Just watched an interesting program: Derren Brown - The Experiments. The first part was interesting as he correctly predicted choices a person made. The second part was sickening. He had an audience choose good or bad situations for an unsuspecting person, progressively making them worse. It included entering his apartment and going through his personal belongings, smashing his TV and so on. The experiment was supposedly just as much about the mob decision making, as many options were having something good happen (win $10,000) or something bad (smash TV) and the audience seemed to always choose the bad option.
I really hate "practical jokes" like this and found it ultimately disgusting. Although having a look around the internet, seems he makes programs of lots of similar psychological experiments. Just found another one where he hypnotised several people and suggested they throw acid into a person's face. They did. He then moves on to train him to assassinate some-one.
It's painful to watch.
This one was worrying, for sure. I chose the nice options, never wanting to see fellow humans suffer. The audience choices were displeasing. But the experiment was useful as hopefully each and every one of the mint he audience will now think about themselves a little more.
ReplyDeleteAs for the assassin experiment, it was based on the assassination of Robert Kennedy where they assassin said in interviews he had no recollection of his actions and they were completely out of character. So he experimented to see if it was possible to hypnotize someone to commit murder and then completely forget it. The experiment worked. It throws an interesting insight into the CIA etc.
Yes, I watched the same thing, but only for a while - got sick of it. We really do have crap on TV.
ReplyDeleteHi Nick. Yes, the experiment proved that Robert Kennedy's Assassin may be telling the truth. The next mystery would be how he came to be selected for the job.
ReplyDeleteThe experiments are enlightening, but I just hate watching such things play out. It's like one of the shows that have a magician play horrible tricks on people. Can't remember the name or title, but there is another show I like with a magician called Dynamo - his tricks are entertaining without being cruel.
Yes, I've watched a little bit of TV over the holiday period, having been feeling a bit sick with the flu. It's all been pretty bad. Which has meant I've caught up with quite a bit of reading :)
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