Why would four young men watch their friend die, when they could have intervened to save him? Why would a woman obey phone commands from a stranger to strip-search an innocent employee? What makes ordinary people perpetrate extraordinary abuses, like the events at Abu Ghraib?

Documentarian Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) revisits three famous behavioral studies to explore some perennial questions about why human beings commit unethical acts under particular social conditions.

Reconsidered are:

- Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments, in which subjects willingly inflicted pain on another person

- Philip Zimbardo’s alarming prisoner and guard role-playing study

- Columbia University’s 1969 experiments which illuminated how being in a group can cause a diffusion of moral responsibility.