A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Name

nInstitution

nCourse

nDate

nA Beautiful Mind (2001)

nThe movie “A beautiful Mind” features the narrative of the bright mathematician John Nash Forbes who experienced mental challenges due to paranoid schizophrenia. Nash has poor social skills and uses most of his time discovering mathematic equations. However, the movie demonstrates that most of the situations are only delusions with the “beautiful” mind of Nash. It is later noted that he is suffering from a serious illness, which is refered to as schizophrenia (Howard 1).

nSchizophrenia is described as “split mind” which is characterized by inappropriate actions and emotions, disturbed perceptions and thinking in a disorganized way. Based on DSM-IV symptoms of schizophrenia include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and catatonic behaviours. Nash suffered from severe hallucinations and delusions, which were later identified as signs and symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia (Howard 1). The first hallucination is identified from the point of view of Nash when he claimed, “the prodigal roommate has arrived” when he is referring to Charles Herman. This is to show that Charles is a hallucination because he comes up in a shot depicted in Nashs viewpoint.

nA wide range of factors causes the development of this mental disorder although there is no precise causative agent. More importantly, some of the factors such as environmental issues and genetic vulnerability increase the chances of the progression of the disease. Similarly, certain kind of genes raises the risk of development of schizophrenia (Howard 1). The genes are not responsible for disease causation but they raise the likelihood for development of disease.

nNash receives antipsychotic medications in order to treat schizophrenia. The medications are used to minimize the symptoms and lower the likelihood of the symptoms to reappear among the affected individual. I would recommend the use of antipsychotic medications because they are effective at minimizing certain symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. Secondly, they do not produce serious side effects to the patients (Howard 1).

nPart B

nThe Stanford Prison Study

nThe Stanford Prison study exposes how social responsibilities can affect human behaviours. The study was one of the most important psychological experiments of human reactions to imprisonment. Precisely, it attempts to reveal the pragmatic circumstances of prison life. The main researcher was Zimbardo Phillip of Stanford University. Zimbardo conducted the study aiming to find out how readily persons would adapt to the responsibility of prisoner and guard in a role-playing practice that imitated prison life. The study was interested in determining whether the harshness witnessed among prison guards in American jails was due to the cruel personalities (dispositional) or was contributed by the prison environment (situational) (Zimbardo 1).

nThe research established that guards and prisoners might have characters, which forces the conflict inevitable. Therefore, the guards became aggressive and domineering while the prisoners failed to respect the rule of law. On the other hand, guards and prisoners may embrace behaviours, which forced them to behave in an unfriendly manner because of the inflexible power structure of the social living and working environment in prison.

nBased on the findings of the study, one-third of the prison guards demonstrated sadistic tendencies (Zimbardo 2). For instance, they started physical punishment and harassment on the prisoners. Moreover, the sanitary conditions deteriorated because the guards declined to allow the inmates to empty the sanitation bucket (Smith, Mackie, and Claypool 10). Some of the guards would also punish the prison by withdrawing their mattresses forcing them to spend their night on the concrete. Inmates were compelled to be naked as a way of deprivation. Numerous guards turned out to be progressively cruel in the course of the study. The experiment also noted that “good guards” failed to object or countermand the orders from bad or tough guards. One of the factors behind this observation was because of situational attribution. In particular, the exhibition of their behaviours can be caused by situation that the good guards were in. Therefore, they failed to countermand the bad guards because of the surrounding conditions or the social situation (Zimbardo 3). Therefore, it contributed to diverse perceptions of the person participating in behaviour.

nThe prisoners also did not try to work within the arbitrary prison system to effect a change in it especially by setting up Grievance Committee, rather than trying to dismantle or change system through outside help (Smith, Mackie, and Claypool 10). One of the major reasons why prisoners did not try to use conventional methods is because the experiment was executed in a manner that simulated the real prison (Zimbardo 9). Therefore, the prisoners were convinced that they were in a real prison. In addition, they were exposed to actual conditions in the prison such as brutal behaviours of the guards, inability to communicate their feeling and difficult living conditions of the prison. In this regard, these factors had significant effect on the prisoners. In addition, their actions can be attributed to the fact that the researcher did not provide an acknowledgement that it was just a prison experiment. Although they were volunteers, the prisoner did not receive a letter describing what they would experience. In fact, they were detained by actual police officers and incarcerated, in what appeared like a real prison. Therefore, they perceived that as an actual detention.

nPrisoners could attribute guard brutality to the guards disposition or character rather than to the situations. One of the major factors that promoted these behaviours is because of internal attribution (Smith, Mackie, and Claypool 10). In this case, the prisoners inferred the guards behaviours were due to personal factors such as feelings, abilities and traits. Similarly, the prisoners believed that the guards were behaving badly because of the factors intrinsic to them. The notion here is that the person is directly responsible for the behaviour or event (Zimbardo 9). Therefore, they interpret their actions based on the guards dispositions.

nSecondly, the prisoners committed fundamental attribution error, which caused perversion of undesirable pattern of behaviours and causal determinants. The prisoners overestimated the significance of dispositional issues among the prison guards while underrated the situational aspects (Zimbardo 10).

nVarious ethical issues emerged from the Stanford Prison experiment. First, it was unethical to conduct this kind of study because the principle of beneficence was not adhered to (Dingwall et al, 2). In this regard, the risks-benefit analysis was not conducted to determine the benefits and risks of the study to the subjects. For instance, all the subjects assigned the role of prisoners were not safeguarded from psychological harm witnessing cases of distress and humiliation (Zimbardo 11). This was evident when one of the prisoners had to be released only after 36 hours since he/she developed uncontainable bursts of anger, crying and screaming. It was also unethical because the prisoners were subjected to undue and inhumane conditions, which are unacceptable in researches. Most of the guards were abusing their authority by forcing them to live in a single confinement for long period. This is serious disrespect of human dignity of the subjects. Secondly, the researcher did not allow the subject to quit at will. Although they were assured that, they had the freedom to discontinue at any time, the researcher failed to allow this in the course of the study (Dingwall et al, 2). Similarly, the experiment lacked to provide fully informed consent to the participants.

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nWork Cited

nDingwall, Robert, et al. “Towards common principles for social science research ethics: A discussion document for the Academy of Social Sciences.” Finding common ground: Consensus in research ethics across the social sciences. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2017. 111-123.

nHoward, Ron. “A Beautiful Mind Trailer”. Youtube, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS_d0Ayjw4o.

nSmith, Eliot R., Diane M. Mackie, and Heather M. Claypool. Social psychology. Psychology Press, 2014.

nZimbardo, Phillip. “Home”. Stanford Prison Experiment, 2016, http://www.prisonexp.org/.