The really sick thing is that such an experiment was really conducted by researches in the 70s. The outcome was that horrible with some many severly psychically damaged people, that it was decided to never again do any experiment like that.
And now a frenchie TV station comes up with the most cruel experiment since nazis just for “entertainment”
No, the initial intent should not be misunderstood : The author clearly indicates that it’s not entertainement, it’s a documentary “to show the result of TV’s authority”.
might be
none the less this experiment was already conducted and a documentary exists on it, there is no reason to do the very same again, independent of the logic and intent, at least out of my view.
And yeah its clear that it has nothing to do with TV. While its clear that TV causes many things, this one for once isn’t to blame on it as even generations ago acted the same way and they were not stupidifyed by the TV
i truly think that the actual capabilities of human empathy are way over stated, and always have been. i have read somewhere that about 1 in 10 people are sociopaths and for many impulse control is more tactical than empathetic.
Humans have empathy for people inside their own group, family, religion etc. We have had to invent other forms of organization like nationalism, which have tried to replace the clannishness of humanity. These attempts have largely been a masking exercise and have created their own horrors.
Just hope that the person pulling the lever is a humanist, hippy or goof ball. Which is rather unlike or he would not be pulling the lever in the first place.
The problem I have with contemporary humanist is they are much too optimistic about human nature. They have already taken the step of viewing all of humanity as their family. A step which most of humanity is incapable of.
Some of it comes down to greed / rational self-interest whatever you want to call it and the remainder comes down to hate.
I think a TV show like that is no a problem in France.
If guys accept to play and know he can die, they yeah he can try to die.
But when I go on the France2’s website (name of the same TV channel), and on the bottom I read some people killed a 53yo policeman with a weapons IN France…
This experiment has been done many times, even Derren Brown did a version of this in one of his shows.
It’s not that people don’t have empathy… when someone else takes responsibility for their actions people will do much more than if they can’t hide behind others.
If you see footage of the experiment you can clearly tell most participants are very uneasy about giving the shocks. Most will only continue because some authority figure tells them too.
If you think about, most army protocols are set up to take “advantage” of this. Chain of command and uniforms etc.
Have you thought that they might have already known it was a hoax. How do you know that some or if not all of the people who pulled the levers were not also actors.
When they were picking the people, maybe they profiled them to only select a certain type of personality the obedient type
Are people on a reality TV show representative? I would say they are more likely to want acclaim, attention and profit - and as such are much more likely to be influenced by audience and presenters.
Are people likely to have confidence, on some level of thought, that on TV in a country like France it’s pretty unlikely that they are really set up to be torturing/potentially killing people? I would say probably yes. The idea that “it’s probably ok because I’m in a place I want to be and everyone here is saying it’s ok” is a strong one.
Also we positively affirm this detachment of responsibility in our legal system. If I slip on some coffee is it my fault for not looking where I’m going? Or the fault of the company that pays the staff who failed to clean up after the child who spilt his mother’s drink?
Time after time we take careful consideration, and give the same answer: it’s someone else’s responsibility.
Throughout History this very mechanism has made entire nations of “good” people commit atrocities. Although the game show may a fares, The experiment, is real, and so are the statistics.
only natural anarchists that can avoid this trap.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
French author, humanist, rationalist, satirist (1694 - 1778)
As mentioned by others, this famous psychological experiment has been performed in the past with a similar outcome, and not by participants looking for fame and attention. The results show how the average person will act in such a situation. It’s easy to discount the TV show’s participants as morally challenged idiots desiring their fifteen minutes, but other studies illustrate that the bulk of us are unlikely to behave differently. It’s certainly an interesting study in obedience and authority. I highly recommend Philip Zimbardo’s TED Talk about how regular people can perform acts of cruelty that are normally unthinkable. It touches on Milgram’s original experiment as well as more recent psychological studies.
For what it’s worth, many participants in the original study experienced no such psychological damage. The vast majority were very happy to have participated, and many expressed their thanks later and offered to assist in additional studies. The ethics of the experiment were certainly questionable (as a result, most universities have a board of ethics that must approve studies before they can proceed), but the outcome of the experiment wasn’t as terrible as you make it sound.
How helpless with their behaviour, how unable to just simply make a decision by themselves, how collaborative those people are into turning one man down … It’s impossible to feel ok in front of this.
The saddest thing is that they are “normal” people. The ones you would never suspect to act that cruelly.
Most of them try to stand up against authority, but most of them fail after having received some simple injunction (“do not let yourself be impressed”, “your turn now, do it”, “this man will thank you in 10 minutes”).
Also, those people are obviously not actors, this is clear in their eyes.
Just reinforces what I figured out a while ago: humans are more dangerous to me personally than any other animal on the planet. If we applied the same standards to humans as we do other animal populations, we’d be culling people by the millions.
There appears to be a significant difference in the numbers between the study and the show. Also I don’t accept that the Milgram study is an unquestionably accurate reflection of real human behavior either.
Nevertheless, I do wonder what the point of it all is. To believe that there are no circumstances in which most people would inflict pain is dreamland. But this very discussion and others like it across all manner of news sites today show how many people reject the unnecessary infliction of pain.
Theres examples of how people forgo simple common sense and typical human consciousness in favor of ‘sciencey sounding’ things all over the place. Theres many examples of it in western medicine.
Humanity has been like this for a long time in one way or another.
