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If you like psychology, here are 3 movies worth watching:

Exam

Eight talented candidates have reached the final stage of selection to join the ranks of a mysterious and powerful corporation. Entering a windowless room, where an armed guard keeps watch, they are given 80 minutes to answer one simple question.

Cell 211

The story of two men on different sides of a prison riot - the inmate leading the rebellion and the young guard trapped in the revolt, who poses as a prisoner in a desperate attempt to survive the ordeal.

The experiment

26 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.

A human is one of the many animals that populate the Earth

All three movies describe situations that are studied in social psychology. "The experiment" in fact is an adaptation of a real psychology experiment that took place in Stanford University. However, the movie gives the exact opposite point of view of what the real experiment showed. The movie starts with images of animals killing each other and all kind of scenes of nature showing its most cruel side. Big fish eat small fish, hunters devouring their preys, a lion killing the cubs of another lion, a rodent killing her own offspring, etc. Those images are followed by human brutality, scenes of war, torture and domestic violence.

The real experiment of Stanford University came to prove that situation is more powerful than personality. While in the movie you can see who is the bad guy and who is the good guy and that stays throughout the entire film, the real experiment turned real good hearted ordinary kids into criminals. But a society like the USA, that exalts individualism over collectivism and believes that personality is more important than situation cannot show a movie where the good guy turns out to be the bad guy in the right circumstances. The same happens in the movie Exam. The actors do a great job making their personalities stand out and faking a performance that would not hold in reality. Each character in that movie has a very distinctive personality that remains unaffected until the end. This movie reminds me also a bit of another one called The Method. In this movie a major corporation holds interviews to recruit a top executive from seven applicants. The selection process follows the Grönholm method, which nobody ever heard of. It soon becomes clear the tests are dirty mind games. Among them there is a HR mole. The candidates are eliminated one by one according to the procedure while their priorities, ethics and loyalty are put through very stressing tests.

Cell 211 is what the movie The Experiment should have been, but did not manage to be. Given the right circumstances any man can become an assassin. However, in western cultures, especially americanized ones, we do not like to see that. We idolize the individual and we like to believe that one always has a choice. The freedom to choose is something we hear in many American movies and it is the core principle of all legal systems around the world.

In social psychology this is called the fundamental error of attribution. We tend to explain the behavior of others based on their disposition or personality. He killed him because he is a violent bastard. But can you keep holding that belief when science shows you that in that circumstance 95% of the people killed someone? Do 95% of the people have exactly the same personality? Or is that situation is more powerful than personality? We are not as free as we like to believe we are.

In The Experiment you can see a bit of a very well researched social phenomenon called "conforming to the majority", when one prisoner is asked to do ten push-ups and he refuses. Then the cop asked all the prisoners to do ten push-ups. Some prisoners start doing them and when the majority of the them are doing push-ups the one who did not want to do the push-ups in the first place ends up complying and doing the push-ups against his first will. This an example where the situation is stronger than personality.

My teacher of social psychology used to give this example:

"Someone releases a lion in the middle of the city and it kills 40 people. Who are you to blame? Would you blame the lion and stone it, torture it, make it pay for what it did? Or would you send someone to search the person who released it? What is the ultimate cause of the death of the people? And thinking a bit further, if that lion is fed and raised by people who know it would be used for killing, are they also responsible?"

In our society we go and blame the lion, we imprison the lion, we punish it, we learn to hate it and focus our anger towards it, while its breeder remains out of sight. Primitive minds that cannot see further will just focus their attention on the lion. Are we not those primitive minds?

Of course the lion must be stopped! We cannot let it run free killing people. A terrorist cannot be let wandering free to kill people. But should we blame the terrorist or the creator of those terrorists? And when finding their creators stretch your mind a bit and reach further and deeper. Terrorism does not arise without its opposition. Just like two magnets when brought closer together by their opposite sides collapse into each other, would you blame only the north pole of one of the magnets? I have been raised in a land of terrorists and while not being a terrorist myself I have faced judgement by others who claim the national unity of Spain. When I was a child and I traveled to the south of Spain for vacation I have been mocked and insulted for being Basque. The tires of our car were pierced and the lights broken because our license plate had the letters BI (which stands for Bilbao). So, I can unmistakably say that those people have taught me to hate the "Spaniards" and feel even prouder of being Basque. Thank God I had other teachers who taught me otherwise.

When a very good friend of mine whose family was actively involved in the PP (a right-winged political party) told me that her family was thinking of moving out of Basque Country because they were receiving too many threats in the mail, I understood. Her brother had to have a bodyguard. That was not a healthy environment for any child.

So, be aware that every time you say a bad word against the Basque, the Catalan, the French, the Muslim or any other, you are just feeding the conflict. You are adding more wood to the fire of terror that is inextinguishably burning, and by doing so, you are also responsible for the conflict. Maybe by just a very tiny part, as tiny as a grain of sand, but add many grains of sand and you will have a desert.

Everytime I see politicians yell at each other on TV I just think of fire bellows fanning a fireplace stoking the fire.

According to social psychology our likes, our motivations, interests and personalities depend on our education. If we were born in the place of the people who hijacked the planes that crashed into the WTC in New York, we would have probably ended up doing the same, or at least we would have agreed with the act of terrorism. Could that person choose not to want the attacks of 9/11? Did Bush have a choice to agree or disagree with the attacks? Of course not, he could only disagree with them.

But those attacks were the result of two forces, Islam on one side and the United States on the other. They did not attack Ethiopia or Japan, they attacked the USA. Many people around the world hated the American reaction towards the attacks and although they thought the killing was terrible, they felt they deserved a call of attention to some degree. You could read it all over the internet and that hate towards America came for a reason.

Now you can blame the lion and go bomb some third world country or seek further for the real cause.


The same person raised in two different places would have different believes and ideas.

The weight of our genes

Those claiming that our biology decides our behavior will argue that instincts play a big role in our choices. In the animal kingdom the Alfa male controls the pack. Some animals are very territorial and have keen senses to detect intruders and they will kill their own kind for that reason. We humans are no different. We come from a long history of barbaric acts, empires were built and raised after bloody conquests, cruel wars and unfair invasions. We are part of the animal kingdom. We are able to kill and torture.

It is part of our nature and we must acknowledge it if we want to transcend it. We do have sensors that make us want to eat highly caloric foods. We have a drive for sex. We strive for control and power, just like the Alfa male does in the animal kingdom,. Our marketing targets those primeval impulses which kept us alive and brought us where we are today. But we keep on using our resources to target those instincts with our marketing. Cars are sold using sexual images, foods have never been so tasty and caloric, mankind has never had so many resources to satisfy their hedonistic senses.

Once, I read that with 80% of the money that the UK spends on losing weight in one year, you can feed two times the planet for a whole year. That was about the money spent in losing weight. They did not say anything about the money used in gaining that weight. I do not even want to imagine that.

If you think this is hypocritical, keep on reading. Many people like I defend animal rights. They might even have a pet they treat with care. However we eat chicken or any other animals that have been raised for food in horrible conditions. I once visited a chicken farm and you cannot believe what they do to them in order to reduce costs and increase production. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy. But as long as we don't see it, it's fine. We go on eating chicken. We keep on buying products made by children who work in inhuman conditions and are scarcely paid. We change mobile phones as often as we can. We want to have the ultimate technology, the coolest clothes, the latest thing, why? Because our marketing campaigns tell us to. Can you choose not to want those things? Do you think you have a choice?

On the other hand we have culture and logic and ethic and religion and philosophy and art. We are able to control our senses and needs. We can choose not to eat that chocolate pie after a nice meal, because we know we are already well fed and we do not need those extra calories. We can choose not to smoke because we know it harms our lungs and body. We can choose to read a book instead of watching TV. We can choose to do regular exercise to keep our bodies and minds healthy. Whenever someone bothers us and we feel like punching their face, we can choose not to do it and behave assertively. When we see an immigrant getting in our way, we can choose not to say bad things about them, because we know it is just our territorial brain kicking in. We can choose to do so many other things, or can we not?

Freedom and free will

In philosophy we distinguish different kinds of freedom:

• Imagine you are in a classroom. The teacher happens to be very authoritative. You hate the class, you hate the teacher. The door is not locked, you are free to leave the classroom. Nothing is holding you. This is what the legal system considers freedom. Preventing that freedom by, for example, chaining you to the desk would be illegal. On the other hand slavery has been a legal way of preventing freedom for many years.
• However, imagine you have been raised not to stand up and leave the classroom before it ends. Whether it is out of politeness or because it is a very authoritative system that punishes the unsubmissive, you don't even dare to stand up and walk to the door. You do want to leave the classroom, but you can't, although the door is not locked and there is nothing holding you. Are you still free to leave?
• Now imagine you have been raised to believe that people with certain class must dress in a certain way and do certain things. So, you grow up wanting to have a certain car or a certain job or dressing up in a certain way. You find yourself valuing your image very much, wanting to look young even though you are 45. Are you free not to want to value your image, not to believe in the things you believe?

We do not like to believe that we do not have free will and even if we do not we would be much happier thinking that we do. Social psychology tells us than when most people react the same way in the same situation, it is difficult to attribute their behavior to their personality. But understanding the laws that regulate human behavior does not make us slaves of a scientific, mechanical world. Some philosophers have said: "knowledge will make you free". The more you know yourself and the society you live in, the more your will understand about what influences you.

The American Dream promises the possibility of prosperity and success regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The truth is that there is no such a thing as "regardless of social class of circumstances of birth". We are our circumstances. A situation in which a person lives has a much higher weight on their behavior than what we would like to think. There are no equal opportunities for everybody, nor can a person be held responsible for everything that happens to them as many New Age followers want to believe. Ignoring those facts is childish and irresponsible. The sooner we accept that, the better.

Acceptance: a lesson we should all learn from our neighbors of the Eastern cultures. Accept what cannot be changed and you will find peace.

As animals we have mastered feeding, digestion, movement and reproductions. Humans are a very recent species in evolution. We still have a long way to go in learning to manage our emotions and thoughts. We are still at the first stages in trying to understand our anger, lust, envy, attraction, repulsion, fear and so on.

In a short time we have been able to develop an amazing technology. We have very smart people who create satellites, ipads, computers, software for the internet... Imagine what we could reach if we put the same effort in mastering and developing our emotional intelligence.