When TV Makes Harm Look Normal: Why We Keep Watching
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. After watching the Artemis two's hope filled trip around the moon and thankfully successful landing back on Earth, then catching up on the phenomenal new show, The Pit, I've got TV on the brain this week. So today, I want to talk about a kind of television that many of us treat as harmless fun even when it depends on dishonesty, humiliation, manipulation, or pushing people into treating each other badly. That's right.
Leslie Poston:I'm talking about reality and reality adjacent TV shows that either lie to contestants as part of the format or build entertainment around conflict, betrayal, and stress. Shows like Jury Duty are often framed as clever and sweet because the person at the center seems to come out of it okay. Shows like Survivor are often defended as just strategy, competition, or that the bad behavior is simply part of the game. But I think those defenses miss the bigger ethical and psychological question. What happens when entertainment depends on misleading people, destabilizing them, or rewarding cruelty.
Leslie Poston:What happens when millions of viewers are asked to watch that and treat it as normal? This isn't about being anti fun or saying every competition show is immoral. We're asking a basic question that television often avoids. What are we willing to do to real people for content, and what does it do to us when we keep calling that entertainment? One of the first problems with this whole category is that we often describe it too vaguely.
Leslie Poston:We say reality TV, a prank show, a social experiment, call it a competition show, or maybe unscripted entertainment. All of these labels blur together several very different things. But from an ethical standpoint, the important distinction isn't whether the show is scripted. It's whether harm is built into the show's format. Some shows depend on deception.
Leslie Poston:The participant doesn't know what's actually happening or doesn't know the real premise or might be missing a key fact that would completely change whether they agreed to be there in the first place. They're placed in situations that undermine informed consent in ways any ethics board would likely reject for psychological research Even though the scenarios in these shows can still have real psychological impact, other shows depend on engineered conflict. Contestants may know they're competing, but the structure is built to produce distrust, emotional strain, humiliation, isolation, scarcity, and betrayal because those things make better television. That matters because these shows are often presented as windows into human nature as if they're just showing us how people really are. But many of them are not neutral windows.
Leslie Poston:They're pressure cookers. They're systems built to get a certain kind of reaction, which they then package as the truth. So when people say, well, that's just how people act, I think it's worth pausing and asking how people act under what conditions? Under conditions of honesty and dignity or under conditions deliberately designed to make them unstable, suspicious, or cruel. Let's start with the deception based version of this.
Leslie Poston:The show jury duty is one obvious example. A lot of people love that show because it felt light and funny, and compared with so many reality TV shows today, almost gentle. The central participants in both seasons came across well. They were kind, patient, and they handled bizarre situations with more grace than most people probably would. The reveal and the ending felt warm, and that made it easier for viewers to focus on how good the show felt rather than the fact that its entire premise depended on deception.
Leslie Poston:But the ethical issue doesn't disappear just because the tone was pleasant. The whole premise depended on one person not knowing what was really going on. He thought he was participating in one thing when he was actually participating in another, and that means the central form of consent was compromised. He couldn't fully agree to the experience because the experience itself was hidden from him. This is one of those places where entertainment gets a moral pass that other settings don't.
Leslie Poston:If a researcher did this without proper review, people would have questions. If an employer or teacher did this, people would want action. But put a camera on it, give it a comic tone, and suddenly many people stop asking what would otherwise be obvious. Now that there's more than one season of jury duty, you can see the ethical issue more clearly. One participant may come away feeling more destabilized, and another may seem more at peace with it.
Leslie Poston:But that difference doesn't settle the question. In both cases, the format depended on deception. The point isn't whether someone looked okay at the end. The point is that they were never in a position to fully consent to what was being done to them in the first place. And to be clear, this isn't about whether the participant later said they were okay with it.
Leslie Poston:It also isn't about whether one seemed emotionally resilient or the final product was charming or one was saying that he had trouble trusting people after the experience. Those things matter, but they don't settle the ethical question. A good outcome doesn't erase a bad process. Someone coming through an experience without visible damage doesn't mean the experience was respectful, fair, and morally sound. Ethics aren't only about the aftermath.
Leslie Poston:They're also about how a person is treated while the thing is being done. Now let's shift our attention to a different kind of reality show, one like survivor. This presents a different ethical problem. Survivor contestants know they're entering a competition where alliances matter and betrayal is part of the game. At first glance, this can seem cleaner than deception based television.
Leslie Poston:No one's being fooled about the fact that they're on a show. But knowledge of competition isn't the same thing as ethical neutrality. A format can still be designed in ways that reward behavior most of us would find corrosive in ordinary life. Manipulation gets treated as intelligence. Emotional detachment gets treated on survivor as strength, and betrayal gets treated as growth.
Leslie Poston:Humiliation becomes a plot point, and distrust becomes the social atmosphere. And then all of that gets framed together as exciting, strategic, and normal. And once that language takes hold, it launders these harmful behaviors. And suddenly cruelty isn't cruelty. It's gameplay.
Leslie Poston:Emotional harm becomes good television, and public humiliation becomes a plot twist. That reframing matters because when a culture repeatedly watches harmful conduct presented as clever or necessary, people don't need to copy it exactly for it to still shape them. Sometimes the effect is simpler. The behavior starts to feel less jarring and unacceptable and more familiar and understandable. It gets reframed as something smart people do to get ahead.
Leslie Poston:I'd argue that this kind of television can normalize harmful behavior to the point that people become less startled by it in real life. Not because a show gives viewers a direct script to follow, but because repeated exposure can make manipulation, humiliation, lies, and cruelty feel more ordinary than they should. And when that happens, people may be less prepared to recognize those behaviors quickly, resist them clearly, or defend themselves and others against the harm they cause in real life. Now let's talk about the people inside these formatted shows, because I think public discussion often skips over their actual psychological experiences. When someone is deceived as part of a show, one possible harm is confusion on a deep level.
Leslie Poston:Not just confusion in the moment, but confusion about what was real and who was sincere. They may even begin to doubt whether their own instincts were trustworthy. That kind of experience can be disorienting even if the person later laughs about it. It can make their memory feel unstable and make a person revisit moments that seemed genuine and ask what exactly they were participating in. With competition based shows, the harm looks a little different.
Leslie Poston:Contestants may deal with stress, sleep disruption, social pressure, isolation, shame, and the pressure of constant surveillance. They may be encouraged to treat other people as obstacles and be rewarded for suppressing their own empathy. They may leave with relationships damaged, public judgment attached to their name, or an edited version of themselves circulating as the one millions of people now think is real. And that editing matters more than viewers know. A contestant doesn't just go through one filming experience.
Leslie Poston:They also go through a second experience in public where producers have chosen which moments from the footage define them. They can be edited in post to become the villain, the fool, the manipulator, the weak link, the unstable one, or even the butt of the joke. That public identity may have very little to do with the complexity of who they are, but it can follow them anyway, sometimes for years. A real life friend of mine was on a reality show and edited to be the villain. In real life, they're a sweetheart who happens to cuss a lot, but the editorial choices by the producers damaged their career for many years.
Leslie Poston:There's also a financial dimension that rarely gets discussed. Most contestants are unpaid or receive only a token stipend, while the network profits enormously from the footage they generated. So the person who is deceived, humiliated, sleep deprived, or edited into a villain often has no meaningful financial stake in the product their experience made possible. That's a fact worth sitting with. So when viewers say, well, the contestants signed up for it, I think that answer is a little too shallow.
Leslie Poston:People sign contracts all the time without being able to fully imagine the psychological weight of what comes next or what the public aftermath of an unflattering edit will feel like. Signing something isn't the end of a conversation. The next thing we should think about is the social impact. What does this do to us as viewers? Psychology gives us a few useful ways to think about that.
Leslie Poston:One is social learning. People absorb cues from what they see modeled, rewarded, laughed at, excused, or admired in the media. And that doesn't mean television controls people like puppets. It means repeated patterns can shape norms, expectations, and thresholds. Another piece of the puzzle is desensitization.
Leslie Poston:The more often viewers see something framed as ordinary entertainment, the less morally charged it may begin to feel. As the shock wears off and the discomfort softens, the behavior becomes one more familiar format. There's also the effect of parasocial something we've talked about before. Viewers often form genuine emotional attachments to the contestants. They're rooting for them, grieving their eliminations, and they feel like they know these people.
Leslie Poston:That attachment is real even if it's one-sided, and it makes the normalization effect stronger, not weaker, because it's harder to critique a format that you're emotionally invested in. When you feel like you know someone from a show, the manipulative conditions that shape their behavior start to feel like they're just how people are. And then there's something called moral distancing. These shows often invite us to judge others from what feels like a safe distance. We see this sometimes in the anonymous comment sections of the Internet as well.
Leslie Poston:We get to watch other people experiencing stress and construct narratives about what we would do, who we think is smart, strong, or weak, who we think deserves sympathy, and who deserves ridicule. And that's part of the pull of these shows. We have names for this. Part of it is downward social comparison, where people feel better by comparing themselves to someone who seems worse off. And part of it is also schadenfreude, the pleasure that some people feel when someone else is stumbling.
Leslie Poston:That also means the audience isn't just passively watching. We're all participating in a system of evaluation and being trained in subtle ways in what to excuse and what to celebrate. These shows don't simply reflect a culture that already tolerates manipulation and cruelty. They can also reinforce it by making those things feel routine, entertaining, and manageable. The wider cultural lesson is where the issue expands past television.
Leslie Poston:We already live in systems that often reward competition over care, performance over honesty, manipulation over clarity, and winning over solidarity. We live in workplaces where people are expected to smile through dysfunction, and political cultures where manipulation is treated as savvy. In our social systems, vulnerability is often punished, and callousness is often reframed as realism. When television turns those same values into spectacle, it's not happening in a vacuum. It fits into a larger culture that already has trouble distinguishing toughness from cruelty and strategy from exploitation.
Leslie Poston:This is where Squid Game is actually useful as a contrast. Even though it's not quite in the same category as jury duty or survivor, Squid Game isn't quietly normalizing exploitation while pretending everything is fine. It's holding up a mirror to show us how desperate people are turned into entertainment and profit. It's a critique. Saying, look at this system you exist in now and notice what it requires of you and how it harms you.
Leslie Poston:Some reality TV formats are not as extreme, of course, but they sometimes borrow pieces of that same logic while draining off the moral alarm. Even cooking competitions can turn humiliation into narrative and precarity into drama. Even judge Judy and similar court simulation shows turn social harm into audience engagement. And because the tone is lighter or the stakes seem lower or the setting looks familiar, people are more willing to accept it. And that may be one of the strangest things television does.
Leslie Poston:It can take dynamics that would look ugly in any other setting and teach us to consume them with snacks. The reason these shows keep getting made despite the ethical concerns isn't mysterious. They get made because they make more money than they cost, and the formula keeps people tuned in. They're efficient and memorable. Emotional volatility is cheap compared with careful storytelling, and conflict hooks viewers.
Leslie Poston:Betrayal creates shareable clips, and humiliation drives conversation. Plus, deception creates these big reveals. Real stress produces real reactions, and real reactions are easily marketable. There's a long history in media industries of confusing profitable with acceptable. If it gets attention, trends, viewers keep watching, that gets treated as its own defense.
Leslie Poston:But that logic shows up in the aftercare conversation too. Producers may say they have support systems, therapists, check ins or follow-up resources, and some of that may be real and meaningful, but support after harm isn't the same thing as asking whether harm is necessary in the first place. You don't get moral extra credit simply for helping someone cope with the situation that you designed. So what would a better ethical standard be? It starts with a simple principle.
Leslie Poston:People are not raw material. Market demand isn't moral permission. Something being widely consumed only tells you it's being consumed and doesn't tell you whether people were treated well in the making of it, whether the social lesson it offers is healthy or whether the format should exist as it currently does. And legality isn't moral permission either. A person can sign something, a network can clear something, the productions company can cover itself on paper, but none of that settles whether the treatment of human beings on the show was decent.
Leslie Poston:It just tells you what a company thought it could get away with. Entertainment doesn't get a free pass to disregard informed consent, dignity, or psychological safety just because the end product is engaging. A show shouldn't depend on someone being fundamentally misled about the experience or require humiliation as its core ingredient. It definitely shouldn't need to create conditions where mistreating other people becomes the easiest route to success. And that doesn't mean all tension is unethical or all competition is unethical.
Leslie Poston:But there's a line between tension and manipulation, and competition and cruelty, and surprise and nonconsensual deception that gets blurred on purpose because blurred lines are profitable. The real test is simple. If a show can't keep our attention without lying to people, destabilizing them or turning their worst moments into content, that's not a sign that audiences are too sensitive. It's a sign the format is weak without exploitation. There is too much genuine talent in television for this to be the only option.
Leslie Poston:Thanks again for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to vote for us. We're nominated for a 2026 Women in Podcasting Award. I'll put a link to vote in the show notes.
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