Bad news, guys. It turns out that Thomas Hobbes was right. The life of man is “nasty, brutish and short” after all. In fact, it might actually be nastier, shorter and more brutish than we previously feared possible.
All thanks to French television, of course.
Let me explain. A documentary, “The Game of Death,” that aired in France last Wednesday cast doubt on the integrity of human morality when subjected to the pressures of authority. In a replication of the famous experiment by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961, scientists—under the premise of a reality game show—asked participants to deliver near-fatal electric shocks to a man seated on a stage in an electric chair enclosed in a chamber.
Imagine it for a second: Each player is told he is participating in a pilot of an exciting new show with a beautiful and famous hostess. Every time the man in the box (supposedly the contestant’s game partner) gets a trivia question wrong, audience members egg the contestant on, urging him to press a lever that will reprimand his partner by zapping him with a jolt of electricity.
The victim—skin blotchy and sweating—squirms in pain, calling out for the contestant to stop, but the more he protests, the more the audience and the TV show hostess encourage his punishment. Caught on tape, each contestant is faced with a moral choice—to shock his partner by pressing the lever, or to refuse and challenge the authority of the show’s host.
What should participants have done? What would you do in this situation? If you think like the psychology students that Milgram polled in the 1960s before he performed the original experiment, you would guess that very few of the contestants would actually obey such an obviously cruel command.
But—and here’s the inevitable twist—you’d be wrong. An astounding 80 percent of participants followed instructions.
The French are not an entirely sadistic bunch. The game show was a fake. The man in the chamber was a hired actor in on the whole thing—no humans were hurt in the making of this disturbing scientific experiment.
Nor can we blame the show’s findings on the weak-willed, backbone-less character of the French as a culture (however compelling that argument may be). This most recent experiment is reminiscent of many others of its kind: Milgram’s original set up in 1961, The Third Wave carried out on unwitting Californian high-school students in 1967, the Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1971. (If you’re in need of a healthy dose of cynicism in your life, read up on those experiments and then try to feel warm and fuzzy about human nature.)
Again and again, humans have proven creepily susceptible to influence, submitting to authority even when it asks unconscionable deeds of them. Such results suggest that historically troubling acts of collective immorality—genocide, torture, among other disquieting examples—shouldn’t surprise us all that much. As a species, we are much less staunch about our ethical principles than we’d like to think.
Researchers behind the most recent justification of this theory imply that their experimental findings were largely influenced by the unreality of television. Christophe Nick, producer of “The Game of Death,” attributes his contestants’ manipulability to the aura of a game show—“In a game,” he insisted during a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “the boundary between reality and fiction disappears. And even if your partner screams, begging you to stop, you’re still in the game.”
So run most interpretations of these results: In the face of external pressure, we compromise our instilled codes of ethics and, under the influence of the mob (or rather, of any authority, whether it be granted through political or social means), engage in activities that our supposed “true” selves wouldn’t.
This regressive element of morality is unavoidable. Somewhere in the mishmash of influences and authoritarian guidelines lies personal judgment and choice, but where? And how much room do we allow it in between bouts of being herded, sheep-like, by dominant culture?
All is not “Lord of the Flies”-apocalyptic, however, and we are not always faced with the choice of electrocuting or squashing our friends with boulders. Instead, morality is gradually, subtly developed—a day-to-day conversation we hold with our surroundings. In order to avoid a life as “nasty, brutish and short” as Hobbes bemoaned, we must not only exist in civilization but conscientiously choose which teachings of society to accept.
Only then, when we find ourselves faced with a tell-tale lever to test our morality, will we know that the decision we make is actually our own.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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