The Power Of The Situation

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Term Paper Title	The Power Of The Situation
# of Words	1487
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.95

The Power of the Situation

The Power of the Situation

     A week of urban mayhem was ignited by the April 29, 1992 jury acquittal
of four white police officers who were captured on videotape beating black
motorist Rodney King.  The angry response in South Central produced its own
brutal footage, most dramatically the live      broadcast from a hovering TV
news helicopter of two black men striking unconscious with a brick, kicking, and
then dancing over the body of, white truck driver Reginald Denny.  The final
three-day toll of what many community activists took to defiantly calling an
uprising, revolt, or rebellion, was put at 53 dead, some $1 billion in property
damage, nearly 2,000 arrests, and countless businesses in ashes.  These two men,
Damian Williams and Henry Watson undoubtedly committed a heinous crime, but
thousands more looted, burned, and destroyed property with the same disregard
for life and property.  Were all these people criminals who used the verdicts as
an excuse to commit crimes, or was the nature of the social situation the
primarydeterminant of this nefarious behavior?  In the course of this paper, I
plan to explore this question from a psychological perspective with an emphasize
on conformity and social norms, bystander intervention, social perception and
reality, and finally, prejudice.  Generally looking at the Los Angeles riots,
and specifically drawing upon the Reginald Denny beating and subsequent trial,
the power of the situation becomes evident, as thousands of people living in an
extremely poor and crime-ridden area of Los Angeles, lashed out against a
perception of injustice through violence.
     The conditions that lead people to perceive themselves as victims of
unjust actions are rather complex.  In this case, the favorable verdicts towards
the officers who beat Rodney King was the "unjust action", not only for Rodney
King, but for the community he came from.  The perceived damage to desired
social identities and justice led to resentment on the part of a historically
poor and underprivileged class of citizens.  The individual attempts to explain
the event (the verdicts) by processes of attribution in which grievance may or
may not be formed. (DeRidder, Schruijer, and Tripathi, 1992).  The attribution
of responsibility and blame is activated when confronted with unexpected
behavior, unwanted consequences, or stressful, puzzling, and important events
(Wong & Weiner, 1981).  Thus the attribution process may be activated eith...

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