Discussion Board
The society believes that private lives of individuals can only be reviewed in terms of their personal failures and successes. The link between the private lives of these individuals and the society around them is ignored often. This should not be the case. In this regard, we will focus on the aspect called sociological imagination. It is a concept that dwells on the connection between an individual’s own personal life and larger social groups (Mills 2000). Two fundamental concepts that go hand-in-hand with sociological imagination are: the first concept is troubles, which dwells on personal matters, while the second concept, issues, dwells on public matters of an entire society. Sociological imagination outlines the existence of society to the individual. Mills notes that nowadays people feel like their private lives are a series of traps. This is because they attribute events surrounding them internally without considering the external factors that greatly influence their daily life.
Focusing on Mill’s notion of the sociological imagination, and whether or not unemployment is a public issue, we discover that his views are of the opinion that unemployment is a public issue. He explains that societal structures have direct implications on people’s wealth. A fine example illustrating this viewpoint is seen in his discussions on industrialization and its effect on workers; he points out at the changing pattern of wealth distribution as societal structures change due to industrialization. Mills does not explicitly mention that the issue most dependent on societal structure is personal wealth, but this is implied in his example on industrialization. We can therefore conclude that unemployment is related to the social structures in place, and should thus be considered a public issue.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment that was conducted to see how people would behave if they were taken to a place that is secluded from the society. Some of the participants of the experiments acted as prisoners while others acted as guards. The outcome of this experiment shows that the real behavior of a person changes when one faces the conditions in a prison. The experiment also does well to explain how prisoners are from diverse backgrounds. More so, their cases have different charges in regard to the crime that was committed. The outcome also shows that people tend to change their attitude once they reach the prison. This can also be explained by the fact that they are secluded from the rest of the members of the society. This experiment reflects the real life situation since the behavior of real inmates usually changes when they go to prison. This can be explained mainly by the lack of freedom in the prison as well as the fact that people find other prisoners who are notorious.
