Many wonder if they too are capable of following orders to inflict pain and kill people, as the Nazis did. A television documentary that aired in France last week showed the average person's ability to kill an innocent person. The documentary focused on a fake television show called "Zone Xtreme" where 80 contestants (who believed the show was real) were told to electrocute a man (said to be another contestant, although in reality an actor) when he answered a trivia question wrong. Even as the actor pleaded "Get me out of here, please! I don't want to play anymore", the contestants continued to electrocute the man. Only 16 of the 80 contestants refused to "electrocute" the man.
"People were convinced that they'd never succumb to this — and then they discovered they did it in spite of themselves," Nick [the producer] told The Associated Press in an interview, referring to the participants. "They were stupefied."
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35918059
This experiment raises some troubling questions, the most obvious being: could I kill a person? Put in the right circumstances, the truth is that many of us would succumb to our basic survivalist natures. In the occupied countries of WW2, the situation was similar to this television show; say a SS guard points a gun at you and commands you to shoot a complete stranger, with the reward perhaps being food for your family, or perhaps merely your own survival. How many of us would truly value the stranger's life over that of ourselves and of our families?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how this situation would have changed if they saw their peers kill people or were told they would be killed if they did not electrocute them. Because in this situation it seems that they killed to get ahead not because they were in danger.
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