Lessons from France's Torture Experiment

Are you capable of committing torture? Inflicting pain on others? Killing? Participating in genocide?

If you've answered no to any of these questions, then consider watching a new French television program broadcast earlier this week, which features randomly-selected, ordinary people in a spoof game show administering what they believe to be near-lethal electric shocks to rival contestants.

As part of a scientific experiment measuring the impact of television on people's willingness to obey authority, French documentary filmmakers created a mock game show called The Game of Death, in which participants -- who believed it was a real TV program -- were instructed by a host to pull levers that inflicted electric shocks on hidden contestants (who were actually actors) each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing intensity for each wrong answer.

As the electric shocks increased in potency, participants heard what they believed to be loud screams of pain and agony from the contestants. Even as contestants pleaded for mercy, 81 percent of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the host, administering fatal levels of electric shock to contestants.

The results of the French documentary mirror a similar experiment carried out nearly 50 years ago at Yale University by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. In that case, participants took on the role of a teacher and delivered what they believed to be increasingly lethal electric shocks to actors every time they answered questions incorrectly. In this experiment, 62 percent of people obeyed the authority figure and administered the electric shock torture.

Both the Milgram experiment and the latest French Game of Death serve as powerful indicators that when placed in particular settings, everyday people can be induced to engage in unthinkable acts of brutality as they obey authority. Creators of the French experiment say that their study shows the added power of television in getting people to submit to authority and administer torture. Indeed, the results indicate that the promise of being on TV may very well increase people's willingness to act against their own principles and moral codes, when ordered to do something extreme.

The parallels between the French experiment and America's actions in the war on terrorism are glaring. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military personnel, under order from their higher-ups in the Bush administration, carried out brutal forms of physical and psychological torture in their interrogations of suspected terrorists. Contrary to the Bush administration's rhetoric, these soldiers were not just a few evil and renegade "bad apples" acting against the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). On the contrary, the problem was systemic, and as these psychological experiments have repeatedly shown, you and I would most likely have done the same thing.

Not surprisingly, Fox News has failed to see the similarities. As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum were shocked and outraged that the French participants of the Game of Death could be induced by the power of television to engage in acts of torture. In their news segment discussing the experiment, the conservative journalists suggested that it was something unique about the physiological and psychological makeup of the French people that made them so willing to submit to authority.

Let alone that similar experiments, including the Milgram study, have repeatedly produced similar results here in America. That the employees of Fox -- a channel that has repeatedly defended torture as necessary for the security and safety of America in the war on terrorism -- could blame the results of the French experiment on the cultural background of the French people is outright stunning.

How ironic, that representatives of the same channel that produces the pro-torture television drama 24 could be so astonished that television could play a role in influencing people's actions and pushing them to engage in horrible acts. As Jane Mayer reveals in her 2007 story in the New Yorker, many Bush administration officials, soldiers, and military interrogators watched 24 religiously after 9/11, and even modeled many of their real-life interrogations on the tactics used by the arm-twisting, torture-loving, all-is-fair-in-the-war-on-terror super-agent Jack Bauer. The show has single-handedly propagated the ticking time-bomb myth, that torture will instantly help to stave off that terrorist plot on our soil that is just moments away from occurring.

Leave it to Fox to assert America's moral high-ground. Rather than dismissing the study's troubling results as the product of the authoritarian nature of the French people, Fox News might have used the experiment as a moment of deep reflection, a chance to examine the ways in which the station's support for the Bush administration's torture policies led the majority of the American public to sit back and embrace torture as an acceptable tool in the war on terrorism. But, that obvious connection was of course lost on the pro torture news advocacy channel.

At least the French experiment was just that, an experiment. The illegal and nightmarish manner in which America has tortured detainees in the war on terrorism is unfortunately real and irreversible.

If the French experiment is to hold any meaning, it should remind us of how easily we can all be led down the road to committing immoral acts of torture, or assenting to acts of brutality, if we are not vigilant and vocal in our opposition. Lost in the headlines of the study were the close to 20 percent of people who refused to administer the electric shocks to contestants, a fact that should give us hope that it is, indeed, possible to stop ourselves from blindly submitting to authority and standing on the side of justice.

One just wonders how many of this 20 percent minority is currently employed by Fox News.

Photo credit: takomabibelot