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Obedience
Considered one of the most famous experimental studies in psychology of all time, Obedience focuses on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Conceived in the wake of the World War II criminal trial of Adolph Eichmann, who ordered the deaths of millions of Jews, the experiment was designed to explore how far people would go when under the instruction of an authority figure. Based on footage shot at Yale University, subjects were told to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to another person. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock. Fifty years later, this experiment still resonates as people ask themselves, “Would I pull that lethal switch?”

This is the only authentic film footage of Milgram’s famous experiment and is essential to all foundational work in social psychology at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school level.

About Stanley Milgram
Obedience 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.

Milgram conducted research that includes the well-known studies in small world (the source of “Six Degrees of Separation”), the lost-letter technique, mental maps of cities, the familiar stranger, and other important work central to the study of social psychology. Each of these films provides arresting visual imagery to supplement classroom instruction and discussion around a variety of essential themes, figures, and experiments in social psychology, making even complex topics accessible to a wide variety of students.