The last few weeks, Divergent--the movie slated to be the next Hunger Games--has been on all over the media. Interestingly, the movie was inspired by psychology! I was reading my People magazine, as I often do on a Friday night, and I saw the words "fear" and "anxiety," so of course I stopped to read the article. The article was on Veronica Roth, the author of the best-selling book, now movie. She talked about how she battles chronic anxiety and has occasional panic attacks. As her own therapy, she wrote about a "character who meets her fears head-on."
Roth started writing Divergent as a senior at Northwestern where she was taking a Psychology 101 class. The topic we just finished learning about, psychotherapy, is what really inspired her. She was studying exposure therapy and thought that it was fascinating. Exposure therapy is a part of behavioral therapy and counter-conditioning. Counter-conditioning is using classical conditioning to replace an unwanted response to a (scary) stimulus to the desired response to that same stimulus. Exposure therapy may consist of systematic desensitization and progressive relaxation. This basically means that to overcome a phobia, the patient will be gradually exposed to the thing they are scared of while in a controlled setting and while being consistently relaxed between exposures.
In the book, the city is made up of factions. One of these factions, Dauntless, values courage and fearlessness. As part of their training, they must go through simulations where they face their each of their fears. This is like an extreme version of exposure therapy without the systematic desensitization and progressive relaxation. They are just thrown into situations where they must face their fears. Roth says that she wanted to write about people who used exposure therapy not just to get rid of unwanted phobias, but to become completely fearless.
Roth was also inspired by the study of obedience in social psychology. We have not gotten up to it yet in class, but one of the most famous experiments dealing with social psychology is Stanley Milgram's experiment on obedience. His goal was to test people's willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform actions that conflicted with their personal values. His results were that people are likely to go to almost any lengths to if a person of authority demands them to--even if conflicts with their personal values (in the experiment, they had to punish someone with an electric shock--65% were willing to give a 450-volt shock to the participant). This concept of disregarding our own moral principles in order to comply with the demands of a person in authority is something Roth is constantly exploring throughout the series.
This was so interesting! I had no idea that Veronica Roth based Divergent on psychology. It's also cool that she created a character that was strong in the areas where she was weakest. Though I don't think the psychological aspects of the book are as clear as the corruption of leaders, blah blah blah, reading it again while keeping psychological concepts in mind should be interesting.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting blog post, Alyssa. It's funny, I was reading this same information yesterday in the booklet that came with the series, and couldn't wait to tell Mrs. Perl. At the time when I was reading Divergent, we hadn't covered exposure therapy yet, but in retrospect, it all makes sense now. It's also interesting to note how the fear simulations target the amygdala and the idea of divergence and multiple personalities manifesting themselves throughout the book.
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