Post #3 : Perspective of Social Science on "what makes humans bad?"

How social science is helpful to my understanding of the theme “what makes humans bad?” compared to the humanities?

    Contrast to the humanities, the social sciences provided a systematic and scientific approach to understand the theme with different academic disciplines such as anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, and so forth. As the discussion facilitators introduced the articles from social scientists, the class discussions became more analytical and exposed to the precise data which helped the class to inquire about the theme in the ways of social science. When the humanitarians approached the theme with individual’s thoughts and their own reasoning, psychologists and sociologists from the journals and articles discussed in the class observed the societal events and gathered precise data of social phenomena to predict the patterns of human behaviors.

    I had a mere true belief that some humans are just good like Mother Teresa. However, I found that few social scientists found that humans can be vulnerable to do “bad” things when they are exposed to the violence. This finding triggered me to ask a question: “if Mother Teresa had exposed to the violence during her childhood, would she still have the same empathy towards people in poverty?”

   From the data from the journal “Parental Characteristics Associated with Bullying Perpetration in US children Aged 10 to 17 years” suggested that young Mother Teresa would likely to be affected by the violence and the anger from her parents even though she was Mother Teresa.

   Roshmi Stegiri, Hua Lin, Rosa M. Avila, and Glenn Flores wrote the journal “Parental Characteristics Associated with Bullying Perpetration in US Children Aged 10 to17 years” and their findings suggested that the parental-child relationships can influence the child’s bullying perpetration in the school. Using the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, they surveyed 91,642 parents through phone calls and asked them questions to measure the correlation between the parental characteristics and the odds of child bullying. Parents were asked the question: “How often was this true for [child] during the past month: [He/she] bullies or is cruel or mean to others”; they had following options to choose: never, rarely, sometimes, usually, or always.

   The results were that “parents of non-bullies were more likely than parents of bullies to cope very or somewhat well with the demands of parenthood.” As a contrast to the parents of non-bullies, parents of bullies “who were frequently angry with their child and felt that their child bothered them a lot had more than double the odds of bullying perpetration.”  
This finding revealed that the child may have tendency to “model aggressive responses learned from the parents.” I had believed that Hitler could have not killed thousands of people if their parents had taught him to have the empathy towards others. This study supported in some degree that the child may copy the parents violence and their anger and express their anger to others.

                                                                                  Work Cited

Rashmi Shetgiri, Hua Lin, Rosa M. Avila, and Glenn Flores.  Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetration in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years. American Journal of Public Health: December 2012, Vol. 102, No. 12, pp. 2280-2286.