News

For the last two years, Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher have been collaborating with award-winning film-maker and respected film scholar Kathryn Millard on a new documentary film about Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments. 

The film is due for release in September 2014. Millard, Haslam, and Reicher will discuss the project and other aspects of their collaboration in a symposium at the forthcoming General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology in Amsterdam.

A synopsis of Shock Room is as follows:

What would you do?
Stanley Milgram’s dramatic psychology experiments on ‘Obedience to Authority’ concluded that most of us will blindly obey orders. Fifty years later, social psychologists Alex Haslam and Steven Reicher and film scholar and director Kathryn Millard break open this research in the compelling new feature documentary Shock Room. Combining never-before-filmed versions of Milgram’s experiments with interviews and animation, it provides graphic new insights into how and why people comply with harmful orders. And, just as importantly, it examines how and why people refuse to inflict harm. Shock Room forces us to ask ourselves: What would I do?

Stills from Shock Room directed by Kathryn Millard, Charlie Productions. Release date: September 1, 2014.

Top: Graham McRae as Harry and Martin Crewes as The Learner
Middle: Ling-Hsueh Tang as Sarah
Bottom: Christian Willis as George and Simon London as The Experimenter