Fake TV Game Show About Obedience Shocks France

NPR reports that a documentary about a fake reality game show has shocked France. In the documentary, titled “Game of Death,” researchers conducting a psychological experiment masked as a reality show attempted “to see how far people would go in obeying authority, especially if television reinforces that authority.” Set up as a TV quiz show, there was a well-known, attractive hostess, a loud audience, and a group of contestants who posed questions to a man in an electric chair in front of them. When the man answered questions incorrectly, “the hostess and a chanting audience urged the players—who had levers in front of them—to send jolts of electricity into the man.” The players and audience did not know that the man in the electric chair was an actor and that he was not actually being shocked. For the players and audience, the man’s pain was real. Even when he “screamed out in pain for them to stop,” 80 percent of contestants continued to electrocute the man until he appeared to die. The filmmakers explain that “reality television relies increasingly on violent, humiliating and cruel acts to boost ratings. They say they simply wanted to see if we would go so far as to kill someone for entertainment.” The experiment closely resembles Stanley Milgram’s famous research on obedience in the early 1960s, which showed that “something deeply rooted in the human psyche makes most of us unable to resist authority.”