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Essay about Social-Psychological Principles of the Movie Unforgiven

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Social-Psychological Principles of the Movie Unforgiven

Florida Institute of Technology

Most movies have different social-psychological principles, however most people are watching movies to be entertained, and not to psychologically analyze them. There are many different principles that would be applicable to the film we are discussing however, I have chosen to analyze three scenes discussing altruism, self-fulfilling prophecy, and counterfactual thinking. Please review the following scenes and analysis from the movie Unforgiven:
Scene
* The first scene is the opening scene when a man was upstairs in the saloon/brothel with a prostitute – Delilah, who did not want to have sex with the man she was in the room with. In turn, he …show more content…

Just then, Munny’s shotgun enters the scene, and slowly everyone turns around to see him standing in the doorway. Munny shoots and kills the owner, followed by several of Little Bill’s crew. He ends up shooting Little Bill but not killing him. Munny tells the remaining patrons to leave the saloon if they don’t want to get killed. While Munny is going back to his shot of whiskey, he hears Little Bill cock his gun. Just as he is about to fire, Munny stops him by stomping on the arm holding the gun. He stands over him, barrel down, Little Bill says “I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house”. Munny then says “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it”. Little Bill says “I’ll see you in hell William Munny”, and Munny cocks his gun, says “Yeah”, and shoots him dead.
In this scene, the social-psychological principle that is relevant is self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecy is “the process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in way that confirm those expectations” (Kassin, Markus & Fein, 2010). Ned and Munny himself were the last people that thought Munny could be the whiskey drinking cold blooded killer that he used to be. Munny got married, had kids and settled down. He was just a pig farmer now. He hadn’t even been on a horse in years. Munny had two small children now and did his best to support them on his own. When Kid Schofield showed up at his ranch and asked him to help him kill

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