Throughout this semester, we have come to be extremely mindful of different cultures and demographics. Many of us notice a plethora of various restaurants, people and activities around us, having a better sense of how they originated. Personally, I am extremely interested in social interaction in particular. I am intrigued by the show, “What Would You Do?” and believe that doing a similar IDC project as a class would be interesting.
I think that we should come up with different scenarios and see which cultures or which neighborhoods give the best social response. For instance, we could set up certain scenarios and see how many strangers interfere to say something about the peculiar situation we present. We could film these events from a distance to display in class. We can then write down where this event took place, who got involved and later compile these statistics. Perhaps we will be able to find that a certain ethnic group was more likely to say something about an event that was out of the ordinary. Additionally, maybe we will find that a certain gender or certain type of person tends to get involved more often, say someone who is into religion or someone who is a legal resident. Later on, we can try to find the results that people obtained when doing similar studies and see how our results compare to theirs through different charts, graphs and videos. Overall, I think this would be a very interesting project because I am always curious to find out who will actually speak up in a strange situation, and who will fall victim to the bystander effect.
Reading all of the sources that we have looked at this semester was helpful for us because it introduced us to different peoples’ cultural values and views. For instance, we learned that many Asian people went into the laundromat business because they found it hard to get jobs working for others. Thus, they decided to work for themselves. In this way, it becomes easier to understand why certain cultures are more close knit and reliant on their families, since society in America didn’t fully accept them at the time. Similarly, Polish people had a tendency to go into construction, while many pharmacies tend to be owned by people from Soviet countries. I think all of this knowledge would be interesting to apply in various neighborhoods and in different social situations. We can dissect the data we collect and come to conclusions about which groups of people are most responsive in which situations and in which neighborhoods this happens. In turn, we can then form conclusions of our own based on what we have already learned throughout the semester in IDC. Thus, I feel like this would be a very fun, interesting project for us to do, and hope that my classmates enjoy the idea of blending social psychology with immigration history as well.
As a second proposal, perhaps we could explore what kinds of people tend to gather in different kinds of places such as parks, coffee shops restaurants, etc. That would also be a very intriguing social project, but take a different perspective on the topic of demographics.
-Mariana G.
