In todays society numbers became really important because it is an element that is essential in our life, starting from the money that we use to buy our daily needs to knowing how to count. Whenever humans encounter numbers in magazines they tend to believein them. Any quantitative instrument is believed in todays society because it is known that most of the quantitative instruments that are available are very precise. Precision is what humans are looking for because the more precise the values are of a research the more close the conclusion is close to reality.
There are important factors to consider though. People tend to believe in graphs and in statistics immediately, one because they cannot prove them wrong, second because they are quantitative values that can be proven true. Statistics and graphs should be considered more important than just how they were inserted in a magazine, the reader should think about how, where, and on what or who the data was collected. A statistic may vary from person to person, animal to animal, from group to group,from sample to sample, from location to location, but also from the method of collecting the data. It is important to know all this background information about the graphs or statistics because the collection of data might not be reliable.
Not all the people think about the numbers that are being given to them during the day. And this is dangerous because there could be manipulation of information and also people might think wrong about the world they live in. It became almost in human nature to believe in science, people started to give science a reputation of giving the truth to life without considering that science may be wrong. In todays society numbers are relevant in any way especially for economy, if the value of the money increases then the country is gaining more money and this is good signs for the income of families. Numbers make the world spin, this is why numbers are studied since early years.
For example and experiment of psicology that was done by Philip Zimbardo and his co-workers to see the roots of the root of aggressive behaviour in jails. The experiment was done on a chosen group of guards and group of prisoners. A new jail was built in order to monitor any movement and behaviour of the two groups. The conclusions and results of the experiment were that the guards took advantage of their power and therefore became aggressive towards the prisoners, the experiment had to be stoped because the situation went out of control. The results have to be anlysed in different ways: one of them is that the people could not behave naturally because they knew they were part of an experiment, another way could be that the location of the exepriment was not a real prison and therefore it does not create the right atmosphere and far from reality.
Numbers became so important that it is hard to not believe in them. It makes life harder if we have to find out if the numbers that are given to us are real or false, this is why people don’t think about the validity of the source. Every quantitative instruments make people believe more because they it is very close to reality, for example we believe in rulers because we know that it is very close to being precise, and precision is truth.
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DOCUMENT : Key Experiment: The Mock Prision Study