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Invitation to Social Psychology
By placing an emphasis on three questions — What is the subject matter of social psychology? What are its methods of investigation? What are some of its findings? —this film is able to provide an overview of the field of social psychology. The program features reenactments of Asch’s experiment on conformity, Bandura and Walters’ work on the social learning of aggression, Milgram’s study of obedience, and Zimbardo’s prison simulation.

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.