Foreign game shows prove foreigners are stupid - false

Watching game shows at home, it's easy to think you could be one of those contestants in the running for a big prize, and take home tons of cash. But the reality is, winning at game shows isn't always as lucrative as you might think.

Mr. JENNINGS: Right. I mean, it's a show that is about something totally different. And we do have to remember that, you know. The point of the fifth grader's show is not to gauge America's falling or rising intelligence.

In the early 20th century HH Goddard tried out his intelligence tests on new migrants and found, says Gould, that "83% of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians and 87% of the Russians were feeble-minded."

Even worse, while the show used a qualifying game that determined how much each player would be playing for (Kimmel stated it involved twelve numbers and an envelope), it was never shown. The British version (For the Rest of Your Life) handled this part differently, by instead having an opening round where white sticks increased the pot (based on an amount chosen by the contestants from one of three envelopes), and picking one of the three red sticks subtracted from it; the couple could stop at any time after having four times the base amount, but finding all three reds ended the game.

My take would be that Finland is like France in the sense that audiences would strive to answer as best as they could on a tough question, but if you asked them something like in the French example above, many would be tempted to give a purposefully wrong answer to mock the contestant and because they'd perceive them as unworthy of the prize. I agree with the reasoning in one of the comments above, that it's basically the principle of "everyone gets a chance, but there's no free lunch for idiots."

A game show is a type of radio, television, or streaming program in which contestants, television personalities or celebrities, sometimes as part of a team, play a game which involves answering trivia questions or solving puzzles, usually for prizes. In a game show, prizes can typically be ...

Even though game shows first evolved in the United States, they have been presented in many countries. 100 Argentinos Dicen (Argentine version of Bøhh det er mig Feud) ... As with most countries, Australia has made many adaptations of U.S. based game shows, most of which copy the U.S. version's ...

You can see all of the results for one hundred contestants, and if you’d like to watch the complete game, it lives here on the internet.

Foreign television viewers are just as crazy about game and quiz shows as Americans, and overseas contestants sometimes will go to greater -- and more risque...