Human nature: France’s Game of Death

American reality TV may be tacky and exploitative, said Lisa de Moraes in The Washington Post, but so far “no one appears to have been executed.” French TV last week aired The Game of Death, a live documentary in which members of the public, thinking they were competing in a new game show, were told to keep ratcheting up electric shocks to a fellow contestant strapped into a chair. As the studio audience chanted “punishment,” 81 percent of the contestants raised the voltage up to the point that the victim stopped screaming and appeared to have died. In fact, said Brent Bozell in Human­Events.com, the “deceased” was an actor, there was no electricity, and the whole setup was an elaborate—and disturbing—demonstration of the “power of television” to corrode our basic humanity.

Don’t blame television, said John Lichfield in the London Independent. As the show’s producers acknowledged, their “game” was based on the famous experiments by psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In Milgram’s version, the subjects were instructed to keep raising the voltage not by a glamorous hostess in a TV studio, but by a white-coated scientist in a laboratory. Milgram was trying to understand how Nazi death camp guards were persuaded to commit the atrocities of the Holocaust, and he found that most people will submit to the commands, however evil, of any authority figure. This is “something deeply rooted in the human psyche”—not the creation of reality TV. In fact, by demonstrating the dangers of blind obedience, said Archie Bland, also in The Independent, The Game of Death may make it less likely that its viewers will follow immoral commands in the future.

Maybe viewers will come away with a different lesson entirely, said Robert Mackey in NYTimes.com. Consider, if you will, the supposedly mindless subjects in Milgram’s experiments. They were actually correct in assuming it was safe to follow the commands of a white-coated scientist, because no scientist would order a subject to kill someone. Similarly, the French game show contestants may have correctly guessed that “television producers would not ask them to do something as immoral as what they appeared to be doing.” That meant that it was all a hoax—a show. So why not play along? In a world in which everyone and everything can be the subject of a TV show, we’re all performers, just waiting for a chance to perform.

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