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Social Experiment - Moral Pharmacist



When a pharmacist refuses to fill a young girl's prescription for contraceptives, the others in the waiting room react. The conflict for them is whether he has the right to refuse her based on his morals?

From a social psychology point of view, this video is a good exploration of Attitudes, how they are formed and what function they serve the people in this experiment.

Our attitudes are part of our Emotional Aspect of Being, are patterns of beliefs and values and shape our future actions. There are three types of Attitudes (A, B, C: Affectively based (emotional), Behaviourally based (observing behaviours of others) and Cognitively based (reacting with our rational thoughts over our emotions).

We've learned, also, that Attitudes are very much linked to Motivation - they help us gain approval or acceptance of others, help us make sense of our surroundings, protect ourselves from uncomfortable truths around us, and help us demonstrate our own unique ideas and values.

In this video, it is interesting that some feel more comfortable expressing showing their attitude, either directly to the young girl(s) or to the pharmacist himself. Others only share an attitude after the confrontation has passed.

For this particular situation, with the young girls (actresses) being only 16, there is also a conflict for people in their values - they may believe a woman has the right to take care of herself and the pharmacist has no right to refuse her that, but they may also disagree with the idea of a young girl having premarital sex ... so there is a conflict between their values. Our Congitive Dissonance man would say the pharmacist is doing the wrong thing but for the right reason.

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