Stanley Milgram became a controversial and compelling public figure as a result of his shocking 1962 experiment, Obedience to Authority, which revealed the extraordinary actions average people will take to follow orders. When published, the world was reeling as new information about the Holocaust came to light though the Eichmann trials.
The film Obedience, which documented the experiment and provided visual evidence of the results, began Milgram’s interest in film as an educational tool. He went on to create five more films over the course of his career on other social psychology topics, all of which are now available in online streaming format for the first time, exclusively from Alexander Street Press.
Other films in the Milgram series include:
- The City and the Self — A combination art and documentary film exploring the concepts of urban overload, selective attention, and cases like the murder of Kitty Genovese.
- Conformity and Independence — An examination of psychology’s primary findings on why people conform, obey, and dissent in various social situations.
- Human Aggression — An exploration of the major scientific principles governing human aggression, using examples from a youth gang to illustrate how aggression is learned and expressed.
- Invitation to Social Psychology — An overview of the guiding principles of social psychology, including reenactments of experiments from renowned researchers like Asch, Bandura, and Zimbardo.
- Nonverbal Communication — A collection of expert interviews discussing research theories on nonverbal behavior including gesture, expression, and body language.
