480. EXPLORATIONS OF MIND ON FILM: EXPERIMENTER

Peter Josyph   Michael Almereyda’s EXPERIMENTER is about Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), famous for his controversial experiments on the troubling mechanisms of human obedience that concerned him in the wake of the Holocaust. In Milgram’s experiments, participants followed the rules to give electric shocks to strangers, even though they believed—falsely—that the shocks were real. The film co-stars Winona Rider as Milgram’s wife, and Jim Gaffigan as the pretender allegedly being punished for giving wrong answers. Even though such an experiment would be considered unethical today and not sanctioned by university Institutional Research Boards, the debate still goes on in college classrooms and elsewhere as people try to define which kinds of research experiments are ethical and which are not, even though they may lead to valuable revelations about human beings. 1:00 – 3:30 p.m.