the best possible child they can but the book raises the question of how much influence a parent actually has in the process of determining how successful their child will be. Various factors are explored such as socioeconomic status of parents, education of parents, and age of the mother when she had children and involvement in the PTA among other factors. Correlations can be strong with some of these factors but causality with child success is a little harder to find when evaluating these factors. It is found that only a few factors matter when raising a child to be successful and they are as follows: Child has educated parents, child’s parents have a high socioeconomic status, child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of the child’s birth, the child’s birth weight, the parents ability to speak English, whether or not the child is adopted, the parents involvement in the PTA, and finally whether the child has many books in the home. These factors were the traits that could be controlled for in determining a child’s success or not. Some are more symptoms than cause of a particular child’s success however they point in a direction that may hint at whether your child will succeed or not.

The last chapter in the book wraps up the parenting discussion by showcasing another aspect of parenting which is naming your child. We start off by looking at the naming gap between black and white families. African American children tend to have unique names compared to white children who have more mainstream names. Naming a child in this instance may be an indicator of parent education, class or any number of other factors that may contribute to a child’s success rate in life. We also tend to see varying names between blacks and whites as a culture gap. A more segregated neighborhood may be more inclined to name their children based on immediate cultural and social values. If those values are not mainstream or in this case “white” then of course they will be different. Ill-educated parents may also believe that naming their offspring something that may predict their success or describe it also contributes. This is seen not only in black communities in lower class neighborhoods but in lower class white neighborhoods as well. A wider naming convention is also at work according to the data gathered in the book. “Once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. (Freakonomics pg201)” This naming framework has been at play more years and it may even be able to predict future names of children. However, “an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be.(Freakonomics pg204)” This means that the naming of the child is something that doesn’t really matter in terms of the child’s success. A parent can only leave their mark and hint at how the child should be successful but they children over all will have to create their own successes.

Work Cited

Levitt D. Steven, Dubner J. Stephen. “Freakonomics”. 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2005, Print.

Book Report-Entry 4_Freakonomics

The fourth chapter within the book “Freakonomics” continues a little bit of what the book was talking about earlier. It starts off by giving us a little bit of background history about Romania during communist rule. The leader of the country at the time was Nicolae Ceausescu. He was a tyrannical leader that ruled his country through fear. One of the more interesting things he instated when he came to power was the banning of abortion, and all sex education and contraceptives. This would have far reaching consequences for him later on because it would cause the population to surge. When the Soviet bloc collapsed in 1989 the increased population came out to protest against him. Him and his family were eventually caught given a swift trial, and executed by firing squad. This will end up tying into the chapter later.

The chapter then takes a swift turn towards the American crime rate, and how it rose from the 1960’s up until the early 1990’s when it fell sharply. The book explains that several factors may be at work behind the lowering crime rate. These factors include: better economy, innovative police strategies, reliance on prisons, changes in drug markets, aging population, tougher gun laws, increased police forces, and other strategies such as death penalty and gun buybacks etc. So these factors were discussed by the book. It is explained that every single one of these factors had contributed in small ways to the drop in crime. These factors were explained to have correlation and effect on the decreasing crime rate. Although minimal at best and sometimes almost negligible the factors that have been proven to take the crime rate down.

While the aforementioned factors are somewhat relevant, the true culprit for what brought down the crime rate would surprise us. The legalization of abortion in the United States had a lot to do with the dropping crime rate in the early 1990’s. The book points to the Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu to find explanation of this phenomenon. According to the Romanian data, children that were born after the abortion ban were more likely to become criminals. This was due to the fact that the children were not raised with care and love. A mother who does not fully love her child may neglect it physically and emotionally. This leaves the child more susceptible to becoming a criminal in society later on. The same could be applied to the legalization of abortion in the United States.

Since abortion has been legalized, the females who have felt that their children would not receive the love and attention from them have gotten abortions. “Two factors in particular, childhood poverty and a single parent household are among the strongest predictors a child will have a criminal future.(Freakonomics,pg138).” After examining the major contributor of the crime rate drop of the early 1990’s we visit the possibly uncomfortable act of trying to place on a fetus. The book starts off by using the value system put in place for body parts in dangerous jobs. It outlines which body parts are most likely more useful and hence more valued. In the case of the fetus the book uses an objective third party view point in which the individual agrees with neither side. “This individual does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. (Freakonomics,pg144).” He assigns a value of 100 fetuses to 1 newborn child, this value is arbitrary within the context of the book but it illustrates the point that using abortion to control the crime rate in inefficient, because it creates more “murders” than it can stop. This value is completely arbitrary as I said before and may not reflect the majority of viewpoints on what value a fetus versus a newborn child has. One thing has been proven though by legalizing abortion, which is the confidence of the mother to assess what life their child would have based on the resources of the mother at hand.

Work Cited

Levitt D. Steven, Dubner J. Stephen. “Freakonomics”. 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2005, Print.

Nacirema, the tribe of teeth!

The Nacirema article was a very interesting read, and I would very much like to take the time to explore it. I believe the article is interesting because it takes the time to explore things from a third person perspective, or more accurately an anthropological perspective. The article specifically talks about everyday "rituals" which we go through to prepare for the day. Now I'd like to take a moment and put these rituals in perspective. To someone who is not familiar with these, it may seem like a strange process to go through each morning. The way we treat our body or objects may seem mundane but repetitive action or process show that we actually care about ourselves and the way we look quite a lot. We have become desensitized in a way from what we do everyday. Being able to deduce what values a culture holds just from studying what they do everyday is valuable  It may even tell us more about ourselves and society than we ever could. By providing a third party window from which to view ourselves we have an unobstructed view of our activity and how we go about life. Dissecting a culture like this as I said before gives valuable insight into what the people if such a culture value and how the behave. Interaction with each other is another interesting insight that is gleamed by viewing a culture from this perspective. It can tell us what in socially acceptable and at the same time tells us what is rewarding and punishable. Anthropological views are important and I would like to see more examinations of this sort on different cultural and geographic locations to examine them further.

Cultural, Layer Cake

The cultural layering that was talked about today in class I found to be exceptionally interesting. So I am here to discuss this topic further. Cultural layering seems as though it can give valuable insight into the way a cultural interacts and thinks within the context of itself. More specifically if we look at certain symbols within a culture it may have references that may be seen differently. The main example of this used in class was a bumper sticker flag on the back of an automobile. Lets take a look at a different context and this time lets use color. In Asian culture the color white is known to signify death. However in more western cultures more often than not white is a color of purity and is often used in many wedding ceremonies. This cultural meaning isn't complete esoteric and maybe understood by some people. So let us take a look at yet another cultural symbol, the swastika. Now immediately I know that the third Reich comes to mind and Germany in the midst of WW2, Hitler and his persecution of the Jews, etc. But what if you saw this symbol in a far away isolated Asian village high in the mountains of the Himalayas. Oh they must be Nazi's right? wrong. They are in fact using the swastika in the proper use. Yes it can be used properly, because it was used before as a symbol of peace and balance within, Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. One may not have known what the symbol meant without the benefits of cultural immersion before hand. This is why it is important to take note of differences however slight within different cultures. In a more pragmatic context such as a business transactions internationally it  helps to know the social norms and intricacies of the cultural your dealing with. Shooting down your own multi-million dollar business deal with a simple hand gesture that YOU consider non-offensive, may get you fired, or at the very least reprimanded. Even managing a global team of employees has practical applications when exploring the layers of a culture. It really is important and has far reaching consequences whether they be good or bad is up to you.