Derren Brown: Pushed to the Edge

[God of Mr. Hanky]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...-Edge.html

I'm a big fan of Derren Brown, an illusionist who used science and psychology to explore and explain the weirder aspects of the natural world, including how we as humans think and, importantly, how we are suspetible to indoctrination and being led to do things. I'd thoroughly recommend watching his shows, especially the ones where he exposes frauds and charlatans such as psychics (his experiment with cold reading is great).

His most recent show explored the phenomenon of suggestion and social compliance, the idea that people will suspend their convictions, beliefs and morals in order to 'fit in' with the situation around them, leaving them more suspetible to completing tasks that they otherwise wouldn't complete.

This show uses the premise of a charity fundraiser culminating in the subject being given the choice whether to ultimately murder someone to protect both themselves and others from having some other crimes they have committed during the show from being revealed.

Not sure people outside of the UK can access it but quite fascinating (dailymail link is just chock full of criticism which misses the point of the show but has all the info if you can't watch it).

LOFL, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram did this without 100 actors, high-profile celebrities, and groundbreaking special effects more than 50 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I really like the idea of pointing out the important truth on the dangers which our human socialization can subject us to, but Brown did absolutely nothing to point out how "easy" this is, therefore his show was completely pointless. Milgram accomplished what he did with no such ludicrous extravagances, which belie Brown's initial premise that he would "show how easy it is" to manipulate somebody to do something out of character for them. What a ludicrous joke it is to suggest that anybody who wants a patsy for their murder would go to so much trouble, and involve so many accomplices and skilled workers to be trusted in making you do their dirty work when there are far less complicated and reliable ways of getting away with anything. Milgrim needed no more than a handful of actors and what looked like battery electrodes to show this! What Brown did to the people he brought into his experiment was pointlessly traumatizing, because the scenario was ludicrously unlikely. In truth it doesn't deserve the title "experiment", that would be plagiarism!