The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the darkest TV shows that has ever been produced in Hollywood, with some fans even deeming it unwatchable when its second season aired. However, this show is not the conventional horror genre. It is much scarier than that. The Handmaid’s Tale is centered around crude psychological manipulation and reconstruction, set in a world that eerily captures what today’s society could create in the future. Still, the truly terrifying aspect of this story lies in its inspiration. Margaret Atwood’s muse was our society. She stated in multiple interviews that she is not a dark, horrible person who can envision and write these things. Every aspect of Gilead, where The Handmaid’s Tale is set, is taken from something that is happening at this very moment. All the characters, their clothes, their attitudes, beliefs, and punishments are inspired by genuine people and regions in this world.
This psychological thriller opens the floor to anyone interested in psychology and how it was profoundly used in this narrative. As promised in our video, I will answer and explain the five questions I asked to you all!
1. Were the lengths that Serena went to obtain a baby of her own justified?
This question is a healthy mix between social psychology concepts and morality or moral actions. The morality part of this question is quite simple. In fact, it might be one of those rare answers to moral questions that everyone agrees upon despite cultural differences and societal expectations of righteousness. Serena stripped every one of their basic human rights and subjected them to cruelty, abuse, and trauma. She fully knew what her actions were, and was not under any delusions about the impact Gilead would have on the thousands of women and men trapped. She only thought that these actions were justified because she will have a baby in her arms at the end of it. She could easily get her way because of power. The same mother’s love Serena wanted so desperately that she helped create Gilead - the same nation will hopefully bring her downfall. Although Serena’s character traits are often debated to be either good or bad, her scarily abusive nature, her complete selfishness and disregard for other people’s most basic human rights, and her autocratic, tyrant character cannot be forgotten. Serena and Offred both love their children more than the world but have two very different definitions of love. This can happen through upbringing, and as we saw in the show, Serena’s was anything but smooth sailing. A way to explain but not rationalise Serena’s and even Aunt Lydia’s behaviour is through the approach/inhibition theory that suggests that people in high power positions look at things more simplistically and act in more disinhibited ways, sometimes leading to excesses and abuse.
2. How do Fred and Serena’s, and Nick and Offred’s relationships form and develop 3. How does June cope with being raped and maimed while still being hopeful?
Offred lost her husband to another country, her daughter to another family, and everything else she had because of Gilead. Yet, she is attracted to Nick and has a relationship and a daughter with him. Fred abuses and whips Serena and has her finger amputated for reading - a forbidden activity. So how do happiness and attraction find their way even in the darkest of times? A constant condition of human nature is to predict our emotions in the future. This is called affective forecasting (Gilbert, Brown, Pinel, & Wilson, 2000). Affective forecasting is predicting our emotions based on a particular event that might occur. It also tries to expect how long that specific emotion will last, thus anticipating the event’s impact on our emotions. Obviously, Offred thinks she will never recover from this and will always be in total despair and in a state of clinical depression. Serena begins to perform this and realizes what Gilead has become after the state executes Eden, a teenager who had an extra-marital affair.
Affective forecasting was studied by Gilbert and Wilson (2000) with college students who were currently in a relationship (luckies) and students who had been through a breakup (leftovers). They found that the leftovers were just as happy as the luckies were then, at that moment, but the luckies predicted they would be much less happy than the leftovers currently were. Unfortunately, this shows that we have a very unreliable sense of future happiness or general emotional prediction. This happens because of two biases. The first of them is immune neglect (Gilbert et al., 1998). This bias neglects our extraordinary capability of resilience and our ability to bounce back from tragedy. We, humans, are naturally inclined to find the silver lining, humor, and growth potential even in the most painful setbacks as enabled by our psychological immune system. We tend to completely neglect to consider this when predicting our emotions in the future after an adverse event. For instance, if we believe that we will be heartbroken after a breakup with a romantic partner even three months after the event, we are indulging in immune neglect. We underestimate our natural resilience in bouncing back that may safeguard us from being unhappy for long seasons, thus predicting an unhappy future for ourselves. This is seen in both relationships because they both develop after adverse effects. Serena and Offred could have never predicted that love and attraction will prevail in Gilead.
The second bias that interferes with our prediction of future emotions and ability to bounce back after a traumatic event (even as bad as Gilead) is called focalism (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axson, 2000). Focalism is the overemphasis or overfocus on the short-term and most immediate feelings after the event. We focus on the searing elements of the event, like the despair, unhappiness, overwhelming hurt after a breakup with a romantic partner. We ignore again that there are other factors in life other than this event and its immediate impact that shape our life and thus affect our satisfaction. Such events are finding a confidant in Nick or finding traces of a caring husband in Fred for Offred and Serena. Many other events work simultaneously in our lives that will affect us in different ways, and this event is not the only determiner.
Finally, attraction is possible even in a situation like Gilead. Nick is in and out of their house all the time, and Offred can watch him through her window. This increases the probability of attraction significantly because of two things - the mere exposure effect and proximity. This effect states that the more exposed we are to something, the more likely we are to like it (Bornstein, 1989; Moreland & Beach, 1992; Zajonc, 1968). The mere exposure effect also creates familiarity, which is obviously another driving force for more significant attraction. Also, Nick looks unhappy and is a man of low status, so he shares the sense of oppression and subordination with Offred. This similarity also increasingly drives attraction because it shows compatibility. Finally, Nick is handsome, and so is Offred. Physical attraction plays a massive part in the attraction and leads people into the ‘halo effect,’ which creates the illusion that good-looking people are good-natured and trustworthy. Without the halo effect combined with all of these other driving factors, Offred and Nick would have never even approached each other in Gilead because of the horrifying consequences if caught.
4. What could explain June’s perseverance and resilience to remain in Gilead for Hannah?
Another of the most intriguing questions was whether Offred should have escaped to Canada when she had the chance. The answer is very straightforward. She simply could not leave her young, impressionable daughter to suffer the horrors of Gilead. It was a mother’s love that stopped her. She could not leave her daughter to grow up thinking her only purpose in life was to bear her husband’s children and look over the house and knit.
5. How does Aunt Lydia become such a formidable and obeyed leader? a. How does group psychology play a role when all Handmaids and Marthas succumb to the role of hierarchy? b. How does partner shopping affect their resilience since their partner is supposed to be their biggest spy?
A terrifying aspect of the show is Aunt Lydia’s leadership. She works to maximize obedience levels by using many techniques observed from the Milgram experiment, which was conducted by Stanley Milgram from Yale University (1963,1974). Although this experiment’s ethical aspects are questionable at best, the scientist managed to pull off an intriguing experiment to test factors affecting obedience. In terms of conformity, absolute authority is not even a necessity - symbolic authority figures work just as well. However, in obedience, especially blind, no-questions-asked obedience like Aunt Lydia demands, a real sense of authority and reputation did the trick. Aunt Lydia made her reputation well known, so the handmaids would know precisely who she is, what she has done, and what she is capable of doing. Aunt Lydia exercises formidable methods, like plucking Ofjoseph’s eye out when she was rude to her in public. This increased compliance because all the handmaids thought the same thing would happen to them. People are unlikely to obey based on only fear. Fear is a tool for a tyrant like Aunt Lydia. However, without fear, no one will abide by her, and with only fear, the handmaids would not be persuaded to conform.
Studies showed that fear-eliciting persuasive messages that provide information that can be acted on can be highly effective (Leventhal, 1970; Leventhal et al., 1967; Robberson & Rogers, 1988). But they shouldn’t go overboard. Sometimes people are so unnerved by scary messages that they will choose to deny the danger rather than act to combat it, especially if there is no clear recommendation about responding to the threat. Aunt Lydia gives them all the reasons Gilead was formed, draws diagrams and charts to aid their learning, and uses demonstrative knowledge. She provides helpful information calmly but in a fear-inducing manner. Messages that instill fear in the audience can also be effective, as long as they include information about the courses of action one can take to avoid the feared outcome. This is exactly what we see most handmaids doing initially, especially Ofjoseph, who becomes Aunt Lydia’s favorite.
When the handmaids are called to execute Gilead criminals, Aunt Lydia always tells them why they are executing him and carrying out justice, especially if he has harmed women. She strikes that emotional chord but also makes it clear that he is a terrible man. It is crucial to create a sense of importance, a feeling that they are carrying out a noble, worthy cause. It needs to be enough to convince people that the rewards outweigh the violence. The handmaids also needed to believe that the people they will execute are people who had voluntarily chosen to be under Gilead’s authority and have voluntarily broken laws that Gilead made clear should not be broken. This technique is used when guardians or drivers, who are voluntary workers of Gilead, were presented as criminals. The importance of creating a convincing cause for violence is paramount. The handmaids did not execute Ofjoseph and openly disobeyed Aunt Lydia because the reason was illogical, weak, and typical of Gilead. Also, Ofjoseph had not succumbed to Gilead’s authority voluntarily.
Aunt Lydia, right from the get-go, created a sense of threat and extreme uncertainty. These are core appraisals of fear to induce hypersensitivity to the background because of changed perception. This makes people more attuned to obedience because they do not want sustained fear. They can be lured in by telling them half-truths. Rewarding the army through Aunt Lydia’s rare moments of kindness and humanity, but more than that, not being terrified of punishment also strengthened their obedience. The last technique Aunt Lydia uses is one formulated by Gustav Le Bon (1895). Le Bon thought people tended to lose their higher mental faculties of reason and deliberation when they were in large groups: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.” Thought patterns of individuals change when they come together in large groups and make them more susceptible to group influence. Most of the time, we feel individuated. We feel individually identifiable by others, we consider ourselves individually responsible for our actions, and we are concerned with the propriety and future consequences of our behavior. But as several social psychologists have noted, we often experience a loss of individual identity—a sense of deindividuation—when we’re in a large group (the bystander effect). This increases self-perception bias, diffusion of responsibility, and pluralistic ignorance.
One of the most notable things in the Handmaid’s Tale is their use of shopping partners. From the very beginning, the audience tours Gilead in all of its terrifying glory through Offred’s (the protagonist) eyes. She speaks directly to the audience when she narrates and tells us about shopping partners. Everyone is required to walk in pairs and talk about appropriate things - God and the weather. She tells the audience that their shopping partners are supposed to be spies and calls her partner, Ofglen, a “pious bitch.” In reality, her shopping partner turned out to be one of her best friends who defied Gilead’s rules much more than Offred could have imagined. Ofglen reveals later that she also thought Offred was a pious bitch, and had become one of Gilead’s puppets. This misperception of someone’s character is called pluralistic ignorance (Miller & McFarland, 1991). Pluralistic ignorance occurs whenever people act in ways that conflict with their private beliefs, assuming, mistakenly, that everyone else concurs with a norm, thereby confirming to a system socially, despite disagreeing with it privately. This inconsistency with the inner and outer self may also occur because of misperceiving group norms. None of the handmaids trust each other because everyone is forced to follow the same rules. When everyone conforms to one idea, an illusion is created, and everyone misperceives the group norm. The handmaids always act pious and accepting of Gilead’s rules because their shopping partner does the same, thus, assuming that if they didn’t follow the norms as well, they would be outcast or alienated by the rest of the believers. As we saw in the show, these actions reinforce the erroneous group norm until Offred broke the illusion by revealing her actual name to the group.
The shopping partners and even the Marthas, i.e., older, infertile servants, initially do not trust each other because of a phenomenon called the self-fulfilling prophecy. In this phenomenon, our expectations lead us to behave in ways that elicit the same behavior we expect from others. If we think someone is unfriendly, we’re likely to offer something of a cold shoulder ourselves, which is likely to elicit the very coldness we anticipated. This is precisely what happens with most Handmaids and Marthas at the beginning of the story. This phenomenon was illustrated through a notable study by Saul Kassin, Christine Goldstein, and Ken Savitsky (2003). Participants in condition 1 were asked to commit a mock crime, and participants in condition 2 visited the crime scene. Condition 2 then interrogated condition 1 participants. Condition 2 participants were led to believe that certain participants were innocent and certain participants were guilty before the interrogation. The interrogators who thought their suspects were likely to be guilty asked more incriminating questions and generally conducted more vigorous and aggressive interrogations. This, in turn, led these suspects to act more defensively, which made them appear guilty to a group of uninformed observers who listened to tapes containing only the suspects’ comments. This is how the Marthas and Handmaids reinforced their feelings of distrust, fear, and coldheartedness for each other.
During the grocery store’s iconic name exchange scene, which made every watcher scream in utter pride and triumph, we see a dramatic change of attitude and perception. Handmaids who earlier distrusted and feared each other were suddenly coming together in friendship and camaraderie. This proved that Gilead had managed to retain their authentic selves to such an extent that they risked being caught just to murmur their real names and who they truly were. This belief is strengthened even in the last season when Marthas and Handmaids come together to help get 52 children out of Gilead. Gilead could not persuade them to become fanatical, and Gilead could not drive their pre-Gilead notions out of them. Social psychologists explain this resistance to persuasion through something called attitude inoculation (McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961)
Psychologists believe that our pre-existing knowledge, commitments, and biases make us resistant to persuasion and attitude change. Social psychologists McGuire & Papageorgis (1961) found inspiration through inoculation against viruses. Exposing a human being to a weaker version of the virus prepares the body for an attack on a much larger scale. During flashbacks, we see Gilead slowly taking over, and we see women’s rights slowly stripped away. First, Offred and Moira are called sluts at a coffee shop for wearing a tank top, then no woman is allowed to work, and then members of the LGBTQ+ community are not allowed to marry and are treated as second-class citizens. Finally, they are captured and forced into Gilead. Given the initial gradual exposure to the adversity or oppression and a glimpse into what Gilead was going to be like when finally, Gilead was forcefully/coercively established, their beliefs were even more certain and firm against the opposition. (Tormala, Clarkson, & Petty, 2006; Tormala & Petty, 2002) This is how attitude inoculation played a significant role in retaining their pre-existing ideas and their identities to a considerable extent.
Author,
Sanjana Kulkarni,
Clinical and Research Intern, PsychLine.in
References and resources for further reading
Gilbert, D. T., Brown, R. P., Pinel, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2000). The illusion of external agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 690–700.
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638.
Gilovich, T., Keltner, D., Chen, S., & Nisbett , R. E. (2015). Social Psychology (4th ed.). W. W. Norton & Co.
Kassin, S. M., Goldstein, C. C., & Savitsky, K. (2003). Behavioral confirmation in the interrogation room: On the dangers of presuming guilt. Law and Human Behavior, 27(2), 187–203.
Le Bon, G. (1895). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Leventhal, H. (1970). Findings and theory in the study of fear communications. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 5, 119-186.
McGuire, W. J., & Papageorgis, D. (1961). The relative efficacy of various types of prior belief-defense in producing immunity against persuasion. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62(2), 327–337.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.
Miller, D. T., & McFarland, C. (1991). When social comparison goes awry: The case of pluralistic ignorance. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social comparison: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 287–313). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Tormala, Z. L., Clarkson, J. J., & Petty, R. E. (2006). Resisting persuasion by the skin of one’s teeth: the hidden success of resisted persuasive messages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(3), 423–435.
Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T., Meyers, J. M., Gilbert, D. T., & Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(5), 821–836.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1–27.