March 20, 2011 - 4:36pm
'Game of Death' shocks the TV world
BY CAROLYN KLARECKI
France has decided to shock the world once again. France’s newest TV show based off the famous Milgram psychology experiment, “Le Jeu de la Mort,” or “The Game of Death” is also France’s latest controversy.
The show is basically the Milgram experiment performed in front of a studio audience and broadcast nationally for all of France. An actor poses as the show’s real contestant and is asked trivia questions. For each question he or she answers wrong, the actual contestant (who is also the test subject) is asked to administer an electric shock with increasing voltage for each wrong question. No shock is actually administered; the actor fakes the whole thing. The cruelty of the game is that the whole point is to see when the torture-inflictor will stop.
And the results are shocking. When Milgram originally performed his experiment about 62 percent of his subjects could be goaded into completing it, but on TV in France, 81 percent willingly administered what they thought is a lethal amount of electricity to their victim.
Needless to say people aren’t happy, but according to TIME, creator Christophe Nick claims it just moves the traditional experiment to a new setting to see how the eye of the TV camera changes people’s reactions to authority. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, and if you’re ever asked to shock someone, now you’ll know you’re just a part of a Milgram experiment.
