We do as we’re told. Or do we?

In the early 1960s, US psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous psychology experiments. Trying to understand the Holocaust and why people followed orders to kill millions, Milgram designed a study, in which participants were asked to act as experimenters in a study on learning and memory. These experimenters were ordered to punish another human being with painful electric shocks whenever they answered a question wrong. Milgram concluded that most humans will obey the order and punish another person even with lethal shocks.

Kathryn Millard revisits the Milgram experiments in her documentary “Shock room”. She not only presents footage of the original trials, but also re-staged some of the previously un-filmed versions and conditions of this experiment, to explore if and when humans indeed do as they are told.

“Shock room” won the award for the Best Feature Documentary at the Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2015. The jury decided that “In terms of being a riveting seventy minutes that explores the dark side of human nature…Kathryn Millard’s excellent direction of dramatic re-enactments drew us into the many uncomfortable scenes that put us in the position to ponder – when would we stand up and just say NO!”

The ScienceCampus Movie Nights show “Shock room” for the first time in Germany. Margarete Boos from the University of Göttingen will offer comments and discussion about the film.