A French TV documentary features people in a spoof game show administering what they are told are near lethal electric shocks to rival contestants.
Those taking part are told to pull levers to inflict shocks – increasing in voltage – upon their opponents.
Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no
electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to
pull the lever.
Programme makers say they wanted to expose the dangers of reality TV shows.
They say the documentary shows how many participants in the setting
of a TV show will agree to act against their own principles or moral
codes when ordered to do something extreme.
The Game of Death has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz
show, with a roaring crowd chanting “punishment” and a glamorous hostess
urging the players on.
Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary, said they were
“amazed” that so many participants obeyed the sadistic orders of the
game show presenter.
“They are not equipped to disobey,” he told AFP.
“They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to.”
Yale experiment
The results reflect those of a similar experiment carried out almost
50 years ago at Yale University by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Participants took the role of a teacher, delivering what they
believed were shocks to an actor every time they answered a question
incorrectly.
Mr Nick says that his experiment shows that the TV element further increases people’s willingness to obey.
“With Milgram, 62% of people obeyed despicable orders. In the setting of television, it’s 80%,” he told Reuters.
The documentary was broadcast on the state-owned France 2 channel on Wednesday evening.
The Milgram experiment
The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the
experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks
to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject
believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual
electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being
separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder
integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded
sounds for each shock level etc.[1]
The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures
was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale
University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness
of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to
perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram
first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[2]
The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of
the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: “Was it
that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in
at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?” In other words,
“Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?” Milgram’s
testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of
accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their
deepest moral beliefs.
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