The psychology behind The Squid Game

The Squid Game is the series that generated all kinds of reactions after its great success on the Netflix platform, perhaps because of its large amount of violence, brutality and blood.

But now it's time to put in order everything that the series presented us, point by point and from a psychological perspective.

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The Squid Game, from the perspective of Psychology

In The Squid Game we see different characters with something in common: they are desperate and in a vulnerable situation. due to a large number of economic problems they face in his life, when suddenly they are presented with the opportunity to win a large sum of money for just participating in a series of children's games, but where losing in any of them means the death.

psychology of money

The series begins with the story of a man who lives in one of the less privileged neighborhoods of his city, with a rather messy life full of debts. for his addiction to slot machines, and who for these same reasons is invited to a bloody game that promises him a lot of money if he is alive at the end of East.

this is where the importance of money as a way to meet the most basic needs of each person it comes into play in order to affect the rational way in which decisions are made. Money is established as the main protagonist of the series, making it clear that it is directly linked to ours. survival within society and our behavior within it, being a dominant factor within our Actions.

Through this series we wanted to convey to the audience the importance of money in our lives, how it dominates our behavior, and make us reflect on this and on what we would do in the situation of the players. Even if we have to go over our moral principles? Is money so important, influential and dominant in our lives and in today's society that we would attack our own. loved ones in order to preserve a privileged position?

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Making hasty decisions in an environment blinded by need and greed

In each chapter we can see that the characters go through different situations of vulnerability in their lives: extreme poverty, terminal illness, forced migration, or different types of aggression.

And it is the vulnerability in which they live and the aggressions they face that favors the survival impulse to appear at different times and take control of the situation in non-rational and balanced ways, making them act aggressively.

Surely several participants regretted the decisions they made while experiencing strong emotions and were in that one. situation where not only money was at stake, but also their lives, and where it is common for emotional hijacking situations. Despite the fact that all the participants want to get out alive after each test and keep moving forward to get closer and closer to the juicy award, it is indisputable that the ambition and the tension between themselves to seek the same goal forces them to make decisions wrong.

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Competitiveness, ambition and violence as a portrait of our society

The series is thought to try to reflect the competitive society we live in, telling a story about people who initially struggle with the challenges of the day to day, but that at the end of it they always find themselves vulnerable in the same place where they started no matter what do. In this way, this fierce competition arrives that we see as fictitious and that promises the players that if they are committed enough to do anything, in the end they will change their lives.

It's really not very different from the society we live in today, where sees life as a competition or as an individual sport where being very competitive and not collaborating is the best way for us to achieve personal progress and ultimately get out of the "vulnerable position" where we find ourselves.

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What are the consequences?

The clearest consequence of viewing this type of highly explicit content is the normalization of violence, so that even in some chapters the need for it is justified in terms of the end to any means; several participants lose any type of empathy, characters appear with stories and emotions with which we we have felt identified and that at some point we do not question or do not reflect on their decisions more impulsive

For this reason, it can sometimes be problematic for this type of content to go viral that repeatedly can desensitize us to violence, to which we end up getting used episode after episode looking for strong emotions that each time have less emotional impact than the previous one, but they do have an impact on our brain. These representations encourage us to stop reacting to this type of content, so that we can minimize it or even normalize it in the real life and in our society, which would end because of this desensitization, coming to legitimize social injustice, dehumanizing and losing the empathy among the people who make it up, along with their sense of belonging and community.