Free Will

We think that our presentation was an overall success. We had researched the topic thoroughly and provided a detailed analysis of our findings. The information that we presented had consistency and relevance to the topic of Determinism as shown with individuals’ behaviors in natural disasters.

Based on the definition of Determinism that we provided:

 Determinism is a philosophical view, which conjectures that every type of event, including human cognition (behavior, decision, and action) is causally determined by previous events…

we feel that our paper and presentation addressed the basic constructs and gave clear, concise examples of the 3 situations (Hurricane Katrina, Blizzard 2011/LSD, and Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami).

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Strengths:

 Historical proof that inhabitants of these areas had all been conditioned through experiences, and this conditioning determined their courses of action or inaction.

 Documentation of media coverage for all 3 situations, indicating that people had foreknowledge of impending disaster and still made the decisions that they did. This showed that our hypothesis of “People stayed because of Determinism” was valid.

 Class participation showed that our topic was interesting and that the other students enjoyed the visual and verbal presentation that we made.

 Our selection of pictures was relevant, interesting and informative.

 We feel confident that Determinism is the reason that individuals with seemingly sound mental capacities would choose to remain in adverse conditions when they had many options available to them as far as leaving, being proactive to avoid negative conditions, or not living there to begin with.

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Weaknesses:

 There was a slight discrepancy between us as to whether we were proposing that ALL people’s behavior was deterministic as opposed to only those in the 3 disaster situations we mentioned....