Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Schindler's List (1993)

An award winning movie based on a book called the Schindler's Ark (1982).  The story was set during the World War II where millions of jews were brutally murdered in the holocaust. Oskar Schindle is a name remembered by thousands of Jews whose lives were saved by him in a list now known as the Schindle’ List, thus the name of the film.

Prejudice and discrimination can be seen throughout the film where the Jews were treated like animals. For instances, Social Dominance Theory is clearly illustrated in the film when houses and properties of the Jews were taken away by the Nazi, and the Jews were forced to live in camps, while the Nazi enjoyed themselves in a prestige lifestyle. Social Dominance Theory states that a social group can be organized in a power hierarchy, where the dominant groups enjoy disproportionate share of assets, and subordinate groups receive most of its liabilities. The prejudice of the Nazi towards the Jews arises because the Nazi were envious of the achievement of the Jews who were immigrants who were allowed to set foot on their territory many years ago. They fear the Jews would one day take over their place as leaving them with the left overs. In social psychology, this phenomena is termed as Contemptuous Prejudice, which happens when a perceivingly high status social group felt threaten by the competitiveness of a lower social status group. Authoritarianism was practiced by the Nazi’s leaders. For instances, the Jews were force to either submit to the authority, which was the Nazi, or die. An example can be seen in a scene of a lady with an engineering degree who voice out her opinion was then killed.


Inspired by the mass murder by the Nazi army, Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figure was a series of psychological experiment to study the willingness of an individual to perform a conflicting act upon orders from the authority. The result showed that 65% of participants followed all the orders strictly given by the researchers who were the authoritical figures in the experiment. This explains why the Nazi armies were willing to kill. In addition to that, deindividuation of the Nazi armies facilitated the cruel act of killing as they temporary loss their individual identity by reduced self-awareness to follow the group. Emergent norm which was at that time, killing the Jews, had occurred.




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