There's a new movie out on the Milgram experiments -- the ones where subjects were told, calmly and patiently, to keep upping the level of electric shocks to an increasingly distraught victim in another room.  "Experimenter" stars Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram, Winona Ryder as his wife, and John Leguizamo and Anthony Edwards (among others) as the subjects.  You can catch the trailer here.  There is also film of the actual experiments themselves; here's one segment.  Watching these is painful -- it's not surprising that we now have IRBs -- but the experiments really capture something important about human nature.

2015 is apparently a boom year for dramatic films about psychology experiments.  "The Stanford Prison Experiment" came out earlier this year -- here's the trailer.  There's also existing archival footage as well.  Next year I'm looking forward to a gripping thriller about subjects trying to decide how much to charge for a mug.  "I want to charge more, but it's just ... not ... RATIONAL!"

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