Shock Room (ATOM Study Guide)

We do as we're told. Or do we?

In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, in seeking to understand the Holocaust, ran a series of controversial experiments on obedience. An authority orders you to inflict painful shocks on another person. Most of us will obey, claimed Milgram. But will we? And were Milgram's experiments as much art as science? In dramatising previously unfilmed versions of the world's most famous psychology experiment, Shock Room turns a light on the dark side of human behaviour and forces us to ask ourselves: what would I do?

Curriculum guidelines
Watching Shock Room is a challenging and at times quite distressing experience. The documentary is suitable for senior secondary and tertiary students in the areas of Psychology, Media and Screen Studies, and Ethics. It is essential that teachers intending to show this film to their students provide them with enough of the background material in this guide to have a contextual framework in which to understand the filmmaker's intentions and approach to restaging and dramatising Milgram's 1962 experiments into obedience now.