Le Jeu De La Mort

There's a documentary/book/'study'/fake game show resembling the 'Milgram shock experiment' that seems to be getting some press right now. My first reaction was "Really? Why did they do the Milgram experiment again?"

As it turns out, at least part of the motivation, as quoted in the Time article, was the idea that "Milgram's findings about the human submission to authority figures were particularly applicable to TV." While I most definitely appreciate the critique of [reality] television and the attempt to increase awareness of how people can be influenced, I have to ask: did they really need to use the Milgram paradigm? The ethical concerns are the same and possibly worse (by my reading, participants' faces were shown on television). On top of that, I worry that the controversy is going to detract from rather than add to the intended cultural critique (and awareness of the pseudo-scientific findings).

I hear the Milgram study on obedience (this is, I believe, the now-rarely-used phrasing of the original title) cited during explanations of why institutional review is important, but it's rare that I hear anyone but a psychologist reflect an understanding of what it suggests about humans' susceptibility to influence. (In fact, the first story I saw about this said nothing about Milgram, authority/obedience, social influence, the influence of television, etc. The Time article, and several others I've seen, do a bit better.) I certainly think that ethics are more important than theories of social psychology, but when there exists evidence of a theory of human behavior -- especially when it's relevant to ethics in settings that don't have the same oversight that occurs in academia -- I find it sad to see it misunderstood, overshadowed, or ignored completely.

Another thing that bothers me is that from what little I can tell, this is a pretty shoddy research design. They report that 81% of their 'subjects' went to the highest setting, vs. 62% in the Milgram experiment. The superficial conclusion, which seems plausible, is that the tv-show context makes people even more susceptible. But there are so many reasons that the comparison of these two samples is suspect. For starters, that's 81% of people willing to participate in a reality TV show in the first place. One titled "Zone Xtreme," no less. There was also a "goading studio audience," which was probably highly influential and isn't, strictly speaking, an intrinsic part of the TV show context. For work that comes at a such a potentially high cost to the subjects, it would be nice to see a little more attention to validity, to say nothing of mitigating the harm, though I'll grant (and hope) that may be some things that went unreported in the popular press, especially for the latter.