The CBC reports on a French documentary, recreating the famous Milgram experiment as reality TV:
The fake game show, called Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death), features a glamorous hostess and a studio audience who eggs contestants on with cries of “punishment.”
The documentary showed that 82 per cent of participants were willing to pull the levers that inflicted a shock on their opponents. […]
The participants, who did not know the game show was fake, were shown their rivals writhing in pain. They are also told that the voltage of the shocks increased each time they pulled the lever.
Yet in the game-show setting, only 18 per cent of participants refused the request of a host to pull the lever, said filmmaker Christophe Nick.
“They are not equipped to disobey,” he told AFP. “They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to.”[…]
After filming, one of the contestants said that taking part had helped her to understand why her own Jewish grandparents had been tortured by the Nazis.
“Since I was a little girl, I have always asked myself why the Nazis did it and how they could obey such orders? And then there I was, obeying them myself,” she said.
“I was worried about the contestant, but at the same time, I was afraid to spoil the program.”
Glenn Greenwald comments:
I just watched an amazing discussion of this French experiment on Fox News. The Fox anchors — Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum — were shocked and outraged that these French people could be induced by the power of television to embrace torture.
Speaking as employees of the corporation that produced the highly influential, torture-glorifying 24, and on the channel that has churned out years worth of pro-torture “news” advocacy, the anchors were particularly astonished that television could play such a powerful role in influencing people’s views and getting them to acquiesce to such heinous acts. Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority, just like many of them submitted to and even supported the Nazis, they explained. I kept waiting for them to make the connection to America’s torture policies and Fox’s support for it — if only to explain to their own game show participants at home Fox News viewers why that was totally different — but it really seemed the connection just never occurred to them. They just prattled away — shocked, horrified and blissfully un-self-aware — about the evils of torture and mindless submission to authority and the role television plays in all of that.
Well, if you’re looking for a positive spin on this one, IIRC, in the original Milgram experiment 100% of participants were willing to push the button the first time and something like 2/3 were willing to go up to what they were told was a lethal voltage. So 82% pulling the lever once is…possibly measurable progress. Possibly just random variation. Or a misremembering of the Milgram data.
Sorry, Diane, but I think the CBC has misled you.
According to reports at the time of broadcast, like this one from the bbc, citing commentary in the broadcast itself, only 16 of the 80 participants (20%) stopped before the final potentially lethal shock – “Eighty percent of the candidates went right to the end”.
As I recall, a lot of the media comment noted that this was worse than the first Milgram findings, even though we like to think of ourselves as less deferential to authority than our grandparents. Of course Milgram was relying on the then high prestige and authority of the white-coated scientist, rather than that of television, celebrity and massive, chanting peer pressure, so the figures aren’t directly comparable.
Incidentally 82% of 80 is 65.6, so I’m not sure where they get that number.
Bummer. I’m not convinced that either number is outside of the 95% CI anyway. That is, there may be no meaningful difference between the two results. I’m surprised that no one caught on that it was the Milgram experiment though. I thought it was pretty well known.
Yeah – in another TV recreation a few years ago (Channel 4 in the UK, I believe), a couple of participants did catch on, but they quietly weeded themselves out before it really got started. Maybe something similar happened in this case, or perhaps Milgram just hasn’t had as much media attention in France unti now.
Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority
So this one’s turned up again. They used to say the same about why the German people succumbed en masse to anti-semitism during the Holocaust.
…And meanwhile, psychological experiments conducted on a small research population of college-age, mostly white, mostly middle-class Americans can always be generalised across the entire human race. Fantastic, isn’t it?
Glenn Greenwald’s comments don’t make a lot of sense. When Glenn says
that’s odd. If it’s totally different–which I think it is, FWIW–then why exactly is the connection so important? Why would they be chastised for not making the connection?
If Glenn is trying to make an argument that “24” is responsible for the people pulling a lever, he needs to do a lot better.
The subjects were a selected (ignorant, insecure people make better shows) and self-selected (they applied to be on that show) group. I hope that the results would be a bit less damning if the subjects were randomly chosen.
By the way, Milgram’s experiments are well known in France, at least among university students. I know they were mentioned in at least two classes of mine, and I assume that is the case for pretty much everyone, as I was an Engineering major, and 80% of the classes were not-optional, i.e. would be taken by everyone.
Thanks, Sailorman. I was about to make comment on that but you did an excellent job.
If Glenn is trying to make an argument that “24″ is responsible for the people pulling a lever, he needs to do a lot better.
That goes back to the old argument about whether dramatized violence on TV or in other media encourages real violence. I’m not sure of the data so I won’t comment. Anyone else? Does violence go up in any measurable way when people watch violence on TV, movies, or in other formats? I doubt that the results would change much if one removed 24 from TV without any other social change but what if depiction of violence were as taboo as depiction of sex? Would making any depiction of murder require the movie/TV show/whatever to have an X rating decrease the rate of violence in society? Does it work with sex (i.e. does making it difficult to get images of people having sex do…anything at all)?
Sailorman,
You are mis-parsing Glenn’s statement. Glenn is not surprised that the Fox commentators don’t make the legitimate point that there is no connection between their own torture boosterism and the willingness of people to engage in torture. Glenn is surprised that Fox doesn’t feel the need to even acknowledge the legitimate connection by denying it. He is surprised that they feel secure enough in their monstrosity that they don’t even have the guilty tell of trying to explain it away.
As to 24, I think it is unlikely that a popular American television show has much effect on French attitudes towards torture, but the US military instructors who teach interrogation techniques to military intelligence officers have repeatedly begged the producers of Fox to stop having 24 be pro-torture, as it has added significantly to their work to have to first convince their students that YOU DO NOT USE TORTURE. I think that the US military instructors are in a better position than you or I to judge whether 24 has a significant effect on attitudes towards torture.
Dianne, #10:
I don’t have any data at my fingertips, but what bothers me about this argument is that it assumes that people learn about violence from TV rather than real-life sources like school violence/bullying, domestic abuse and (in some cases) exposure to violent crime, terrorism and war. How lucky do you have to be to only be exposed to violence in the media? How lucky do you have to be to have never suffered violence until you’re old enough to get into a PG-13 movie?
Corollary; has violence increased by a measurable amount since the invention of TV and movies? I’d stick with the idea that the human race has always had both violent storytelling mediums and violent behaviour and that this is unlikely to ever change, though minimising the latter is a worthy goal.
it assumes that people learn about violence from TV rather than real-life sources like school violence/bullying, domestic abuse and (in some cases) exposure to violent crime, terrorism and war. How lucky do you have to be to only be exposed to violence in the media? How lucky do you have to be to have never suffered violence until you’re old enough to get into a PG-13 movie?
That assumes that all exposure to violence is equal. If, for the moment, we restrict the question to relatively affluent children who live in places where they are unlikely to experience war or major street crime first hand (yes, I know that lets out a lot of kids, but humor me for the moment), then the first physical violence they see may well be from the media. If they go to a particularly PC school they might not even have experienced much bullying (though school and bullying are so intertwined in my mind that I find it hard to imagine a school where kids don’t get bullied…but again let’s leave aside my personal developmental problems for the moment.) So, if a child is lucky enough to live in a peaceful area then is the experience of the occasional playground fight really the equivalent of seeing people tortured for fun by the heroes on TV?
I agree that it’s unlikely to be as simple as banning TV violence bringing about a non-violent society. There are plenty of other factors involved. But I would be surprised if the amount of violence shown in the culture doesn’t have an effect on how willing people are to act violently. People are social animals. We learn what is right and wrong from each other. If a child’s parents spend one night a week cheering while Jack Bauer tortures another terrorist, what is the child going to learn from that? Probably that violence is ok, as long as the “right” people do it for the “right” reasons. Probably not as strong a lesson as if the parents spank the kid, but still a message being sent. I seem to remember there being at least some weak evidence that use of the death penalty does not decrease crime because it increases the social tolerance of violence and lowers the threshold for its use. I’ll try to dig up the study if you’re interested.
Given the way this description is phrased—“game show” and “opponents,” specifically—I would imagine the people being studied are assuming consent on the part of the people being shocked.
It’s not what I’d consider a good enough standard of consent, but those of us who are reasonable on that matter are somewhat rare in this society. THESE people seem to be invited to figure that their “opponents” agreed to take part in this experience for a chance at money or prizes or fame or whatever, as is common with reality TV, and to assume that the show’s producers and suchlike have all the safety issues taken care of. Possibly they themselves are often the sort of people who would be willing to be shocked on national TV for a chance at $10,000.
So I’d say that, 1) the experiment does not accurately display the percentage willing to deliberately and with full awareness commit torture on a nonconsenting person, and 2) the experiment is more useful for highlighting people’s tendency to assume consent and/or assume that the situation is entirely benign.
Given how prevalent the concept of someone “deserving” various sorts of ill-treatment is, including by lots of rapists and abusers and bullies and sadists-in-authority, this latter consideration is highly worth looking into.
(Edit: “deserving” and its subsidiaries, rather, which includes a lot of “functionally agreed to (by their actions)” projected onto the victims.)
THESE people seem to be invited to figure that their “opponents” agreed to take part in this experience for a chance at money or prizes or fame or whatever, as is common with reality TV, and to assume that the show’s producers and suchlike have all the safety issues taken care of.
Both in the TV show and in the Milgram experiments, the actors being shocked expressed pain and pled with the experimental subject to stop. I’m not sure here, but at least in the Milgram experiment, the subjects were told that the highest shocks were potentially lethal. So while the “contestants” might have reason to believe that their “opponents” consented originally, it’s hard to believe that they believed that the opponents agreed to be shocked to death. And they had clear evidence that they’d withdrawn their consent.
In the end, people are social animals and we evolved to tend to trust authority-disbelieve your elders about whether that berry is good to eat or whether lions are likely to be in the bushes and you could end up dead. So maybe we need to just admit that we need training and constant retraining in how to resist immoral authority.
This report has some data on the effect of violence in the media on violence in society. It is the result of long term studies of communities and nations that did not receive television until relatively recently, in which they compare their changing crime rates with those of communities and nations that were introduced to television earlier.
The short version of their findings is that exposure to violence in the media significantly affects the violent tendencies of the young, and that the effect is significant and chronic, lasting into adulthood which is when they first gain the ability to affect the crime rate. So a spike in violent crime seems to inevitably follow a spike in television ownership, by a period of about 10-15 years.
The study also finds that violence in the media has little effect on the subsequent violent tendencies of older children and adults.
http://cursor.org/stories/television_and_violence.htm
OK: if you’re right–which, on rereading it, I think you probably are–then Glenn isn’t doing much to show, or support, a “legitimate” connection.
Let’s try this, instead:
I think that the US military instructors are in a better position than you or I to judge whether 24 and its demonstrations of torture as a military interrogation tool have a significant effect on attitudes towards torture in the context of military interrogations.
Glenn’s point seems to be “24 shows torture! On TV! And this is torture! On TV! So they must be linked, and therefore Fox is evil!”
I’d give that a lot more credence if you found out–as an especially pertinent example–how many of those French zappers actually watched 24. And I’d give it a lot more credence if they weren’t in the context of a game show. And if the solidly pre-24 Milgram experiment weren’t so similar in results. And so on.
You know that conclusion Glenn wants Fox to make? It’s so unsupported (at the moment) that he’d probably be calling it “bad news” if they made it about something he disagreed with. Perhaps he’s right in the end… but as of now, his argument doesn’t show much.
Maco @16: So the problem is not 24 or horror movies, but rather Disney and similar type of programming which are the problem? Sounds reasonably plausible.
Sailorman,
I think you are still completely misreading Glenn. Glenn is drawing a parallel, not positing a causal relationship. If the Fox commentators had simply reported the event then Glenn’s parallel would not have seemed to him like an omission, but once the commentators got into “How could something like this happen? What is wrong with the French?” then the parallel “How did something like this happen on a much larger scale in the US in the last decade? What role did we and our employer play in causing that to happen here?” becomes relevant.
Glenn isn’t saying that anything Fox did caused the contestants on this game show to act as they did. He is saying that it is absurd for the Fox commentators to resort to positing something about the French character that caused the contestants to behave as they did. Fox (both through Fox News and the show 24) was instrumental in making torture an accepted US government practice over the last decade, so the people who were positing that there was something wrong with the French and that (implicitly) Americans would never be so susceptible have direct experience with the fact that Americans are that susceptible.
Of course, what Glenn is talking about operates at a somewhat different level than the French fake game show or Milligram’s experiment, since the game show and the experiment are about what a non-preconditioned person will do under the influence of authority or immediate social pressure, while what Fox has done is about conditioning people to approve of the larger practice of torture. However, the military intelligence example suggests that people who have been pre-conditioned to believe that torture is appropriate probably require much less influence of authority to be pushed to engage in torture. In deed, they appear to require the influence of authority to be convinced not to torture once they are put in a situation where they believe they will be allowed to engage in torture.
What source do you have for that? The torture decisions were coming from the highest level of government. Are you saying that John Woo was influenced by 24 and Fox News, not by the age-old-if-incorrect belief taht people may tell you stuff undertorture that they would not otherwise tell?
Just to underline Charles S’s point (no relation), the Fox discussion had veered far from the specifics of the Milgram/game show scenario – they raised the broader question of media power and an imagined French susceptibility to influence. It’s that discussion that Glenn wanted to see connected to a consideration of the role of Fox’s own torture boosterism in shifting American norms over the last decade.
Sailorman,
I meant socially acceptable to the US population, not that Fox orchestrated Yoo and Bybee and Cheney’s (et al) actions.
I always wonder about those who don’t pull the level. I want to know if there is anyway to short-circuit the Milligram experiment- what do we need to do to get a greatest number of people to stop being mindlessly obedient?
I want to know if knowledge of the Milligram experiment itself helps. I’ve always wished that they would repeat the Milligram experiment, but only on people who were aware of it. I would have the participants fill out this massive survey where hidden in the survey was a question of how familiar they were with the Milligram experiment. Then, like a month later, I would call them back up and ask them to participate. I would be curious if it had an effect. Of course, we’re not really allowed to perform that anymore.
Actually, some one (googling, Jerry Burger) did a recent repeat of the Milgram’s experiment. Reviewing Milgram’s results, they found that 79% of participants who didn’t stop the first time the other participant complained continued on to the end, so Burger’s version stopped immediately after the first test subject either ignored or accepted the fake participant’s request to stop (as well as doing extensive pre-screening to weed out people with potential triggers and people who were psychologically unstable). Burger found the same rate of obedience as Milgram.
I think that Burger excluded people who were familiar with Milgram’s experiment, but I’m not sure.
I want to know if there is anyway to short-circuit the Milligram experiment- what do we need to do to get a greatest number of people to stop being mindlessly obedient?
IIRC, example was extremely helpful. That is, if the experimental subject was first allowed to observe another subject (really all three participants were actors at this point) refusing to obey after the shock victim complained then they were much more likely to stop when the victim complained than if they were not exposed to the example. So refusing to obey in itself fosters a culture in which more people refuse to obey even when the refusal seems futile.