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The Experiment
Das Experiment
2001 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Funnily enough I share same sentiment about Beatles as about Citizen Kane, I forced myself to watch it together with Casablanca and few other "classics" and it's horrible movie by nowadays standards and I'd say you don't need to see it even once unless you are really movie nerd.
Back in the day it was revolutionary and important I guess, but by nowadays standards it's utterly mediocre movie despite people praising it as something amazing, but to be fair I don't think I'd find movie from CK era which I'd like while I have no problem to find better artists from Beatles era whose music I enjoy much more and like them even nowadays compared to present day music.
And one more unpopular opinion from someone who experienced jail like environment I think even recent highly rated Shawshank redemption while very good and enjoyable movie is romantic unrealistic fairy tale (for women) and I'd rather recommend everyone to watch Das Experiment to see more realistic display of prison I can sign, yet I've of them is rated asking best movies in history and the other is pretty much unknown.
Yup, The Day After feels like willy nilly optimistic romantic comedy next to Threads, I have same feeling about extremely overrated romantic movie The Shawshank Redemption compared to much more realistic Das Experiment (judging by my military experience which was sort of prison).
1) how? I consider The Shawshank redemption romantic movie for women, if you want more realistic portrayal of prison and impact it does on people I recommend German Das Experiment. I served in military which was sort of like prison where you were totally under someone's control and I experienced changes shown in Das Experiment first hand, when your are noob and older dudes bully you and later you turn into them
Indeed that's a tricky one. My guess is that the average person lacks sufficient self-awareness to be able to answer a question such as that, especially if there are strong insecurities or other fears. At the same time, I believe that many people could attain a better skill at answering such questions if they practised meditation more regularly.
It seems that the nervous system pretty reliably adjusts its sensitivities to the recent norms, so maybe the answer to this predicament involves not only (a) asking participants such questions, but also (b) establishing for each person the current systemic bias. Similar to pain-threshold testing, perhaps the person could be exposed to social scenarios, such as in videos, while being monitored with an EEG or related device. The pre-screening done on the experiment participants in the 2001 film "The Experiment" could be seen as similar since it tests emotional reactions. Even persons from different worldly cultures and religions would presumably have different biases, so finding this bias for each individual would probably be very important if accurate analysis were sought. To give an analogy, asking people questions on feelings is like asking a multi-meter for a reading. The problem is that each person has a large set of calibration knobs, so the real-world measurements can not be known without first checking the knobs.
There is also a German movie (and an American direct-to-video remake) inspired by the Stanford Prison Experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment_%282010_film%29
Very interesting detail: The German movie escalates the violence far beyond what happend in the real experiment (to the point that the "guards" capture some of the scientists and several people are killed), and Philip Zimbardo got a court order prohibiting the advertising of the film as "based on a true story".
Yeah. Probably not. I haven't even watched Saw. I'm too emotional. As for Dexter I don't think it's violent. It would be family comedy-drama about slightly maladjusted individual if not for all the killings. On the other hand I have friends who coldn't suffer through first episode. At the same time they happily watch something as nasty as Das Experiment. I guess there is some variation in perception of violence.