Contestants have power to make reality TV torture

_http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article7041310.ece

02/26/10

Reality television often ends in humiliation and ridicule for those taking part — but who would be prepared to take part in a game show that featured torture or death?

The answer is most of us, judging by the results of a French experiment that involved asking people to inflict electric shocks on a fellow contestant in what they thought was a new reality TV concept.

Eighty per cent of the participants ignored pleas to stop and shrieks of pain as they continued increasing the voltage in response to wrong answers on Zone Xtrême.

“Is he dead?” asked one contestant when the voltage reached 400 and the victim fell silent.

In fact, Laurent Le Doyen was simulating pain. He is an actor and was asked to play the pivotal role in research that has given rise to a television documentary to be screened by the France 2 channel next month. The French study is a variant of a celebrated experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, in the 1960s. Milgram told volunteers that they were taking part in an experiment to analyse memory and ordered them to inflict electric shocks on a student. More than 60 per cent did so, demonstrating their willingness to put aside moral imperatives “on the command of an authority”.

In the French test, 80 volunteers were told that they were taking part in a pilot for a new game show which involved memorising words and punishing mistakes. Almost half were delighted by the concept. “It’s violent, yeah, I love it,” said one, while 28 appeared indifferent and 14 were puzzled. Christophe Nick, the producer of the documentary, and Michel Eltchaninoff, a philosopher, publish a book, L’Experience Extreme, on the research next week. Tania Young, a television presenter who was hosting the mock game show, insisted that even the reticent volunteers should continue — and almost all did.

Mr Nick and Mr Eltchaninoff said that they witnessed participants struggling between revulsion at the pain they were causing and their ability to confront the authority of the television star. Most ended up obeying Miss Young. Mr Nick and Mr Eltchaninoff said that it would be easy to dismiss the contestants as sadistic, but they were ordinary members of society. “The lesson is not that people are stupid; it is that the television has a crazy power,” Mr Nick told The Times.

It's interesting that the authority in the Milgram experiment was a doctor; now it's a game show host. This goes great lengths in telling how obedient people are to their television.

I've seen it already and although the results are quite scary in themselves, a few numbers of people did not continue with the experience.
And that was the important point but It wasn't the main focus of the show.

I think that the setting of the experiment itself played a great part in the reaction of the public and the participant, it's a tv show, there is monetary gain, the cameras and the public pressure must certainly push the candidates to dissociate or something and they lost all sense of morality osit.
But a few, seemed to not care at all and even enjoy it.

Despite showing how people have become numb and obedient it did not, in my humble opinion, explain the hows and whys we have become like that in the first place, I think it will only further the idea that humanity as a whole is weak and can be pushed to the edge, even if in part it's true, but only because we are ponerized and under the spell of psychopathy.
Transmarginal inhibition in action.

I don't know, why would they broadcast this ? to show how we need strong leaders with "good intentions" because we have no moral compass ?
I may be seeing too much into this perhaps.

I can't help but to think that I would not have even registered to participate to such things in the first place so the numbers might be skewed in this regard maybe ?

Tigersoap said:

I can't help but to think that I would not have even registered to participate to such things in the first place so the numbers might be skewed in this regard maybe ?

Click to expand...

Same here. Something to think about.

This:

“The lesson is not that people are stupid; it is that the television has a crazy power,” Mr Nick told The Times.

Click to expand...

seems to deflect the issue, to bring the focus on TV as the responsible, instead of on the people themselves.

OMG!
What's next?!?

Los said:

It's interesting that the authority in the Milgram experiment was a doctor; now it's a game show host. This goes great lengths in telling how obedient people are to their television.

Click to expand...

in the milgram experiment they never actually said that the authority person was a doctor - he was just wearing a white lab coat.
(there were many variations of the experiment, but the lab coat is true for the original one afaik)

i always say to people that the shortest possible explanation for the state of our world is PSYCHOPATHY + MILGRAM EXPERIMENT.
if you know about those 2 subjects, much becomes clear.

Iconoclast said:

in the milgram experiment they never actually said that the authority person was a doctor - he was just wearing a white lab coat.
(there were many variations of the experiment, but the lab coat is true for the original one afaik)

Click to expand...

The hostess in the tv game show was wearing white as well...

One interesting thing about the Milgram experiments was that the majority of people found the courage to go with their conscience when they saw other people doing the same.

[quote author="Stanley Milgram"]
- The rebellious actions of others severely undermines authority. In one variation, three teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and shocks. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, 36 of 40 subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well.[/quote]

I think isolation disempowers people, but when in a group rather than just thinking about what is the best thing to do they can actually do it.

Ponorization by TV - A French Documentary

I wasn't sure where to put this story, but here seemed the most logical.

There is a new documentary TV show in France. Having not seen this I can only hope that it is treated as an attempt to educate about desensitizing to torture... and not promoting it.

Contestants turn torturers in French TV experiment


by Roland Lloyd Parry – Tue Mar 16, 8:00 am ET

PARIS (AFP) – Game show contestants turn torturers in a new psychological experiment for French television, zapping a man with electricity until he cries for mercy -- then zapping him again until he seems to drop dead.

"The Game of Death" has all the trappings of a traditional television quiz show, with a roaring crowd and a glamorous and well-known hostess urging the players on under gaudy studio lights.

But the contestants did not know they were taking part in an experiment to find out whether television could push them to outrageous lengths, and which has prompted comparisons with the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

"We were amazed to find that 81 percent of the participants obeyed" the sadistic orders of the television presenter, said Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary for the state-owned France 2 channel which airs Wednesday.

"They are not equipped to disobey," he added. "They don't want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don't manage to," he told AFP.

Nick and a team of psychologists recruited 80 volunteers, telling them they were taking part in a pilot for a new television show.

The game: posing questions to another "player" and punishing him with up to 460 volts of electricity when he gets them wrong -- even until his cries of "Let me go!" fall silent and he appears to have died.

Not knowing that the screaming victim is really an actor, the apparently reluctant contestants yield to the orders of the presenter and chants of "Punishment!" from a studio audience who also believed the game was real.

Nick said 80 percent of the contestants went all the way, zapping the victim with the maximum 460 volts until he appeared to die. Out of 80 players, just 16 walked out.

One contestant interviewed afterwards said she went along with the torture despite knowing that her own grandparents were Jews who had been persecuted by the Nazis.

"Since I was a little girl, I have always asked myself why they (the Nazis) did it. How could they obey such orders? And there I was, obeying them myself," said Sophie, quoted in a book by the film makers.

"I was worried about the contestant," said another contestant. "At the same time, I was afraid to spoil the programme."

The experiment was modelled on an infamous study at Yale University in the 1960s, which used similar methods to examine how obedient citizens could come to take part in mass murder.

Some observers were sceptical of the manipulative way the participants were handled.

Jacques Semelin, a psychologist and historian who studies genocide and totalitarianism, pointed out that the participants were made to sign a contract obliging them to obey the presenter's instructions.

"There are elements of manipulation from the start," said Jacques Semelin, a psychologist and historian who studies genocide and totalitarianism.

"They are obedient, but it's more than mere obedience -- there is the audience, the cameras everywhere."

But for the film makers, the manipulative power of television was exactly the point.

"The questioners are ... in the grip of the authority of television," said Jean-Leon Beauvois, a psychologist who took part in the documentary.

"When it decides to abuse its power, television can do anything to anybody," said Nick. "It has an absolutely terrifying power."

Click to expand...

_http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100316/ts_afp/francetelevisionpsychologyentertainment

Re: Ponorization by TV - A French Documentary

Hi Rabelais,

I believe the same story was posted here.

The two threads have been merged.

This thread reminded me of something that I had read in Psychohistory late last year. The most interesting things are Lloyd deMause's speculations presented as assertions. I thought I'd post it to see what ya'll think about it, if anything.


[quote author=Lloyd deMause]

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY IN A SOCIAL TRANCE

It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with us persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups that such unexplained experiments as those described in Stanley Milgram's classic study Obedience to Authority162 become understandable. In this experiment, people were asked to be "teachers" and, whenever their "learners" made mistakes, to give them massive electric shocks. The "learners," who were only acting the part, were trained to give out pained cries even though the "electric shocks" were non-existent.

Of the 40 "teachers," 65 percent delivered the maximum amount of shock even as they watched the "learners" scream out in pain and plead to be released, despite their having been told they didn't have to step up the shock level. The "teachers" often trembled, groaned and were extremely upset at having to inflict the painful shocks, but continued to do so nonetheless. That the "teachers" believed the shocks were real is confirmed by another version of the experiment in which real shocks were inflicted upon a little puppy, who howled in protest; the obedience statistics were similar.163

Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is that, by joining a group-the "university experiment"-they switched into their social alters and merged with their own sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others. Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was really a struggle between their social alters and their main selves.

Although many subsequent experiments varied the conditions for obedience,164 what Milgram did not do is try the experiment without the social trance. If he had not framed it as a group experience, if he had simply on his own authority walked up to each individual, alone, and, without alluding to a university or any other group, asked him or her to come to his home and give massive amounts of electric shock to punish someone, he would not have been obeyed, because they would not have switched into their social alters.

The crucial element of the experiments was the existence of the group-as-terrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Not surprisingly, when the experiment was repeated using children-who go into trance and switch into traumatized content more easily than adults-they were even more obedient in inflicting the maximum shock.165

Subjects were even obedient when they themselves were the victims: 54 percent turned a dial upon command to the maximum limit when they had been told it was inflicting damage upon their ears that could lead to their own deafness, and 74 percent ate food they thought could harm them, thus confirming that they were truly in a dissociated state, not just "obeying" authority or trying to hurt others, and that it was actually an alternate self doing the hurting of the main self.166 The only time they refused to obey was when experimenters pretended to act out a group rebellion, since the social trance was broken.167

Milgram could also have tested whether it was simple obedience that was really being tested by asking his subjects to reach into their pockets and pay some money to the learners. They would have refused to do so, because they weren't "obeying" any old command, they were using the experimental situation to hurt scapegoats.

It is the social trance itself and not "obedience to authority" that is effective in producing destructive obedience. Milgram's subjects, like all of us who participate in wars and social violence, lost their capacity for empathy with victims only when in a social trance. Those who continue to replicate Milgram's experiments and who are still puzzled as to why "the most banal and superficial of rationales...is enough to produce destructive behavior in human beings"168 simply underestimate the amount of trauma most people have experienced and the effectiveness of the social trance in allowing them to restage these hurts.

At one point Milgram approached the insight that he was dealing with an alternate personality when he discusses what he terms the "agentic state," which is his term for the trance that his subjects were in. "Moved into the agentic state," Milgram wrote, "the person becomes something different from his former self, with new properties not easily traced to his usual personality."169

Unfortunately, neither Milgram nor any of the others who have performed obedience experiments looked into the childhoods of their subjects to see if those who easily obeyed hurtful commands differed from the minority who refused to do so.170
[/quote]

-------------------------------------

162. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
163. Ibid., 152.
164. Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. New York: Praeger Scientific, 1986.
165. Ibid., p. 76.
166. Ibid., p. 78-79, 148.
167. Ibid., p. 60.
168. Irving I. Janus, Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p. 70. 169 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 143.
170. Milgram himself only tried some crude personality tests; see A. C. Elms and Stanley Milgram, "Personality Characteristics Associated With Obedience and Defiance Toward Authoritative Command." Journal of Experimental Research in Personality 1(1966): 282-89.


Source:
Chapter 5, The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
_http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln05_psychogenic.html


------------------------------------
Could "OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY IN A SOCIAL TRANCE" also be somehow related to the reluctance to withdraw from participating in a 'group' activity due to fear of hurt from social rejection?

Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system for physical and social pain
from TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.7 July 2004

Writers have long noted that some of the most painful experiences known to humankind are those that involve the loss of important social bonds. Indeed, the use of physical pain words to describe episodes of social estrangement is common across many different languages.

An overlap between physical and social pain:
We have recently proposed that physical pain – the pain experienced upon bodily injury – and social pain – the pain experienced upon social injury when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost – share neural and computational mechanisms [1]. This shared system is responsible for detecting cues that might be harmful to survival, such as physical danger or social separation, and then for recruiting attention and coping resources to minimize threat.
_http://www.neuro-psa.org.uk/download/rejection.pdf