I have been very interested to know how people interact in a group. Sometimes I find myself acting differently when I am with one person than when I am with a group of two or more people. After I learned about the functions of groups for a person during class, I was curious to know people in a group. I observed how people interact with others in a group putting emphasis on things such as “who would be a leader in a group” and “what would be different when the size of a group gets bigger.”
To find out what kind of influence a group has on people, I did observations mostly in the cafeteria and partially in the food court of the Mall. A maximum of eight people can sit at one table in the cafeteria. However, up to six people sit at one table. The food court is around that number. Since people sit wherever and with whomever they want to both in the cafeteria and in the food court and enjoy talking over their meals, those are great places to see how people interact with other people. Participants of this observation are people who came to eat food in the cafeteria and food court. They are both males and females. In the cafeteria, people’s ages mostly tended to be younger, but in the food court, the ages ranged from the young to the elderly.
People enjoy talking while they are eating their meals; however, when people in a group are not very intimate, the situation is a little different. They are likely to have less conversation. Such a situation is probably uncomfortable for many people, and people try to break the uncomfortable atmosphere. Observing them carefully, most of the time, there is one person who leads the group.
This article was the most interesting one for me throughout the textbook. It must sound strange because slavery issues were so tensed, but I enjoyed reading what was said in the article. The letter Jourdan Anderson wrote implies how his life was going well compared to the one while he was a slave. Although slavery brought many advantages for people especially in the South, I disagree with the slavery from the perspective of ethics. Whatever reasons, it did not seem right to enslave people against their will.