Social Cognition in Inception

1081 Words5 Pages
In the movie Inception Dominic Cobb is approached by Saito, a Japanese businessman, to help him break up the corporate empire of his rival Maurice Fischer. The success of the mission for Dominic Cobb and accomplices relies on the character Robert Fischer’s relationship with his dying father Maurice. The mission, called Inception, is the planting of an idea into someone’s subconscious through their dreams. Saito approaches Dominic to perform Inception on Robert Fischer to try to shake up the rival corporation. To achieve this, Dominic and accomplices have to build a dreamscape in which Robert Fischer must project his own ideas and reflections into positive emotional logic. The goal is to enable Fischer to produce his own belief in the idea that "My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps.” Inception is complete upon the moment Fischer, based on his projected subconscious, dreams of a conversation in which his father confirms this idea. In reality it is made clear that Robert’s father never loved him, but Robert had to reconcile his painful relationship with his father at the point of trying to discover a “second will” in his dream. Fischer’s representation of the “second will” reflecting the love his father always had for him was imposed to reduce the cognitive dissonance that existed and reversed a negative emotional experience to a positive one. Cognitive dissonance arises at the point of discrepancy among two concepts in a person that motivates them to reduce the discomfort through restoring consistency. Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Experiment shows the innate drive to keep an orderly cognitive state. In the experiment, two groups were informed they were to participate in a performance test. It was designed so that it involved two very tedious tasks. At the end of the task a experimenter asked one person from the group to
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