Me, Myself, and the World
As an Asian. Being that the COVID-19 pandemic raged everywhere, it was not only an epidemic-like disease but a social catastrophe as well that brought the existing societal tension to a higher level, and even discrimination against certain kinds of people showed a big sign. This illustrates that global crises and intergroup relations emotions are complex phenomena whose underlying fears, prejudices, and misunderstandings are brought out during such crises. This process can be seen in that the section of ethnic minorities suffers from discrimination because they are often accused of spreading the virus when there is public activism against that kind of disinformation. These cases of discrimination prove that the crises can exacerbate existing social tensions. Mostly, this situation culminates in people re-orienting themselves and positioning themselves along the lines of intergroup conflicts. The primary object of this work is to shed light on the psycho-social concepts of status, identity and discursive processes, feeling expression, and collective guilt by combining the academic literature insights through a personal angle, thus developing a deeper understanding of how these factors determine society's behaviors and responses in crises.
Status
Status, as a social construct, is one of the fundamental dimensions that get magnified during periods of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, a friend of mine, being of Asian origin, felt his social reputation undergoing a dramatic transformation throughout the pandemic. He was a well-known restaurant proprietor in our community, but as the pandemic developed, his position appeared to be damaged by the unproven association of the virus with people of his origin. His restaurant, the former busy community center, gradually emptied, and despite all the measures that he had taken, its customer base continued dwindling. This traumatic situation is the clearest evidence of how adversities can help raise the levels of prejudice and make social positions more unequal, respectively. This incident aligns with the theories discussed by Leyens et. Al. (2002) in the chapter "Expressing Emotions and Decoding Them: "Ingroups and Outgroups Do Not Share the Same Benefits." The authors look at the role played by the emotions in intergroup relations. They underline the idea of how these emotions affect attitudes at the social level and how they can lead to changes in the attitudes and behaviors of the people, thus in groups or individuals who belong to the society under study. It is vividly clear from this real event the significance of addressing the emotional cores while trying to find solutions to such social standings as lack of social harmony or the rise of people's stigma.
Identity and Discursive
Identity and discursive process relates to the process of creating, maintaining, and negotiating social identities using discourse. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, this idea was emphasized again as some groups, mainly Asians, were wrongly stigmatized because of the virus's beginning. As a participant in a virtual community forum designed to support and provide information for those affected by the pandemic, I quickly realized the intensity and effectiveness of the evolution taking place. The group's conversation was inadvertently tainted to disregard the members of Asian descent, their concerns were often disregarded or obliviated. The discrimination was not explicit, but subtly woven into the discourse, reflecting the essence of Mark Rapley's chapter "‘How to do X without Doing Y’: Achieving the Politics of Equity without ‘Being Racist’ – ‘Doing Equity’." Rapley (2001) claims that social entities like 'race' are a kind of discursive resource that people use in different communications with others and these communications often result in discrimination even in a very sophisticated and subliminal form. Thus the Covid-19 pandemic not only revealed a health crisis but also demonstrated that these biases existed below the discourse and stressed the importance of scrutiny and reflection upon the discursive dimensions of the society through a critical reading of the texts to promote equity and equality.
Emotional Expression in Intergroup Contexts
The expression of emotional perception is what connects human beings within the groups, where this fault can lead to armed conflicts, especially in a diverse cultural environment. I understood the sensitivity of non-verbal communication during the negotiation training on multi-cultural circumstances, it raised conflicts and increased tensions among the members belonging to different cultural backgrounds of the group. These misinterpretations came through changes in how signs were seen, gestures were used, facial expressions were perceived, and conversation sounds were perceived, leading to misunderstanding cultural differences and disagreement. Such a level of emotional transparency demonstrates that intercultural interaction is not straightforward, as each participant may have a different range of expectations regarding interpreting emotional signals. "Expressing Emotions and Decoding Them: "Ingroups and Outgroups Do Not Share the Same Advantages," a study by (Leyens et al., 2002), provides an in-depth analysis of how factors such as culture or group dynamics may affect how emotional expressions and interpretations are done, which could be the reason why the quality of intergroup relationships becomes compromised. This study reveals that the meaning of emotional expressions is not the same in different cultures and a person who strictly feels that his/her manner of expression, which is moderate for others, could be described as "overly exaggerated" or "underexpressed" by the audience from another culture. This theoretical viewpoint highlights the difficulty of expressing feelings in the context of different cultures; thus, the fact that people should pay closer attention to cultural differences and develop feelings of appreciation towards people from different backgrounds. Through an exploration into the subtle nuances of emotional expressions and perception, Leyens et al. (2002) provide the readers with another reason to believe in the potential dangers and, on the contrary, accentuate the need to develop emotional competency that harmonizes and reconciles culturally diverse norms and expectations, thus facilitating the spontaneous formation of harmonious relationships among different groups of people.
Collective Guilt in Society
An idea of collective guilt for committed injustices may serve as a good impetus for fundamental societal change and reconciliation. Racial justice protests reveal certain so-called communities coming to terms with the fact that they are collectively guilty because their historically privileged groups committed heinous acts that serve the systemic inequality, for instance, white people feeling guilty for slavery. Such reflective periods usually involve a critical reassessment of shared experiences, and this process may trigger a stronger thought of how two groups can trace back their tangled histories and address the damage of the past. This transformative power of collective guilt is explored in "Off White: "The Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance" (Billig et.al., 2004), which centers on the subject of having collective guilt and how this can foster proactive social change and the coming together of people from different community divides on a certain historical event. The narrative depicts different aspects of guilt as an emotional response and a source for political and social mobilization that deploys communities to deal with historical grievances. Emotion becomes a unifying factor, irrespective of different societal separations; it aids the comprehension of shortsighted people and promotes working together to abolish the horrible outcomes of the past oppressive state. The article exemplifies how a community's expression of shared guilt can be transformed to attain justness and harmony in a society that is split.
Conclusion
The discussion of scapegoating, biases, emotional expressions, and responsibility in this paper creates a look through psychological and social lenses that gives you a general view of the impact of these things on how people from different groups relate with each other during crises. Through combining these theories with my own experiences, this discussion is intended to show a notion of ambiguous maneuverings of individuals and society along the lines of intergroup conflicts and presuppositions. A comprehensive view of these processes is crucial to creating a caring, fair, and sustainable community in which uniting people around the globe and helping them get through difficulties and setbacks is possible.
References
Billig, M., et al. (2004). Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance. Taylor & Francis Group.
Leyens, J.-P., Demoulin, S., Désert, M., Vaes, J., & Philippot, P. (2002). Expressing Emotions and Decoding Them: Ingroups and Outgroups Do Not Share the Same Advantages. Psychology Press.
Rapley, M. (2001). 'How to do X without Doing Y': Accomplishing Discrimination without 'Being Racist' – 'Doing Equity.' In Offwhite: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance. Edited by Billig et al. Taylor & Francis Group.
Woods, T. (2022). A Social Virus? COVID-19 and Intergroup Relations. Psychology Today. The pandemic increases discrimination, but only towards specific groups. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-intergroup-conflict-and-reconciliation/202201/social-virus-covid-19-and
Comments