{"id":37,"date":"2015-04-02T12:08:38","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T16:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=37"},"modified":"2015-09-01T18:20:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T22:20:24","slug":"advance-planning-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/advance-planning-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Advance Planning"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>Stanley Milgram\u2019s studies of obedience to authority<\/a> 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\u2013a basic argument of almost all social psychology.\n

\"A<\/a>
A familiar pose: Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Experimenter<\/a><\/em>, 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\u2019s best film. In the March-April Film Comment<\/em>, she says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Michael Almereyda\u2019s Experimenter<\/em> 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\u2019s screenplay and direction\u2014this is far and away his strongest, most coherent, and moving film\u2014and Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder\u2019s performances as the titular experimenter and his wife capture the profound sense of irony that infused the Milgrams\u2019 entire life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Experimenter<\/em> is scheduled for general release on October 16. Here is the trailer.<\/p>\n