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What Would You Do? Paper

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What Would You Do? Paper
What Would You Do?
Episode __ : Helping the Homeless

I. Relate the video to conscience

Conscience, as defined by the Merriam – Webster Dictionary, is “the part of the mind that makes you aware of your actions as being either morally right or wrong”. It’s that tiny voice inside your head that tells you if what you’re about to do, what you’re doing or what you’ve done is essentially right or not. A lot of people nowadays tend to ignore this for fear of being ridiculed or judged by other people, even if what they did was actually right.

The American television news magazine and hidden camera show entitled “Primetime: What Would You Do?”, which aired their first episode in February 2008 and still continue to do so, reveal how bystanders react to certain situations of conflict or illegal activity in a public setting acted out by professional actors. However, there have been instances in the series wherein some people do not even intervene in what’s happening before them, be it good or bad. An example of these scenarios is a waiter reprimanding an overweight woman for ordering food with high calorie content with the reason being that he is just “helping her out”. The show also does variations of these scenarios to see if and how these bystanders will react. For the example mentioned above, there is a different version wherein the waiter is replaced by a pretty waitress and sadly, in a diner filled with mostly men, these men do not defend the overweight woman and even extend their concern for the waitress, instead.

The episode I had chosen centers around a homeless man who, after being helped by a good Samaritan by giving him money for food, is denied service by the bartender of the restaurant simply because of the fact that he is homeless. He also states that this homeless man is “bad for business”.

Most of the people targeted in the series take the side of the homeless man in the argument, saying that he has the right to eat at the restaurant same as any other

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