Sundance exclusive: Peter Sarsgaard is shocking as 'The Experimenter'

Sundance exclusive: Peter Sarsgaard is shocking as 'The Experimenter'

It's about Stanley Milgram, a brilliant, trailblazing social psychologist whose experiments were often conducted outside of the field's usual conservative parameters.

"His controversial 1961 study, which he devised to study and understand the 'just following orders' psychology that enabled the Holocaust, monitored volunteers who were politely instructed to apply painful electric-shocks to a subject strapped to a chair whenever he answered incorrectly. That set-up was a ruse: the volunteers were the ones actually being tested, and Milgram found that 65 per cent of them were willing to zap the subject — an actor pretending — with shocks that would’ve been fatal."