Andy Dufresne In The Shawshank Redemption

The movie Shawshank Redemption focuses mainly on the character Andy Dufresne as he encounters many new experiences after being put in prison. A drastic life change like he experienced, going from working as a banker to being a prison inmate, caused him to reassess his life and alter his identity. Throughout the course of Andy’s prison experience he encounters many social psychological concepts and theories that he might not have had he not been arrested. Both inside and out of prison Andy experimented with many different identities that varied depending on the situation that he was in. These roles are somewhat contradictory to one another, so they could not have been enacted at the same time and would be seen as inappropriate if used in the

In prison Andy received multiple threats from the guards, the warden, and other inmates. Often these threats were not carried out and were simply used as a means of control, but the times that they were carried out had an effect on the way that Andy behaved for the remainder of his sentence. There is no debate that prison life changes a person and the identities that they hold. For Andy, he developed multiple identities that varied depending on the situation that he found himself in. Doing so allowed him protect himself to the best of his abilities. A situated identity is “a conception held by a person in a situation that indicates who he or she is in relation to the other people involved in that situation” (Delamater et al. 622). Understanding his situated identity helped Andy to recognize where he stood in regards to power and how to act towards others. Throughout his sentence Andy had three main jobs which required him to take on very different roles. He worked in the laundry department at the beginning of his sentence where he constantly had to be on guard, watching his back to avoid an attack from a group of other prisoners who sexually abused him. His next job was a

Other prisoners bullied Andy and made him submit to them by threatening his life. Bogs and his group of friends physically and sexually abused Andy to the point where he quit fighting them off. On a specific occasion, Bogs threatened Andy with a knife and said that if Andy did not perform oral sex on him and his friend that they would kill him. Before this threat was made Andy refused and tried to fight them off, but he gave in as soon as Bogs took out his knife. It has been found that victims of threats are likely to comply when the threats are more severe and this explains why Andy gave in so easily once his life was put on the line (Delamater et al. 330). In such a high pressure situation Andy would measure the subjective expected value of the situation. According to the text, a victim will be more likely to comply “as the threat’s credibility increases and as the magnitude of punishment threatened increases” (Delamater et al. 331). Because Andy knew that Bogs was serious and would follow through with the threat he did as he was told. However, in the instances where Bogs was not armed Andy put up a better fight. This shows how the severity of a threat affects a victims likelihood to