For the first time, not one but two filmmakers have made serious attempts to portray research in social psychology. Experimenter, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, is about Stanley Milgram’s 1961-62 obedience studies, and The Stanford Prison Experiment, written by Tim Talbott and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, recreates Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 prison simulation. Please take a moment and read these two blog posts (Milgram here and Zimbardo here) which I wrote before I saw the films. They contain background information about the studies and the official trailers of the two films.

There are important similarities between these two research programs. Both support situationism, the school of psychology which claims that human behavior is largely determined by its immediate social environment rather than by personal qualities of the behaving individual. Both Milgram and Zimbardo have suggested that their research can help to explain wartime atrocities such as the torture of prisoners and the mass killings of the Holocaust. The dramatic behavioral changes that occurred in these experiments are surprising to most people, and the studies are sometimes summarily rejected for this reason. Both studies were controversial, with critics maintaining that it was unethical to subject unwitting volunteers to the psychological stress that they generated. Neither would be allowed by today’s institutional review boards. They represent, for some of us, a distant golden age when social psychology dealt with more important social questions. (Finally, in an interesting coincidence, Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo both graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1950. They were acquaintances, but not close friends.)

There are also similarities between the films themselves. Both are independent productions obviously made on a shoestring budget. They both premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. To their credit, both filmmakers meticulously re-created the original experiments. Sasha Milgram, Stanley’s widow, was a consultant to Experimenter, and Phil Zimbardo played an active role in The Stanford Prison Experiment‘s production. Both films received favorable reviews but almost no nationwide distribution, and as a result they were financially unsuccessful. The Stanford Prison Experiment grossed $644,000 in its first three months, and Experimenter only $155,000 in two months. It will probably be a long time before we see another movie about one of those boring social psychologists.

In spite of these similarities, the films are quite different. The Stanford Prison Experiment attempts to portray the study as realistically as possible. Experimenter is more abstract, and is ultimately the more interesting of the two. For example, while both films show the researchers observing experimental participants from behind one-way mirrors, Almereyda seems to use mirrors as a metaphor to comment on social psychology as a profession.

The Stanford Prison Experiment covers the time from when the participants were recruited to their debriefing the day after the experiment ended. Most of the film, like the experiment itself, takes place in a small, enclosed space, with lots of in-your-face closeups. Alvarez’s intent seems to have been to induce claustrophobia, so viewers can share the experience of incarceration. Here is a scene in which one of the prisoners is placed in solitary confinement (a closet) for refusing to eat his sausages.

In spite of Zimbardo’s participation in the production, the film contains some none-too-subtle criticisms of him. As portrayed by Billy Crudup, he resembles the devil, a look that Zimbardo himself may have sought. Early in the experiment, he appears to incite the guards to behave more provocatively—a clear violation of research methodology. Although the guards were told that physical aggression was forbidden, he ignores a guard’s act of violence reported to him by his graduate assistants. Although he stops the experiment on the sixth day at the insistence of his girlfriend (later, wife) Christina Maslach, the film leads viewers to conclude that he was negligent in not ending it sooner. The filmmakers fail to dramatize his reasons for not discontinuing the study—his commitments to his graduate students, his department and university, and his funding sources, all of whom were expecting tangible results from all the time and effort that went into the study.

The first half hour of Experimenter is a realistic re-creation of the obedience experiments. Here is one of Milgram’s debriefings in which he first attempts to confront the participant with the ethical implications of his behavior, but then allows him to evade responsibility by showing him that the victim is unharmed.

Milgram is ambivalent toward his participants. His situationism makes him sympathetic to their plight, as illustrated by this quote from his book, Obedience to Authority.

Sitting back in one’s armchair, it is easy to condemn the actions of the obedient subjects. But those who condemn the subjects measure them against the standard of their own ability to formulate high-minded moral prescriptions. That is hardly a fair standard. Many of the subjects, at the level of stated opinion, feel quite a strongly as any of us about the moral requirement of refraining from action against a helpless victim. They, too, in general terms know what ought to be done and can state their values when the occasion arises. This has little, if anything, to do with their actual behavior under the pressure of circumstances.

Much of the rest of Experimenter reminded me of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, in which the narrator speaks directly to the audience and introduces scenes some of which take place in front of deliberately artificial-looking sets. In Experimenter, Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard) is the narrator, and his narration tends to distance the audience from the events being depicted. Here is a scene of Stanley and Sasha (Winona Ryder) sitting in a fake car with a black-and-white photograph as background, reading a New York Times article about the obedience studies.

Some of the narration consists of recognizable paraphrases of statements from Milgram’s book and articles. They emphasize not only his intellectualism but also his sense of ironic detachment from his research. As portrayed by Almereyda, he applies this detachment to his personal life as well. Critics have debated the meaning of the elephant in the room. (I’m serious; there’s a real elephant there, and nobody notices.) Its first appearance seems to signifiy the Holocaust. The second time it wanders in, Milgram deadpans, “1984 was also the year in which I died.” He died of a heart attack in a hospital emergency room while Sasha filled out medical forms. Almereyda seems to suggest that he may have died because his wife was unwilling to disobey authority.

Experimenter covers the time from the obedience studies until Milgram’s death. This is a problem for Almereyda since Milgram’s greatest accomplishment occurred early in life. He notes that Milgram’s life was anti-climactic, but then so is the film. Much of it concerns other people’s reactions to the obedience studies, beginning with his failure to get tenure at Harvard, and including his frustrating experience with a TV play, The Tenth Level, that sensationalized his research.

Milgram was probably the most creative of all social psychologists. Some of his later contributions, such as the lost-letter technique and the small world problem (“six degrees of separation”), are presented clearly. Not so, his research on urban psychology. Although a couple of his demonstrations are shown, they are presented out of context. Milgram attributed many of the peculiarities of urban life to information overload, a point which could have been clarified by inserting a few sentences from his 1970 paper, “The Experience of Living in Cities.” His research on cyranoids was not included. These unpublished studies ask the question, “If someone secretly controlled what you said, would anyone notice?” Their omission was a missed opportunity for Almereyda, since you could argue that they illustrate what was, or should have been, one of the dominant themes of the film.

I hope my insider criticisms won’t discourage anyone from seeking out these two films. I strongly recommend them both, and I hope my colleagues in social psychology will encourage their students to learn from them.

Recommended reading:

Milgram, Stanley (1974).  Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

Blass, Thomas (2004).  The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram.

Zimbardo, Philip G. (2000).  The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

You may also be interested in reading:

Advance Planning

Social Psychology on Film, Take 2

The Dirty Dozen of 2015