The Power of Television...?
Game of Death: Fake French TV Game Show has Contestant 'Tortured' by Participants
'A documentary called Le Jeu de la Mort (Game of Death) focuses on a game show called X-treme Zone, which features a contestant trying to answer trivia questions. However, for each question he got wrong, he'd get electrocuted by participants, who are urged to crank up the voltage by the studio audience and the show's hostess.
The show was fake- part of a psychological study on people's willingness to follow orders.
Out of 80 volunteers, 64 were willing to crank the voltage up to lethal levels. Of course, nobody was actually electrocuted during the experiment, but the exercise exposed a strange willingness of individuals to surrender responsibility for their actions to a third party.
The experiments showed a troubling willingness to obey requests, even if those requests had an obviously harmful effect on someone else. The general consensus of the participants was "the producers would never willingly let someone get hurt, right?"
The "contestants" were offered no financial incentives, only the opportunity to play the game.
Game of Death was based on a Yale University experiment from 1961, which examined the mindset behind the "just following orders" defense for Nazi war crimes, and why the Third Reich's victims went along with their persecutors during the early stages of genocide.'
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