On the television show The Bachelor, Rachel lies to her fellow contestants about last night's date. Over on The Amazing Race, Jonathan shoves his wife after she slows them down en route to the finish line. On The Apprentice, Maria attacks Wes, then Donald Trump fires them both.
In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it.
Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the water cooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure. Although it's clear that participants are purposely placed in coercive situations, we nonetheless think we are seeing something real and noteworthy about the character and the psychology of fellow humans.
Perhaps that fascination explains why so many experiments in the field of psychology read like the premise for a reality TV series. Consider themost famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience," published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a "learning experiment." The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the "stranger" is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, "Please continue." If the subject still balks, he is first told, "The experiment requires that you go on," then, "It is absolutely essential that you continue," and then, "You have no other choice, you must go on."
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a "very strong shock," some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
