In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the "obedience experiments" at Yale University. The experiments observed the responses of ordinary people asked to send harmful electrical shocks to a stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65 percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure to deliver potentially fatal currents. With Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram’s Kafkaesque results hit a nerve, and he was accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster. EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram’s whirring mind, beginning with his obedience research and wending a path to uncover how inner obsessions and the times in which he lived shaped a parade of human behavior inquiries.

MOVIE REVIEW

If you’ve ever taken a psychology class, you’ve likely heard of the famous experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram: he put two individuals in separate rooms, and told one (the teacher) to ask the other (the learner) a series of multiple choice questions. If the learner got the answer wrong, the teacher was to apply a shock of electricity that increased with each incorrect response. What the teacher didn’t know was that he/she was not actually electrocuting anyone--the learner was in fact in on the experiment.
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