Riding A Wave

Many of our Psychology films reference material from the past, either in the shape of psychological research or simply as background to a particular time period and this gives me the opportunity to spend time combing through sites like the Internet Archive looking for old film.

And while much of this is work-related (it’s a dirty job that someone has to do…) it gives me the opportunity to seek-out the occasional “old film” that falls into the “Interesting but hardly essential” category.

Not that my life is organised into lots of rather odd little categories.

One such film I chanced across is “The Wave”, a 1981 television adaptation of a 1967 high school experiment carried out by Ron Jones who decided to take a decidedly hands-on approach to teaching his high school history class about how authoritarian ideas can take hold and spread quickly through a credulous population.

The whole thing – from its first gentle classroom stirrings to its Nuremburgesque finale – seems to have taken place over 5 – 9 days (depending on whose recollection of events you’re depending on).

The result wasn’t pretty (check-out the quasi-fascist salute the students quickly adopted) and this is a surprisingly faithful reconstruction of the experiment (although it does takes a few artistic liberties for the sake of dramatic reconstruction).

What the film tells us about the social psychology of authoritarianism and the ease with which things like a preoccupation with “classroom discipline” can cross the line into an unthinking obedience to authority is something for you to decide.

And while you’re deciding, it might also be interesting to think about contemporary parallels in  modern-day Europe and America with the kind of populist authoritarianism it seems fairly easy to encourage given the right conditions…