Psychology has the mission of digging into the deepest part of human beings. It tries to reveal what is hidden behind their behavior and what their most hidden desires are. One of the main tools that we psychologists have are experiments; we recreate a series of conditions and see how people react. Through these studies we understand a little more about the complexity of the human psyche, but there are times when experiments go too far, so far that they have exceeded the limits of ethics and have become public domain. The Seventh Art has taken care of that, giving us some psychological movies that have become practically cult works for lovers of this genre.
Movies about psychological experiments
- The Experiment (2001)
A German taxi driver finds an advertisement in a newspaper recruiting people willing to participate in a psychological experiment. He decides to try his luck and, at the same time, make a little money by carrying a hidden camera in his glasses to sell the story to a journalist. 20 volunteers are chosen, some are assigned the role of prisoners and others of jailers. The prisoners could not return home but had to spend day and night in the supposed prison. Both are convinced that there will be no violent acts, but little by little the experiment begins to degenerate and the jailers assume increasingly sadistic attitudes towards the prisoners, whom they try to humiliate and subdue at all costs.
This is a film inspired by Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison experiment , in which guards were also told not to use physical violence but were given free rein to generate fear and a feeling of arbitrariness and extreme control in prisoners. This study showed the terrible influence exerted by the group and how, under certain conditions, “good” people can become very evil.
- The Wave (2008)
It all begins in a German classroom when a group of teenagers claim that their country has already learned its lesson and that there is no chance of fascism happening again. The teacher is intrigued and decides to show them that even the most open societies are not immune to the appeal of certain totalitarian ideologies. Little by little, he generates in them the sense of group and looks for a common enemy on which to focus his efforts. As he makes them uniform and generates a sense of belonging to the group, the experiment begins to get out of hand as the boys begin to show cruelty and authoritarianism towards those who do not belong to their group, which calls itself “The Wave.”
This film, particularly interesting in our times and rich in subtleties, was inspired by the experiment “The Third Wave”, carried out by history professor Ron Jones, as part of a study of Nazi Germany, with high school students at Cubberley High School, a school in California. The professor’s aim was to make them understand how so many barbaric acts were committed in one of the darkest periods in human history.
A psychology professor is determined to study how apparently “good” people could commit such horrible crimes, hiding behind the excuse that they were just following orders. So, he recruited a group of students and told them that they had to apply painful electrical stimuli to another person, as long as that person made a mistake in their responses. While they applied the current, they listened to a recorded voice that pretended to be in pain. Little by little, the experimenter asked them to increase the voltage to cause more damage to the other person, thus knowing to what extent the students were willing to follow orders.
This old black and white film almost faithfully recreates Milgram’s famous obedience experiment. In which, by the way, 79% of the participants went beyond 150 volts (established as the point of no return because the first real sign of distress was heard).
