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Columnists | Opinion

Columnist: Darker side of human nature revealed in French reality show

By Eryk Salvaggio
Posted on March 22, 2010, at 1:38 a.m.

It was a brand-new game show with a simple set of rules: If your partner gets an answer wrong, give him an electric shock. That was enough for 65 contestants to torture their partners to death.

It wasn’t a science fiction film, it was a social experiment by way of a reality television show on France’s “Le Jeu de la Mort,” — which translates to “The Game of Death” — last Wednesday. Contestants didn’t kill anyone; their randomly selected partners were actors, and so were the audience members. But the contestants didn’t know that, and they tortured their partners anyway.

The set-up was part of a documentary by French filmmaker Thomas Bornot, who borrowed heavily from a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University researcher Stanley Milgram in the ’60s.

In Milgram’s study, participants were asked to join a research project, where they would be paired with another “participant” — who was actually an undercover actor. Participants were told to read questions over an intercom and administer electric shocks for every wrong answer they received, up to 450 volts.

At a certain point, the actor would scream and demand it to stop. If the participant tried to stop, the head of the study would give one of four pre-arranged verbal prods that urged them to continue.

The result: 65 percent of students administered the maximum voltage, enough to kill the person in the other room. The experiment was repeated in different cities and different environments, but the results remained remarkably constant. On “The Game of Death,” in which this experiment was replicated with a beautiful host and a cheering audience, the number soared even higher: Only 16 out of 80 contestants didn’t kill their “partner.” Milgram’s — and now, Bornot’s — revelation about human nature is that most of us, when ordered to do something, will do it.

Claude Halmos, a psychologist interviewed by BBC about the game show, said while we must teach children to obey, “We must also teach them how to disobey.” This means taking the time to explain rules to kids, rather than asking them to blindly follow them. If children have the freedom to question authority figures in their young lives — such as parents and teachers — then they will grow up to be adults who question authority.

This is not the same as raising a generation of armed revolutionaries. The ability to stop and think when confronted with an order is not an invitation to set a car on fire or burn down a police station — in fact, these kinds of behaviors often occur in situations in which the crowd is the authority, such as in riots. Teaching ourselves to examine our impulses toward order and chaos would bring us a safer, more sane world.

But while the prescription for our species’ future may be useful, it doesn’t help us with the generation of yes-men that are already here. If 65 percent of people would torture someone to death on camera for a chance to “win” a game, and almost all would torture the person for a bit before their conscience got the best of them, then we are a race of closet sociopaths.

Protection from abuses of power is clearly essential. It was the logic behind the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg: By setting the precedent that you would be judged for the orders you give and for the orders you follow, the Allied Forces were trying to create a sense of a higher authority for subordinates to fear. But clearly, it doesn’t work.

No authority, even the fear of God, could stop those shocks. Humans, no matter what they believe in, are hardwired to defer to authority and to lose our sense of responsibility when told what to do.

Is our species hopeless? Not if we begin to condition ourselves to critically analyze every order we take for granted. If there has ever been a practical case for philosophy and ethics classes, it is this one: The ability to stop and examine our actions is becoming an obsolete talent.

Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010, 1:38 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.

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  • http://pgn674.com Paul Nickerson

    I wonder if this human nature of obedience helped allow for a US statute and border guards that can get you convicted of a felony and potentially put in jail for two years for asking why: http://preview.tinyurl.com/y9ytqgp

  • Donna Cook

    I have so many responses to this issue ….. I will try to keep to the important ones.

    I personally will not watch the vast majority of reality shows or any form of ‘entertainment’ where humiliation is at the forefront firstly because I squirm internally for those who are being humiliated. The main reason I do not however is that I have come to realise, the hard way, that I am gullible as well as suseptible to peer and or authority preasure and I am quite sure that the mor one watches the higher ones threshold becomes.

    As a Canadian, where being law abiding is part of our national description, I would like to see an exploration of how we, as a species or group, decide who is the ‘authority’ figure. I fully understand that power (can) corrupt, but what is it in the rest of us to sit back and say or think ‘someone should do something?’ What is the line between a moral authority figure and one who lets the power go to their head?

    Furthermore, is there something in our nature to take the easy way out? Oh well, it can’t happen to me or mine, they (the authorities) must know what they are doing, and so on.
    We also seem quite willing to pay lip service to the issue of the day or decade (bullying in school being one) but we do not seem to be prepared to stay at it over the long term. How much of that is simply laziness? Perhaps that is why it seemed so easy to replicate the ‘zap your fellows’ experiment without really considering the long term consequences.

    My last questions,how aware were the contestants of the exact terms of the show before they agreed to the show? Did they know pain was to be involved? Did anyone refuse to join the show right from the get-go? Why? I think the whole concept was more to achieve notoriety than to inform or spark debate.

    What a shame we can sell (no doubt for a fair amount of money) humiliation and pain infliction as ‘entertainment’ by pretending it serves a higher moral purpose. The higher moral purpose would have been served if someone somewhere looked this guy in the face and asked him if he was completely soulless and devoid of empathy.

    Thank you for the opportunity and your forebearance. This issue is definitely something that should be part of an ongoing debate. And yes we should all take philosophy and ethics classes.

  • Jun

    Interesting, thank you, Eryk.

    I disagree with you, that humans are hardwired to obey. The Nazi regime was not an open society and disobedience did not present itself as an option for many Germans once the war started. I’m not sure that the trials afterward were to instill a greater hierarchical power in German peoples psych, but rather to allot justice for their war crimes. Many times the greatest fear, that which causes people to carry out an order they otherwise would deny, is the closest threat (in this case a superior officer). This is a logical course of action for a person to take, to deal with the imminent threat in disobeying an order and worry about a war tribunal when and if that happens. After all, Germany could have won the war and history would only read that traitors to the third reich were shot.

    So, I disagree with your idea that we are hardwired, but very much agree that it is essential to prevent abuses of power. Of course, being a soldier during wartime is possibly the most difficult situation for a person to try and gauge whether or not his orders are just, but a game show is not.

    Did the contestants know that the amount of electricity they were about to administer was sufficient to harm or even kill?

    From your piece, I’m not sure that the contestants understood the potential ramifications of their continually elevating shock treatments.