Would 81% of the Population Obey Orders to Kill If Ordered to Do so by a Trusted Authority Figure Popular in the Mainstream Media Such as TV Talk Shows?

Do children from one generation to the next obey the same type of authority figures as their grandparents did? At what point in family history did you learn about Stanley Milgram's experiment at Yale of how easily it is to get people to obey your orders if they perceive you as an authority figure in your field but only when you're touted in the mainstream media as an authority that can be trusted?

Milgram was known as "the man who shocked the world." In Sacramento, when you research family or personal history, do you wonder how children experienced historical events in the face of authority? Did local past generations trust, obey, or question those in charge to maintain their serenity?

If you remember the 1960s experiment of late psychologist, Stanley Milgram, his experiment has been repeated again a few weeks ago in Paris. How this is connected to family history/genealogy is to see whether people obey other people they trust--other people's orders, to the point where they'd suspend their morality and execute a total stranger just because some authority figure they see on TV tells them to electrocute the stranger.

Did the people realize they were playing a fake game show and that the person they were told to kill was an actor? Or did they assume anyone on TV wouldn't do anything immoral and automatically obey an authority figure on mainstream TV because they assumed that authority figure wouldn't tell them to do anything illegal?

According to the March 17, 2010 Associated Press article by Jamey Keaten, "French polemic over fake game show electrocutions," in Paris, France, a state-run TV channel presesnted a fake game show in which credulous participants obey orders to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a man, who is really an actor, until he appears to die. The name of the show is "The Game of Death."

The reason producers wanted to repeat Milgram's experiment is to see whether people of this generation have the same tendency as people from the 1960s generation to pull the lever giving electric shocks to someone just because the TV game show hosts told them to pull the lever and deliver the shocks. It was all about how willing people are of this generation to obey orders just like people did in past generations--if they thought the authority figure giving the orders could be trusted.

The people would have to suspend their own morality and instead of questioning authority and thinking for themselves, like sheep, they obeyed orders to prove the mind-numbing power of mainstream TV that has now become their authority figures that they'd trust without question to see what flaws might lie in the authority figure's logic or power.

The question is whether television is power or authority figures have power, if people trust them enough. Why do people obey orders of a total stranger to the point where it turns those people into potential killers? The big worry is that by the game's conclusion, more than four in five players in the game gave the maximum jolt because a TV host told them to go ahead and give the actor the lethal jolt.

None of the contestants were told that the actor was acting, playing dying and dead from electric shocks, and the game was fake. Was the audience smart enough to have read about the same experiment done in the US in the 1960s at Yale University by the late psychologist, Stanley Milgram?

Did the audience know about that experiment? Or would it be rare that a general audience living in Paris would have read about Milgram's psychology experiment at Yale almosts 50 years ago?

Maybe they read about it in high school or college classes even in Paris. After all, the experiment is a classic. Milgram found that most average people without training in psychology if encouraged by someone who looks the part of a scientist or similar authority figure--such as wearing a white coat or being a mainstream TV host-- would administer electric shocks to other people knowing full well that a lethal dose of electricity would kill the person isolated in another room.

So why would someone kill another person without actually confronting or touching that person, by pulling a lever to electrocute the person (cowardly, at that) from behind the one-way see-through mirrored wall of another room--as if the person was getting the electric chair of sorts?

Milgram's experiment and the fake TV show repeated the same situation to find out the answer to the same question--would you, too electrocute someone in another room just because you were asked to follow orders? In other words, are you capable of carrying out an execution of a total stranger because someone you saw on TV many times as a popular TV host (or someone you know as an authority figure or scientist in a white coat) asks you to do it?

As the fake game show players who didn't know the game was faked increased the voltage, the studio audience cheered them on. The contestants were on public TV. Everyone saw their faces. But they pulled the lever anyhow. Every time the actor playing the victim's role gave a wrong answer, the electric shocks were increased. As the voltage increases, the authority figure orders the players to go ahead and turn up the shocks even though they were told the shocks were in a range that could be or was lethal.

The contestants were nervous, but ordered to continue torturing the victim with electric shocks. Now why would the average person do this? Only 16 people backed out of the game. Did they back out because of of empathy for the victim or because the stress gave them a panicky feeling of guilt? By the end of the game 81 percent of the contestants turned up the electric voltage to the level they were told was potentially lethal.

The voltage kept coming even when the actor pretended to be dead. The producer wrote a book called The Extreme Experience (L'Experience Extreme). How does this experiment make you feel? The irony is that when it's repeated from generation to generation, it looks almost as if the tendency to follow orders could be inherited or passed to people in the culture or environment, since children usually are not warned about the experiment and prepared early in life to resist and to feel empathy.

Children are not taught early enough in life to question authority and think for themselves when ordered to hurt someone else. Nobody told the contestants to walk a mile in the other man's shoes before deciding on what's ethical and moral.

Unless people are told to question authority when someone wielding power, or the power of television advises another human being to hurt another human being just for an experiment. The game was fake, but the contestants were never told it was a fake game. What they experienced was their total trust in the person of authority--the TV host or producer.

Just like in Milgram's experiment at Yale where the total trust had been placed in the scientist in the white coat, the voice of authority, without being questioned. At least in the TV game, 16 people backed out, but for which reasons--moral or personal stress?

According to the Associated Press article, "Le Jeu de la Mort" (The Game of Death) is some type of an indictment of television's alleged power over society. As family historians, even with genealogy research and looking at personal histories, do you put too much faith in what's mentioned on TV talk shows? How could hindsight about this experiment change your life for the better by encouraging foresight and insight?