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ChangingMinds Blog! > Blog Archive > 28-Feb-16

 


Sunday 28-February-16

Pushed to the Edge: Would you kill someone?

I recently watched a show by mentalist/psychology personality Derren Brown, called 'Pushed to the Edge' in which he gets ordinary people to kill other people, by pushing them off a building. Of course nobody gets hurt, but the person doing the pushing thinks they are committing murder and that this is the only way out of being sent to prison. How did he get them to such a point? One small step at a time. Make urgency more important than 'minor' legality.

It is very similar to ?The Heist? that he did a few years ago, in which he replicated Milgram?s experiment (where the target was persuaded to electrocute people) and got people to engage in an armed robbery. The bottom line is that we are more compliant than we think we are, especially when we feel we are in a corner and are being commanded by someone in authority.

In the real world, people often get into crime through social pressure, and may even end up killing others. A key step that criminals take is that they justify such actions to themselves and are ready to do it again, often with the approval and encouragement of others. This is the critical process of criminalization, through which a person becomes comfortable with being a criminal. A typical justification includes self-talk such as 'I had no other choice' or 'He deserved it' as the criminals convince themselves they are good and right, and that their victims and the police are the real bad guys.

Of course there?s a moral question to such shows, including what negative effects it might have on the participants and even viewers. Against that is the presented purpose, to warn viewers that they can be manipulated beyond where they would think they could be pushed.


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Site Menu

| Home | Top | Quick Links | Settings |

Main sections: | Disciplines | Techniques | Principles | Explanations | Theories |

Other sections: | Blog! | Quotes | Guest articles | Analysis | Books | Help |

More pages: | Contact | Caveat | About | Students | Webmasters | Awards | Guestbook | Feedback | Sitemap | Changes |

Settings: | Computer layout | Mobile layout | Small font | Medium font | Large font | Translate |

 

 

Please help and share:

 

Quick links

Disciplines

* Argument
* Brand management
* Change Management
* Coaching
* Communication
* Counseling
* Game Design
* Human Resources
* Job-finding
* Leadership
* Marketing
* Politics
* Propaganda
* Rhetoric
* Negotiation
* Psychoanalysis
* Sales
* Sociology
* Storytelling
* Teaching
* Warfare
* Workplace design

Techniques

* Assertiveness
* Body language
* Change techniques
* Closing techniques
* Conversation
* Confidence tricks
* Conversion
* Creative techniques
* General techniques
* Happiness
* Hypnotism
* Interrogation
* Language
* Listening
* Negotiation tactics
* Objection handling
* Propaganda
* Problem-solving
* Public speaking
* Questioning
* Using repetition
* Resisting persuasion
* Self-development
* Sequential requests
* Storytelling
* Stress Management
* Tipping
* Using humor
* Willpower

Principles

+ Principles

Explanations

* Behaviors
* Beliefs
* Brain stuff
* Conditioning
* Coping Mechanisms
* Critical Theory
* Culture
* Decisions
* Emotions
* Evolution
* Gender
* Games
* Groups
* Habit
* Identity
* Learning
* Meaning
* Memory
* Motivation
* Models
* Needs
* Personality
* Power
* Preferences
* Research
* Relationships
* SIFT Model
* Social Research
* Stress
* Trust
* Values

Theories

* Alphabetic list
* Theory types

And

About
Guest Articles
Blog!
Books
Changes
Contact
Guestbook
Quotes
Students
Webmasters

 

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© Changing Works 2002-
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