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Astate-run TV channel in France has stirred controversy with a documentary about 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 producers of “Le Jeu de la Mort” (“The Game of Death”), broadcast on Wednesday night, said they wanted to examine what they call TV’s mind-numbing power to suspend morality, and the human willingness to obey orders.

“Television is a power. We know it, but it’s theoretical,” producer Christophe Nick told Le Parisien daily. “I wondered: Is it so important that it can turn us into potential executioners?”

In the end, more than four out of five “players” administered the maximum jolt.

“People never would have obeyed if they didn’t have trust,” Nick was quoted as saying in the paper’s Wednesday edition. “They told themselves, ‘TV knows what it’s doing.’ ”

The experiment was based on the work of the late American psychologist Stanley Milgram, who carried out a now-classic experiment at Yale University in the 1960s, which found that most ordinary people — if encouraged by an authoritative-seeming scientist — would administer ostensibly dangerous electric shocks to others.

At its root, both Milgram’s work and the made-for-TV experiment broadly replicating it unearth a question many people have contemplated after 20th-century genocides like the Holocaust: Would I, too, be capable of following orders to inflict pain — or even kill?

France-2, which aired “The Game of Death,” billed the fake game show as the subject of a sociological and psychological documentary, and added a warning: “What we are going to watch is extremely tough. But it’s only television.”

Recruiters found 80 “contestants” and told them they would take part in a real TV show called “Zone Xtreme.” Each was presented to a man said to be another contestant — in reality an actor — whose job was to answer a series of questions while strapped into an electrifiable chair in an isolation booth.

In a game of word associations, the actor, identified as “Jean-Paul,” was told that any wrong answers would merit punishment in the form of electric shocks of 20 to 460 volts, zapped by a console operated by the contestant.

As the wrong answers invariably rolled in and the voltage increased, the presenter, a well-known TV weatherwoman on France-2, exhorted contestants not to bend to his cries of agony. A goading studio audience added to the pressure. The contestants’ identities were withheld, but their faces were in view during the show.

As wrong answers piled up, and the voltage increased, Jean-Paul pleaded: “Get me out of here, please! I don’t want to play anymore,’’ and finally stopped answering, then fell silent despite the electric jolts. Contestants grew increasingly edgy, but told to continue, the vast majority did.

In the final tally, 81 percent of the contestants turned up the juice to the maximum level — said to be potentially deadly — according to “L’Experience Extreme” (“The Extreme Experience”), a book authored by Nick. Only 16 people among the 80 who took part backed out.

Nick said the experience was an awakening for many participants.

“People were convinced that they’d never succumb to this— and then they discovered they did it in spite of themselves,” he said.

The experience, he said, continued to affect participants even after it was over. Some grew bolder about standing up to their bosses, or admitted their homosexuality to their families, he said.

“For many, it changed their lives,’’ Nick said. 

AP