A Sociological Imagination

A sociological imagination is the way the world around you shapes you. The 2 main things that influence this are history and biography. In the Meyer article, Milgram learned that Germans are not the only group of people that are obedient. In fact, the majority of the people used in his experiment did follow orders even though they felt a rush of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is when your actions do not pair up with your feelings and you are in a state of tension. I think alot of high schoolers experience cognitive dissonance. There are so many new situations in high school that a lot of people do not know how to handle. Peer pressure is all around us. For example, if all your friends are smoking cigarettes and you know they are bad for you but you do it anyone, you feel tension. I believe the reason we sometimes do things we don't agree with is because we want to be accepted. This relates back to a sociological imagination. We have been conditioned from a very young age to do this and do that. If we don't do certain things, like raise our hands when asking a question or stand up during the pledge, we can sometimes feel like we are out of place. The idea of a sociological imagination raises the question of what if we were not conditioned the way we are? How would our lives be different? The year is 2009 but imagine if you had been living during the times of the Great depression or the Vietnam war? How would you and everyone around you be affected? You would be a completely different person. It's interesting to imagine how different my life and my personality would be if my history was changed.