rt.com | French television has recreated a disturbing 1960s psychological experiment, turning participants of a mock show into willing torturers.
During “Game of Death” participants were to ask another player a series of questions and punish him for giving incorrect answers with increasingly powerful electric jolts. Unknown to them, their opponent victim was actually an actor, who screamed and cried for mercy when, in fact, no harm was being done to him.
Cheered on by presenter Christophe Nick and the audience chanting “Punishment!” most players followed the sadistic orders, even when their “victim” pleaded them to let him go and then pretended to die. Out of 80 volunteers who took part in the “pilot of the new show”, just 16 walked out.
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The show was actually a recreation of the “Milgram experiment” a series of tests conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University. He researched how humans behave when commanded by an authority to act against their moral judgment. Disturbingly, most of the volunteers obeyed the experimenter’s orders, despite knowing that continuing it would threaten the life of their victim.
Milgram’s study was intended to find an explanation for the Holocaust, which required thousands of accomplices in Nazi Germany.
The French reenactment was done for a documentary, which Christophe Nick made for the state-owned France 2 channel. The intention was to show how much power the mass media have in our society