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Game of Death: Contestant 'Tortured' on Fake French Quiz Show
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by Jordan Yerman | March 17, 2010 at 01:54 pm
1061 views | 10 Recommendations | 2 comments
Game of Death: Fake French Game Show has Contestant 'Tortured' by Participants
A documentary called Le Jeu de la Mort (Game of Death) focuses on a game show called X-treme Zone, which features a contestant trying to answer trivia questions. However, for each question he got wrong, he'd get electrocuted by participants, who are urged to crank up the voltage by the studio audience and the show's hostess.
The show was fake- part of a psychological study on people's willingness to follow orders.
Out of 80 volunteers, 64 were willing to crank the voltage up to lethal levels. Of course, nobody was actually electrocuted during the experiment, but the exercise exposed a strange willingness of individuals to surrender responsibility for their actions to a third party.
The experiments showed a troubling willingness to obey requests, even if those requests had an obviously harmful effect on someone else. The general consensus of the participants was "the producers would never willingly let someone get hurt, right?"
The "contestants" were offered no financial incentives, only the opportunity to play the game.
Game of Death was based on a Yale University experiment from 1961, which examined the mindset behind the "just following orders" defense for Nazi war crimes, and why the Third Reich's victims went along with their persecutors during the early stages of genocide. Ironically, the French experiment included volunteers who were descendants of Nazi victims.
“I felt that I was being carried forward not so much by the instructions, but more by the context,” says one anonymous participant in the documentary. “The cameras, the atmosphere, being on stage, the subject and the place… It’s one big package and it affects your personality. The machine definitely has a tight grip.”
"They are obedient, but it's more than mere obedience, because there is also the pressure of the audience and cameras everywhere," said Jacques Semelin, a psychologist who helped design the experiment.
Check out Timeslive's photo reenactment, complete with stormtroopers.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 14:43 on March 17th, 2010
Scary stuff
at 21:51 on March 17th, 2010
In the worst case scenario, 20 to 30 volts is all it would take to kill someone, yet in other situations, you can get a 'static' shock of a few thousand volts and suffer no ill effects. This is because weather an electric shock will kill you depends on the current, the amount of time you are shocked for, and the path the electricity takes through the body. The question, then, is whether the participants knew that there was a certain level above which the shock became deadly. Even if they were not told explicitly that 'above xxx Volts there is a high risk of death' , they should have been able to judge this based on the reactions of the person getting shocked.What is disturbing here is not so much that they 'killed' the person but that they kept going, even though the person was obviously in a lot of pain. - This is an example of desensitisation. The contestants kept going because the reactions from the previous shocks had become 'normal' to them.