In the movie The Three Stooges, Farhan is forced to follow his father’s and society’s expectations to become an engineer, but he refuses to give up on his dream of becoming a photographer and ultimately fulfills it. The movie delves deeply into the balance between social pressure and personal freedom from a psychological perspective, and provides important lessons through the characters’ inner transformation.
The social definition of “social identity” refers to a person’s sense of what kind of society they belong to, which can be organized by religion, race, class, occupation, etc. Social identity is an important factor in determining how an individual perceives themselves in society, and it greatly influences their values and behaviors. In the movie, social identity is closely tied to the social perception that engineering is a high-status profession and that a man must be an engineer to be successful. These social perceptions determine the direction of people’s lives and sometimes stifle individual freedom of choice.
Farhan’s family is strongly conscious of this sense of social identity, and it strongly influences their behavior and decisions. In particular, Farhan’s father predicts his son’s future early on, saying “My son will be an engineer” as soon as he is born. This prediction comes from Farhan’s father’s social background and a certain “attitude” towards his son. An attitude is an evaluative response to something, which is shaped by certain values or beliefs. Farhan’s father had the idea that being an engineer is a symbol of success in Indian society, which led him to define his son’s future as an engineer. In doing so, his father attempts to control Farhan’s life through his own expectations and societal standards.
As a result of his father’s attitude, Farhan’s future is defined from birth, and he loses control over his environment, which leads to what is known as “learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a state of lethargy in which an organism loses control of a situation by experiencing repeated failures or setbacks, and eventually gives up trying because it expects to fail at a task. It manifests as the thought, “I’m going to fail anyway, so why bother trying.” Farhan falls into this learned lethargy and enrolls in India’s top university, ICE Institute of Technology, to fulfill his father’s expectations, but in the process gives up on his dream of becoming a photographer, which is what he really wants to do.
Despite Farhan’s desire to pursue his dreams, he doesn’t even try because of intense pressure from his father and societal expectations. This situation can also be described as “conformity”. Conformity is the act of obediently following an undesired behavior due to social pressure. Farhan didn’t want to be an engineer, but because of social pressure and his father’s strong expectations that “you have to be an engineer to be successful” and “men have to be engineers”, he tried to become an engineer even though he didn’t want to.
However, despite these pressures, Rancho convinces Farhan to pursue his dream of becoming a photographer again and convinces his father. Throughout this process, Farhan’s father remains stubborn in his attitude that Farhan should be an engineer and refuses to change. This can be explained by Farhan’s father’s tendency to not easily abandon the beliefs he has already established, a phenomenon known as belief preservation. Belief preservation refers to the psychological phenomenon of holding onto an established belief even when presented with evidence that it is wrong. Farhan’s father ties Farhan’s success to his career as an engineer, and he tries to maintain his beliefs even when Farhan is unwilling to follow this path.
Another reason Farhan’s father maintains these beliefs is because of the “attribution fallacy,” where he attributes Farhan’s declining grades to Rancho’s influence. Attribution is the process of finding the cause of a behavior, whereas the attribution error is the incorrect estimation of the cause of a behavior. Rather than objectively analyzing Farhan’s declining grades, his father blames Rancho, an external factor, for the decline. This is a result of his ignoring the probability of Farhan’s grades declining and drawing conclusions based on his negative attitude towards Rancho.
Eventually, the father’s beliefs are slowly changed by Farhan’s persistent persuasion, and Farhan is finally able to pursue his dreams. Farhan’s behavior in this process is not just about breaking his father’s stubbornness, but about actively working to create the life he wants. In doing so, Farhan regains control of his life and learns an important lesson in the process of finding his own happiness.
In this way, The Three Stooges provides an in-depth portrayal of the characters’ social backgrounds and their psychological transformation, which makes us think about the balance between social expectations and individual freedom. By analyzing the characters’ behavior through the lens of psychological theory, we can go beyond simple physiological responses and better understand how social context and psychological factors shape and change people’s behavior. Understanding these complex processes is not just for analyzing characters in movies, but also provides important insights into our daily lives.
