What do you think about Derren Brown's "The guilt trip"?

Cafe Society
1

Last night I watched a new episode of Derren Brown’s experiments, called “The guilt trip”.

You can watch it here, on channel 4OD. If you are not in the UK you might not be able to watch it (unless you have one of those IP-thingies?).

Spoiler:

Basically, Derren Brown gets a man to come over to a big country house thinking he is speaking at a conference. In fact everyone there is an actor in on the plot. They start by “conditioning” him by making him feel guilty and then squeezing his shoulder & ringing a bell. They make him feel terrible over a course of days.

Then they start messing with his mind, by having people suddenly change clothes when is back is turned, and swapping his plate while he is eating, so he feels he cannot trust his mind.

They fake the disappearance of a pearl necklace, to which all the actors react by saying he had it in his hand earlier that day, after which the necklace turns up in his bedroom. Prompting more guilt, confusion & a “confession” on his part.

It all culminates in him waking up on the lawn without knowing how he got there, someone is dead and he is convinced he did it. He turns himself in to the police. He is obviously distraught and confused, he has at this point be crying for days. It’s actually painful to watch.

First, I wonder if this is real. It could just be another Derren Brown trick, right? The subject could be an actor?

If it is real, do you think it is OK to do this to someone? I would recommend you see it, I was genuinely shocked at what they did to him.

I also wonder how it works legally. He did do some kind of audition before the show (for which they pretended he was turned down), so he would have presumably have signed something for that. However, I can’t really imagine that you can get someone to sign under false pretenses, to the point that you would be allowed to film them in their bedroom etc & to the point of literally driving them crazy?

I dunno what’s going on here, but would really like to hear what other people think…

ETA: Derren Brown’s reason for doing this is to show how people are manipulated into confessing by the police. However, it doesn’t really resemble anything the police could do, as far as I can see… :S

2

I haven’t seen it but I’m certain Derren doesn’t use actors.

This sounds like a simple variation on the theme of stage hypnotism. i.e. that people are suggestible.
Any pre-show selection will be designed to pinpoint those people who will conform.

3

Yeah, he did say he had been selected for being “a nice guy”, they had definitely selected him specifically.

4

There are incredibly strict laws on what people can do in psychology experiments today. Legally there would have to be an ethics comittie present at all times throughout the experiment, and the plan of the experiment would have had to be approved by the ethics comittie in order for it to be conducted. You may remember Darren Brown saying that the subject had to complete a test to prove that he was psychologiclly strong enough to safely complete the experiment, and that would have been one of the conditions given to Darren Brown by the ethics comittie before the experiment could begin. You may also remember, when the subject walked out the door towards the police station that Darren Brown said “this has gone far enough”. Basiclly, he was going to end the experiment there, whether he confessed or not. The ethics comittie are incredibly strict, and therefore, they would have been incredibly confident that the subject would not be mentally harmed for long term. You could also see that he was happy and thrilled after the experiment was explained to him, which basiclly justifies what I have written here. For these reasons I think that it was a facinating experiment and ethiclly moral.

5

I enjoyed it up until the part when they hypnotised through the tv and carried him ‘asleep’ out into the lawn, which was quite a distance away. That’s when I realised the whole thing was staged. His reaction to the reveal seemed staged as well. Good show let down by the last ten minutes.

6

Thanks for informing me of the show gracer - this was fucking EVIL!

I personally don’t think it was staged, whilst initially I was a bit dubious of him being carried outside asleep he had been drinking, and how many people tell stories of waking up and not knowing where they were? Or getting up to take a piss in the toilet that turned out to be the wardrobe? Add a bit of hypnosis (and I’ve been partially hypnotised into a semi-awake semi-asleep state myself) and I think it’s perfectly feasible to do it.

Assuming it wasn’t staged I nearly ended up crying at the reveal, I felt so relieved for this poor guy who actually believed he’d killed someone. It was more emotive when you consider that a lot of people are effectively bullied into confessing to crimes they haven’t committed (I was aware of this from an article that Cracked did recently on this).

7

Lots of things expose this.

Derron earlier warns if he leaves the building subject will find the cameras.

At the end subject leaves the building seemingly without spotting a single camera.

Despite being in a strange village he immediately finds the police station without directions (would need to know which way to walk).

This police station that is so convincing is “made from paper” , some distance away from original set - Paper walls crumble to reveal a pub with cast all smartly dressed, made up, & suddenly assembled on the other side !!!

Previous warning signs to this incl subject being lifted Hammer Horror style without waking till put on floor, and plate swopping
routines which this production would have cost tens of thousands & days of work to already make up to this point + all would never risk being jeaopardized on basic misdirection routines.

8

One of the things that made me wonder about the veracity was also that he was talking aloud in his bedroom. Obviously, sometimes people do that… but still…

Thanks for bringing up the ethics committee, mattied! It still seems to me like this would really be pushing it though. I get that he signed for some things, but really, how can you sign to basically get screwed for days on end, and be filmed in your bedroom? Does anyone know about the legal side to that, how they do it?

Also, I agree that he was happy at the end, but it seemed to me like he was at that moment relieved that it all turned out to be a horrible nightmare. For me personally, 5 mins later I would realise who caused that nightmare, and I would be really, really upset! ( I’d probably start some serious lawsuits, that they would be immune to due to what I had signed, and never speak to my friends again)

Regarding the relevance to police bullying, I think I would rather have seen something more actually like it…

9

Jody must have been quite stupid for the following reasons:

  1. He did not querie why there were chimes going off at odd intervals.

  2. He did not wonder where the blanket on the grass came from.

  3. After seeing the mess he had made of his ‘victim’, he did not seem to wonder why he was not spattered with his victim’s blood.

However, I do not think that he was stupid because he must have been in on the whole thing.

I make amateur movies and to track someone with a camera, walking down a twisting stairway is not easy. But to do this, so beautifully accurate, by remote control is well nigh impossible because the speed of tracking varies. This is what happenend when Jody left his room and wandered outside.

Without the whole thing being totally staged how could Derren Brown be sure that his subject would not feel sudden remorse, grab sharp knife or razor in the bathroom (presumably where there are no cameras) and slash his wrists.

I feel sure that the final episode of the series will reveal that the watching public have been the subjects of the experiments all along.

10

Ooooooooooooh - that’d be a nice mindfuck :slight_smile:

11

I was wondering the same thing, if at the end they say “WTF you guys all went along with this, saying it was OK?! Wake up people, fellow humans should not be treated like this…”

Also a good point, miopicman, that he could have seriously hurt himself. Although I guess that was probably one thing they screened for.

I’m currently taking a university documentary class, and this kind of stuff would definitely not be OK. Ethics is a big part of what we are taught. I’m still curious about the legal issues, because it is such a far cry from a regular show, where perhaps people are manipulated, but they are not miserable for days while unwittingly being observed.

Ugh, this is still really bothering me. I’ll email my tutors, see what they think of the whole thing. I’ll let you know if they reply…

12

I think it’s sickening. That’s what I think.

13

Like a macro-Milgram experiment? I wouldn’t put it past him.

14

And then… we’re the good guys! :smiley:

15

Whilst this would be true to some extent were Derren to be presenting himself as a psychologist, I don’t think this is the case here at all. In the UK the titles of most of psychology’s sub-classes - clinical psychologist and so on - are legally protected cite, and certainly as psychologists we are bound by a code of ethics. Our professional body, the BPS, is required by its charter to have an ethical code of conduct (which doesn’t mention any laws as such), and there are professional sanctions for trangressions. However, these apply to psychologists and Derren Brown is not claiming to be a psychologist. This is not my area at all (my branch of psychology doesn’t do experiments per se) but I’m not sure that this type of event would be subject to specific legal control as much as professional ethical standards. Do you have a cite for the ‘incredibly strict laws’?

In any case, one thing to point out is that if this were an experiment in anything other than a colloquial sense, I’m not sure it would have passed the first proposal stage for any real ethics committee. Taken as a piece of experimental design, it’s shockingly bad - there’s no control condition, there’s no theoretical foundation and so on. But of course, that doesn’t matter, because this isn’t a psychological experiment, and Derren Brown isn’t claiming to be a psychologist.

As a piece of television I thought it was quite good - not as good as last week’s show, which I found more powerful. For what it’s worth, I do believe it was real, and that Jody was a naive participant, his behaviour seemed completely inkeeping with what I would have expected. I suspect the timescales were compressed even more than they explicitly appeared to be, so the change in Jody’s behaviour appears that bit more dramatic. I don’t think this show was particularly shocking or extreme, either - not when compared to some of the Trick or Treat shows that Derren has done in the past. I’ve heard him talking before about how carefully participants are selected and debriefed, and they have all volunteered to be part of a Derren show, even if they don’t know what detail to expect, or that they’ve actually been seleceted, so I don’t actually have too many ethical heebie-jeebies anyway.

16

I’ve just caught up on the other two episodes in the series, the Assassin and Game Show.

Ho.

Ly.

Fuck.

Put it this way, I jumped away from my computer screen twice in Game Show (if you saw it then you know the bits - make sure you pick the right door), and felt physically sick by the end of Assassin. These shows were fantastic, and I genuinely believe they’re real or they have absolutely no kind of weight or point. Actual, documented experiments like Milgram have been carried out and shown that behaviour can be manipulated quite easily in the right settings. I don’t know a great deal about hypnosis, however I have been put into a mild trance state and can verify that what happens is real, it’s not make believe.

Off to add Derren Brown’s DVDs to my queue!

17

Huh, I posted something earlier, it went up just fine… and now it’s gone :S Where’d it go?!

18

I fail to see why people are still fascinated by this guy. His stuff is always obviously fake, and he’s even so much as admitted it before, saying that he never actually uses NLP (despite using NLP explanations all the time), and admitting that several stunts actually weren’t dangerous at all. And his magic is usually rather basic, and all magicians can point it out.

When someone has lied as much as this guy has, I don’t know why anyone even entertains the idea that he is telling the truth. It’s like those people who see the disclaimer that no actors are used and assume that a magician wouldn’t just lie about that, too.

19

So what you’re saying is that that some or even most of Brown’s work involves actors and is entirely fraudulent? If so, why bother doing a show that purports to be real at all? Brown has been honest in interviews that he lies about his methods sometimes but I’ve never seen anything that suggests his basic point about using non-actors is one of those lies.

Can you give us an example of where he is very clearly using an actor or any evidence (such as an admission by him, a production company or an actor involved) that it’s fake? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying that you seem to be making as much of an assumption that it’s fake as the rest of us that it’s true.

20

It’s admirably humble of you to announce your failure.

Here in the UK DB is a major star. He has had his own TV specials on air for over ten years. Some of his TV shows have broken new ground, some have been brilliant and some have been highly controversial. He does live theatre shows the length and breadth of the country that have always been excellent and that always sell out. This body of work, and this achievement, is part of why people are still fascinated by him. I hope this helps.

This assertion is meaningless unless you state which ‘stuff’ you are referring to. During his eleven years in the public eye DB has demonstrated a very wide range of material, routines and stunts.

Also, what do you mean by ‘fake’? In one of his shows he replicated the famous Milgram experiment, showing that authority figures can cause people to make cruel decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make. What’s ‘fake’ about that?

In another, he demonstrated that it’s possible to play a set of chess grandmasters and never do worse than win half the games or at least draw. This was based on the principle that each player was, in effect, playing one of the others, not playing Derren. There is nothing ‘fake’ about this, and anyone can see it works when you understand the principle.

In yet another of his TV specials, he showed that it was possible to create the illusion of having a failsafe formula for picking winners at the racetrack, again based on an old scam that anyone can see would work and does work in real life.

What’s ‘fake’ about any of this ‘stuff’?

There is so much wrong with this assertion that it’s hard to know where to begin.

(1) What Derren admits, accurately and honestly, is that his work combines “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”. This is not equivalent to saying that what he does is ‘fake’.

(2) DB has seldom, if ever, claimed that he achieves his results using NLP, although he has on a few occasions referred to a technique called ‘anchoring’ that was around long before NLP and is referred to in some NLP literature. To say he uses ‘NLP explanations all the time’ is simply incorrect. He makes very, very few references to it.

(3) It is unclear from your sentence whether you think DB achieves his results via NLP and is a fraud for not admitting it, or whether you believe he does claim to use NLP and is a fraud because this is not how he really achieves the results he achieves. In either case, you are incorrect. It is not the case that he achieves the results he does using NLP (there is no link whatsoever) and he has seldom if ever even referred to NLP in any of his work.

I’d be interested to see if you can back this up with any citation. DB does some things that aren’t dangerous, and he doesn’t claim they are. He does some other things that are dangerous, and they really are, although to some extent the degree of ‘danger’ is highly subjective. A lot of people think speaking in public is frightening, whereas other people do it all the time with ease.

This statement is incorrect. A great many magicians are puzzled and baffled by some of the things that DB has done, both on TV and in his stage shows, and his methods are the subject of a great deal of chatter and speculation in the magic world.