480. EXPLORATIONS OF MIND ON FILM: EXPERIMENTER

Peter Josyph

Michael Almereyda’s EXPERIMENTER is about Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), famous for his controversial experiments on the troubling mechanisms of human obedience that concerned him in the wake of the Holocaust. In Milgram’s experiments, participants followed the rules to give electric shocks to strangers, even though they believed—falsely—that the shocks were real. The film co-stars Winona Rider as Milgram’s wife, and Jim Gaffigan as the pretender allegedly being punished for giving wrong answers. Even though such an experiment would be considered unethical today and not sanctioned by university Institutional Research Boards, the debate still goes on in college classrooms and elsewhere as people try to define which kinds of research experiments are ethical and which are not, even though they may lead to valuable revelations about human beings.

1:00 – 3:30 p.m.                                                                                                                               1 Session

Thursday, July 31                                                                                                                              Fee:  $50

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Peter Josyph works concurrently as a writer, painter, actor, photographer, and filmmaker. He has published 12 books, including five on Pulit50zer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, and a series of fictions about Henri Matisse; his paintings have exhibited around the world, and his films include: Shakespeare in New York; A Few Things Basquiat Did in School; Hell; Bardtalk; No Standing in St. Petersburg; Acting McCarthy: The Making of Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses; and the award-winning Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero.