EXPERIMENTER SHOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PSYCHOLOGISTS IGNORE PHILOSOPHY
A biopic of famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard), Experimenter reviews his career, which is traced back to when he is a grad student of Harvard’s Solomon Asch (Ned Eisenberg), who proved in the early 1950s that most students conform to group pressure, even betraying what their eyes see at a time when David Riesman was decrying the lack of inner-directedness in American society in his coauthored The Lonely Crowd (1950). As a professor at Yale, Milgram evidently takes note of Eichmann’s arrest in 1960 to design an experiment in which subjects are asked to administer increasing levels of electric shocks to presumed bad learners in order to determine whether punishment is a successful way to promote better learning. From 1961-1962, he finds that 65 percent of his subjects, regardless of race or sex, are willing to go to the maximum level of punishment as long as they believe that a legitimate authority—such as the “good of science”—requires them to do so. His remarkable findings get him a job at Harvard as Assistant Professor, but criticisms mount that his experiment is inhumane, resulting in a rule adopted by the American Psychological Association that a faculty committee must review proposed experiments with human subjects before they are allowed. Milgram is then denied tenure at Harvard and moves to the Graduate Center at the City University of New York for the rest of his career. The film next reviews later experiments, mostly on the same theme. But those who drive to the cinema where Experimenter is playing in West Los Angeles have already encountered many disobedient drivers who run red lights and fail to display directional signals before turns. Although such disobedient motorists might be deemed heroes to a naïve fan of Milgram, in fact his experimental subjects have one element in common with disobedient motorists—lack of concern for others. Milgram remains perplexed with his findings throughout his career, even noting with puzzlement—and questionnaires—that the same persons can line up day after day along a stop for a commuter train into New York City without ever knowing anything about their fellow train riders. Yet he never realizes that what he has been encountering is lack of friendliness and inconsiderate behavior—that is, lack of Aloha. Although a political science major at Queens College, he also makes no reference to a basic underlying philosophical discussion in which Thomas Hobbes once argued that persons must accept authority or live in chaos whereas John Locke posited that people allow government to preserve order provided that individuals are guaranteed basic rights. Milgram does not explore which contract about authority is accepted by his experimental subjects or why. Perhaps because educational, family, and religious systems are so authoritarian that they never explain that human rights are never to be violated? Milgram’s experiment provides no such explanation to his subjects, who are left to ponder their roles based on what they have learned who knows where, yet 35 percent disobey, and the film does not focus on them. Directed by Michael Almereyda, Experimenter leaves audiences as puzzled as was Milgram; there is even an anomic-sounding film score. Nevertheless, the Political Film Society has nominated Experimenter as best film exposé of 2015 because the conundrum is offered so that filmviewers will have to solve the puzzle on their own as they navigate their way home. MH