A big social issue that occurs often is when there is information that is obscured by individuals who witnessed an event and using that information for a negative purpose. This is often called the misinformation effect which Myers (2013) explained by saying it is when people are “incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it” (p. 560). This misinformation effect can sometimes be detrimental to individuals or a group of individuals if information about them or the group is purposefully or inadvertently false. The misinformation effect is sometimes an issue in situations involving court cases. Sometimes witnesses are tricked into thinking something is true if they are provoked into thinking so even though they witnessed something different. If a person is told something over and over again even if it is false information, in general people start to believe that the information is true.
After 9-11 happened I believe there were a lot of information going around that was not true and the misinformation effect happened. When the media stepped in and said it was a certain group of people, specifically the Muslim community, those type of people were then targeted and stamped as terrorist. Even though most of these people were legitimately not terrorists, they were viewed as such based solely upon how they looked, or where they attended church.A report written by Schevitz (2002) stated that after the events of September 11th, 2001 occurred “the most dramatic change noted by the report was a more than 1,600 percent increase in reported hate crimes against Muslims -- a jump from 28 hate incidents in 2000 to 481 last year”(para. 3).Some of the witnesses of the attacks were so angry they needed someone to blame so when the media announced that the Muslims could be behind the attacks people took it into their own hands to deal with the situation.My uncle lives in Manhattan and witnessed the entire attack. The night of the attacks he decided to take a walk and clear his head. While walking down the street he witnessed a mob of people overtake a taxi cab that had a gentleman who was of the Muslim decent driving it.The mob pulled the gentleman out of the cab and proceeded beat him by kicking and punching him until the police showed up. Another incident that I had witnessed that caused the college I was attending to close for the rest of the week was that of a definite hate crime towards the Muslims. The college had a foreign exchange program and there was a small group of Muslim women who had been attending for over a year. We all knew them and many of us were friends with them.The day following the attacks, while our group was headed to our next class we overheard commotion around the group of the foreign exchange women. We saw the people around them throwing rocks and whatever else they could grab in their hands, at them while they tried to protect themselves with their bags. When others tried to help stop the attackers they stopped and ran away.Luckily the women were not badly hurt by the attacks. People tend to believe what they hear even if it is false when they hear the same thing multiple times. The blast of the misinformation from the media saying that the Muslims were behind these attacks definitely provoked the increase in hate crimes towards the Muslims.
References
Myers,
D. (2013). Social Psychology (11th ed.). New
York: McGraw Hill.
Rieger,
M. (2001). FEMA-4211. FEMA photo library. New York, NY.
Schevitz,
T. (2002). FBI sees leap in anti-Muslim
hate crimes/ 911 attacks blame for bias—blacks still most frequent victims. Retrieved
from http://www.sfgate.com/news /article/FBI-sees-leap-in-anti-Muslim-hate-crimes-9-11-2750152.php
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