Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority are among the most famous social psychology investigations yet conducted. They suggest that ordinary people are willing to harm others (to the point of killing them) on the orders of an authority figure who provides only minimal justification for doing so. What makes them so surprising is that they show that behavior we ordinarily attribute to strong personal convictions is largely under situational control–a basic argument of almost all social psychology.
Experimenter, a new film about the life and work of Stanley Milgram directed by Michael Almereyda, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It has received good notices. Film critic Amy Taubin chose it as the festival’s best film. In the March-April Film Comment, she says:
Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is a spare, formally ingenious biopic about Stanley Milgram, the Yale social psychology professor who in 1961 concocted an experiment that demonstrated that obedience to authority overruled morality and empathy in a large majority of his subjects. . . . Almereyda’s screenplay and direction—this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film—and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder’s performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams’ entire life.
Experimenter is scheduled for general release on October 16. Here is the trailer.
A good source of information about Milgram’s life and work is Tom Blass’s book, The Man Who Shocked the World.
The only other film I know of that directly portrays social psychological research is the 2001 German film Das Experiment, a fictionalized version of Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, a study closely related to Milgram’s work. The film deviates considerably from real events, portraying the lead experimenter as unconcerned about the suffering of the participants and eventually morphing into a thriller about whether the subjects can escape from the laboratory. Zimbardo was not amused. Nevertheless, it’s worth checking out if you can find it.
This post was revised on August 24, 2015.
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