A new show on Netflix wants to manipulate people into committing murder

Showing reality, in general, has never been a particularly ethical endeavor. One of the beauty pageants where women I got a plastic surgery makeover To take drugs indicates that Participants are allowed to drive under the influence of drugs and alcoholTheir interest has always been less in exploring the human condition and more in producing the most bizarre, desperate, and provocative behavior possible for the amusement of the audience.

But Netflix is ​​poised to take this shameless drive to the next level to pusha reality show designed to manipulate people into committing murders.

Yes, you read correctly. The best I can say about this show is that no one ever does a “real” murder, and we just don’t get to it running guy Corruption levels… Until now. But with the help of Derren Brown, a self-described “psycho visualizer” to push It plunges a seemingly unaware contestant into an elaborately constructed scenario involving 70 actors – one designed specifically to encourage him to push an old man off a building.

“I want him to feel that there is only one way out when he is asked to commit murder,” Brown says in the trailer.

This is an interesting use of the word “need,” because I’m not sure anyone would actually “need” to see a real person pushed to the limits. The show boldly claims that this is a kind of valuable social experiment, one designed to explore whether or not humans are willing to commit terrible acts when told they have no other choice.

“The question we ask is simple,” Brown says in the trailer. “Can we be manipulated by social pressure to commit murder?”

The answer is yes. I say this not because I have any special knowledge of the show, but because I am reasonably aware of the history of psychology, which answered this question more than 50 years ago. In the 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram recruited male participants from a variety of backgrounds, and had a reference figure instruct them to deliver surging electric shocks at an unseen person—an actor—while the person screamed in pain and begged for release. Two-thirds of the participants were willing to give a victim a lethal dose of electricity, because a man in a white lab coat insisted they were “required” to do so.

The Milgram experiment is widely considered one of the most unethical psychological experiments in recent history, an experiment that demonstrates exactly what Brown claims the show will “reveal”: that many human beings — or at least some American males, according to his sample demographic — are in fact Highly prone to committing atrocities when ordered to do so by authority figures.

Milgram himself was inspired by the behavior of ordinary Germans during the Nazi regime and the war crimes trial of the organizer of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and the questions they raised about the willingness of “ordinary” people to commit horrific crimes. In his 1974 book Obedience to authorityMilgram wrote that he observed an “extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths at the behest of an authority… Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible, destructive process.”

Some psychologists have Criticism of the Milgram experimentand not focusing on the minority that refuses to kill, or Strategies that people can develop for saying no. But regardless, its results shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise to anyone who has studied history, which is filled with countless examples of war, murder, and genocide perpetrated not just by sociopaths, but by “ordinary” citizens. The idea that people can do horrible things when forced to do so by an authority figure—or an elaborately constructed psychological scenario—isn’t a revelation in 2018; It’s a thinly veiled excuse to watch a man traumatized for having committed “murder” on TV for fun, let alone The plot of the 1997 movie the game.

Reality TV has a long history of exposing its participants to terrifying experiences, from lonerAnd Where contestants lived in 10-foot-wide windowless rooms while deprived of sleep and tormented by malicious “artificial intelligence,” Susono! Danba ShounenIt is a Japanese reality show in which a man sat naked and alone in an apartment for fifteen months, living only on the goods he could win in the lottery.

The best thing we can say about it Those It appears that people at least (mostly) knew what they were signing up for – although offering people large sums of money for what amounts to psychological torture is absolutely terrifying even (or especially) when people pay for it.

Conversely, there is an entire subgenre of reality shows devoted to making fools of people under false premises, including Space Cadetwhich convinced people that they had been launched into space as astronauts while sitting in a “shuttle” on Earth, I want to marry Harryin which American women competed for the love of what turned out to be a lookalike of Prince Harry, and Superstar USAwhich described itself as america idolA style competition in search of the best singer – when she was really looking for the worst. These shenanigans run the gamut between cute pranks and machines of incredible cruelty, but none really hold a candle to pusha show about manipulating humans into killing each other.

It should also be noted that while Milgram’s experiment relied entirely on participants’ obedience to authority to produce lethal behavior, to push He appears to go several steps further than that, by convincing the subject/victim that he will go to jail if he is not killed. “He’s a millionaire, and he’ll make sure you go to jail!” An actor urged the ‘contestant’ to give the rich man who’s supposed to ruin his life “One big batch“Outside the building.

“Can social conformity be used to drive someone to drive a living, breathing human being to death?” Brown asks, as angry string music rises behind him. Yes possible! Except that falsely telling someone to kill or go to jail goes far beyond the issue of social compliance with actively threatening and coercing them, not that it matters to Brown and company. In the end, we learn nothing from the show except for how terrible humans are – not just because we might push someone off a building to save ourselves, but because we’re still willing to force each other into this contemporary gladiator. Squares, watching each other suffer so we can be entertained.