Obedience
Thursday, June 18 – Wednesday June 24, 2020
USA 1965 Stanley Milgram 45 min
Free Virtual Screening
Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), an American social psychologist, remains best known for his landmark 1961 “Obedience to Authority” experiment, which exposed the unsettling extent to which ordinary citizens will do as they are told. In this film, made by Milgram himself and promoted as “the only authentic film footage of Milgram’s famous experiment,” we see subjects participating in an apparent study of the effects of punishment on learning. Those research subjects assigned to a “teacher” role are instructed to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to an apparent “learner” (in fact, a Milgram confederate pretending to be another research subject). Despite (feigned) agonizing protests from the learner, a majority of subjects continued to administer shocks to maximum and potentially dangerous levels. While the ethics of the experiment may have been deplorable, the film is powerful theatre and “succeeds spectacularly as arresting and compelling drama”(Gina Perry, Theory and Psychology).
Free Live Q&A
June 24 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm PDT
Register to watch the film and receive an invite to a live Zoom Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Gibson, a Clinical Ethicist with Providence Health Care, and Dr. Andrew M. Rivers, a faculty lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company, for their assistance in our presentation of Obedience.