On March 13, 2020, Netflix released a new show called 100 Humans. The goal of the show was to bring 100 different people of varying ages, races, genders, and orientations to test classical experiments on them to prove or disprove them. Sounds fun right. Well, it is! That is until you realize that half of the experiments are incredibly immoral and the results of those experiments are almost always misleading.

The three hosts are American writer and actress Alison Ann, American comedian and actress Zainab Johnson, and American writer and stand-up comedian, Sammy K. Obeid. Notice that nine of those people have any background in science or psychology. Now, over the course of each episode, the hosts bring in experts on the topic of their experiments to interpret their results. Fine. That is a good practice. Except for the fact that the experts were often skeptical of the results of the experiments, and the hosts often ignored that skepticism

Remember, the show seeks to retest famous and reliable experiments. Knowing that it is odd that a lot of their trials showed the opposite of what the original experiments concluded. Of course, the show wouldn’t have done so well if all of the results matched those of the original but that doesn’t really matter. Those results are not well gained.

Each theory is only tested once with one trial which is not how experiments are supposed to work. For reliable results, there must be multiple trials to confirm the theory. Because the show chose to release their conclusions without testing them multiple times they are actually spreading misinformation.

Unfortunately, that’s not even the worst thing that the show does. The treatment of the test subjects takes first place in that aspect.

There are many different experiments on the show, each episode focusing on a different topic. For example, episode 2 consists of experiments that explore age, and episode 3 explores gender stereotypes. Again, that sounds super interesting. Yeah, except, it’s reinforcing stereotypes.

But wait! Isn’t the point to disprove the agist and sexist stereotypes? It should be, but because the tests are only done once the results are straight-up wrong. They are falsely proving potentially harmful stereotypes. In addition, the results that did disprove stereotypes ended up putting those negative associations on other groups because all of the experiments were staged in competition form.

That competitive environment was likely pretty stressful and damaging to the self-esteem of the “humans,” who were subjected to some of the more intense experiments. Like torture, for example.

Yeah, some of the subjects were literally tortured and that’s not just a statement made because of some over-analyzed event. No, the hosts literally asked the subjects if they were willing to be tortured and then put them in rooms with no water and sounds of babies crying for 24 hours. That’s real, traumatizing, PTSD-inducing, torture. Now, the hosts did say that they had signed consent forms from the subjects, but, again, that doesn’t matter in this scenario.

There was another experiment that could potentially cause physical problems. One experiment called for the subjects to hold their bladders for hours to see how their productivity was affected. That’s dangerous. Real experiments state that holding your bladder for long periods of time is harmful to the bladder. That kind of makes that experiment torture as well.

The subjects were under the pressure to submit to torture whether it was to look cool, to help the show, or to try a new experience. No one should be even offered the opportunity to be tortured especially when it could make them famous. The things that those people went through will have traumatic, long-lasting effects and it is the show’s fault.