Shock Room

Shock Room breaks open Stanley Milgram’s dramatic ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiment in the early 1960s, and forces us to re-evaluate its conclusions. Extensive research from Sydney filmmaker and self-professed Milgram obsessive, Kathryn Millard, reveals that although Milgram ran more than 25 versions of his experiment, he filmed only one. Overall, the majority of people actually resisted the orders of the Authority figure. Fifty years after Milgram’s original experiments, Millard, with a team of filmmakers and psychologists, re-staged Milgram’s experiments in Sydney, with actors an intense immersive technique. Shock Room combines dramatisations, animation, archival film and interviews with psychologists, Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher. It provides new insights about how and why people refuse to inflict harm, and questions the conclusions of the world’s most famous psychology experiment.