Social Influence and Persuasion in Cool Hand Luke

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The late 1960’s famously introduced the idea of the “anti-hero”, which is defined as an individual with heroic qualities who is not in the position of an archetypal hero. One such example is the movie Cool Hand Luke, from 1967 starring Paul Newman. The movie surrounds a prisoner named Luke Jackson who refuses to comply or conform to the norms of the prison. The powerful Captain and the mysterious prison guard, whose silver reflecting sunglasses was the inspiration for one of the main prison guards in the popular Stanford prison experiment, tested his acts of defiance. This paper discusses the movie Cool Hand Luke and how the prisoners, Luke and the themes in the film relate to the Social Psychology 1ZO3 course focuses of conformity, non-conformity, and obedience to authority.
In the movie Cool Hand Luke, the other prisoners in the prison often displayed conformist behaviour. Their compliance, which is when the prisoners’ behaviour conformed to the sources request, often ended in unfair treatment to them. One example of this is how one of the prisoners complied to a night in the box even though he clearly did not want to spend his time there. Furthermore, the prisoners were part of the bystander effect, which is when the greater number of bystanders in an emergency, the less likely any one by standing will help. This was exemplified when Dragline was beating Luke up, and none of the many inmates had done anything about this. One explanation of this occurrence is that since Dragline had power –the ability to influence and control the behavior of others, even against their will- over the prisoners, they stood there and did not help. The inmates also constantly obeyed to the authority of the prison guards and the rules of the prison...

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...ring the car wash scene in the movie, none of the inmates did what they wanted, which was to run away and be with the girl washing the car. In fact, this was one of the few times Luke himself obeyed the authority.
While being a very popular movie in the late 1960s, Cool Hand Luke displays many concepts on the topic of social influence and persuasion, which were discussed in class. Moreover, the movie specifically dealt with the topics conformity, non-conformity and obedience to authority. These topics were shown throughout the movie across the characters, scenes and even the larger themes of the movie. The topics discussed bring up a peculiar sense of reality due to the fact that they were placed in a movie based on reality. The presence of such topics in prisons shed light on the fact that these topics may as easily be found in other institutions such as school.

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