Serious Question: Why do you watch 'I'm A Celeb'?

Hello. Let us start by assuming that 'I'm A Celebrity, Please Get Me Out Of The Jungle As I've Already Been Paid And It's Really Shit Here' is, to all intents and purposes, a torture show. Yes it is. I've seen enough clips on Gogglebox to come to that conclusion, without ever putting ITV on to form a wider view. It's okay, I'm not going to accuse anyone who watches it of enjoying people being tortured, you know, being fed horrible things, cut off from friends and loved ones, undergoing physical discomfort... no, definitely not.

You're safe from the moral dilemma of watching people suffer for your entertainment because of the distance between you and them. For a start I bet hardly anyone reading this is in Australia, which we are led to believe is where the show is made (and NOT the Eden Project place or Kew Gardens or a disused TEXAS Homecare just off the A13 near the Ripple Road roundabout). No, there is a distance between you and the infliction of discomfort on others, which is why, presumably, you can still sleep soundly at night after watching it.

And they're getting paid right? If they win they get £ALot apparently, so they've asked for anything that's thrown at them, or placed through them, or on them. And it's this bit I want to focus on. In 1961 a psychologist called Stanley Milgram ran an experiment in the U.S. to try to get to grips with one of the biggest questions of the 20th century: why do people do harm to others? At the Nuremburg trials after World War II, Adolf Eichmann claimed that he carried out atrocities against the Jews because he was simply 'following orders'. Milgram wanted to try to set up an experiment to test if ordinary folks might be capable of such acts if told to do so.

The experiment involved three people. An ad was placed in a local paper, it asked for volunteers to take part in a psychological test for a pre-paid fee of $4. Two volunteers would then draw lots to be either the 'teacher' or the 'learner'. Thing is, this bit was fixed: one of the 'volunteers' was a stooge, and they always became the 'learner'. The third person was an authority figure, a man in a white coat who oversaw proceedings. The 'teacher' and 'learner' were separated by a wall (here's your distance), and the 'teacher' then gave the 'learner' a series of memory tests which got progressively harder to repeat.

If the 'learners' got a test wrong, he (and they were ALL men) were given an electric shock.

The 'teacher' was given a very mild shock before the experiment began, enough to be uncomfortable but not to actually hurt. So, the 'teacher' knew what the 'learner' was going through. The big deal with this experiment is that the amount of shock administered was variable. As the stooge deliberately started making more and more mistakes, the man in the white coat and the clipboard advised the 'teacher' to increase the charge. Pre-recorded cries of anguish, turning to pleads to be released, were played as the charge increased.

Put yourself in the 'teacher' position. When would you stop the experiment? Will they take my $4 away if I bail straight away? Once you know there's an electric shock involved you'll get cold feet and politely call it a day right? Once the poor guy in the other room starts "ow"ing, that's the cut-off point, surely? In the actual experiment, almost all of the 40 'teachers' went beyond 330 volts! Despite recorded screams and even a faked physical episode, most went on to deliver potentially fatal shocks.

It can't have been the money. Even accounting for inflation, $4 isn't enough to risk someone's life for. No, the experiment shows that when people are told to do things by someone in (even bogus) authority, they tend to do as they are told.

Milgram's experiment was heavily criticised because of the stress it placed the 'teachers' under. Later versions had two authority figures, one saying 'stop' as well as the one saying 'you must carry on'. You'll be pleased to know that this made a difference. Although the original experiment was, for want of a better phrase, a nasty piece of work, it was the most instructive.

I think if anyone tried a similar experiment today, there would be a strong chance that the guinea pigs would know something fishy was going on. We've all seen Dom Joly's 'Trigger Happy TV', where he picked on old people or unsuspecting members of the public who don't use English as a first language, to play 'hilarious' (but also humiliating) pranks on. The distance between him and the victims was, oh hang on, there wasn't any distance! He was taking the piss out of these people and filming it and is proud to have done so. What a dick. Then there was 'Game For A Laugh', 'Fonejacker', 'Brass Eye'... all happy to humiliate in the name of entertainment. Admittedly no-one got hurt on those shows (I remember Dennis Norden commenting on 'You've Been Framed': 'It's funny, as long as they get up afterwards'). But no-one was really hurt in Stanley Milgram's experiment either, and no-one on 'Trigger Happy TV' was asked to be humiliated, or were offered a fee beforehand for the opportunity to be humiliated...

He really was a dick, wasn't he?

You would have to find people who haven't watched a lot of television, perhaps because they are always on the television. Because of inflation, you would have to increase the fee for such research. Ordinary people won't get out of bed for less than $4 today; if you want to experiment on celebrities in a controlled environment and film the results for posterity, you'll need to pay £Thousands, even £Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps it could take place in a jungle, with the public voting on who has to go through certain 'challenges'...




The proper historical bits from this are contained in:
'Investigating Psychology' edited by Nicola Brace and Jovan Byford
'Investigating Methods' edited by Jean McAvoy and Nicola Brace

Both are part of the Open University module 'Introducing Psychology'.