{"id":326,"date":"2016-02-11T18:06:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T23:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=326"},"modified":"2016-03-26T16:27:49","modified_gmt":"2016-03-26T20:27:49","slug":"an-embarrassment-of-riches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/an-embarrassment-of-riches\/","title":{"rendered":"An Embarrassment of Riches"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first time, not one but two<\/i> filmmakers have made serious attempts to portray\u00a0research in social psychology. Experimenter<\/a><\/i>, written and directed by Michael Almereyda, is about Stanley Milgram\u2019s 1961-62 obedience studies, and The Stanford Prison Experiment<\/a><\/i>, written by Tim Talbott and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, recreates Philip Zimbardo\u2019s 1971 prison simulation. Please take a moment and read these two blog posts (Milgram here<\/a> and Zimbardo here<\/a>)\u00a0which\u00a0I wrote before I saw the films. They contain background information about the studies and the official trailers of the two films.<\/p>\n

There are important similarities between these two research programs. Both support situationism<\/a><\/i>, 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\u00a0controversial, with critics maintaining that it was unethical to subject unwitting volunteers to the psychological stress that they generated. Neither would be allowed by today\u2019s institutional review boards. They represent, for some of us, a distant golden age when\u00a0social 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.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s widow, was a consultant to\u00a0Experimenter<\/em>, and Phil Zimbardo played an active role in The Stanford Prison Experiment<\/i>\u2018s production. Both films received favorable reviews but almost no nationwide distribution, and as a result they were financially unsuccessful. The Stanford Prison Experiment <\/i>grossed $644,000 in its first three months<\/a>, and Experimenter<\/i> only $155,000 in two months<\/a>. It will probably be a long time before we see another movie about one of those boring social psychologists.<\/p>\n

In spite of these similarities, the films are quite different. The Stanford Prison Experiment<\/i>\u00a0attempts to portray the study as realistically as possible. Experimenter\u00a0<\/em>is more abstract,\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

The Stanford Prison Experiment\u00a0<\/em>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\u2019s\u00a0intent 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.<\/p>\n