Brought to you by Alexander Street Press

Human Aggression
By depicting spontaneous and startling occurrences of aggression in the activities of a youth gang and relating them to scientific principles and laboratory findings, this film succeeds in communicating the major specific scientific principles and findings on human aggression.

The program focuses on how aggression is learned by children, and the activities of the gang are used to demonstrate aggression in terms of dominance and territoriality, frustration and displacement. The program also highlights Bard’s work on the psychological training of police, Bandura and Walters’ Bobo doll experiment, Milgram’s work with group influences on aggression, and the findings of Sykes and Matza on the legitimization of aggression in delinquent groups.

About Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram became a controversial and compelling public figure as a result of his shocking 1961 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 through 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.

Milgram also 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.