New Reality TV Show Will Manipulate Contestants Into Committing Murder

A new show announced by Netflix called, “The Push,” is promising to take reality television to new extremes, with a theme of manipulating contestants into committing murder. The show will be hosted by Derren Brown, a man who calls himself a “psychological illusionist”

Derren Brown is not a stranger to controversial reality television, there has already been a UK version of the show with this same premise but with the name, “Derren Brown: Pushed To The Edge.” Brown came on the scene In 2011 with a similar show called “The Assassin,” where he hypnotized someone and tried to convince them to murder a celebrity.

The show will place contestants in the most extreme and stressful position ever, being pressured to take a human life. A trailer released this week teases an episode where a young man is put into a situation where he is unknowingly surrounded by 70 actors who are all setting him up to commit murder. For some reason, the man is being convinced to push someone off a ledge to their death.

Of course, no one will actually get murdered on the show, but these experiments are sure to leave lasting mental marks on the contestants.

This week Brown tweeted that the show will be live and available for streaming on February 27th and that two additional episodes with similar themes will be following shortly after.

For those asking, who missed this:
Pleased to announce that The Push will be shown on Netflix from Feb 27th worldwide. Two more specials will appear on Netflix later this year including a big brand new one, which I have just completed filming. Have been secretly very busy.
X

— Derren Brown (@DerrenBrown) February 20, 2018

According to a statement from Netflix, “Brown exposes the psychological secrets of obedience and social compliance. He expertly lifts the lid on the terrifying truth that, when confronted with authority, our natural instinct is to unflinchingly obey without question—to such an extent that even the most moral people can be made to commit the most horrendous acts, simply because they are told to do so.”

The themes in this show are eerily familiar with that of the infamous Milgram experiment, a study where a professor by the name of Stanley Milgram set out to discover if good people can really be coerced into doing bad things by authority figures. He conducted an experiment in 1961 that involved average test subjects being ordered to administer electroshock therapy to another “test subject”.  Only there was no shock and the participant that was apparently receiving the shock was just an actor.  The study was designed to discover if the test subject would continue to do what they were told, even if it meant harming another human being. Before the tests were conducted, a poll was taken to predict the percentage of test subjects that would refuse to follow orders once the experiment seemed to become life-threatening.

Those who were polled believed that 97% of the test subjects would refuse to administer anything higher than a “strong shock” to the other “participant” or actor.  Unbelievably it turned out that only 35% of the subjects actually were able to do the right thing and resist authority. All of the other participants continued to administer what would have been very high levels of electricity to the apparent victim in the study.

Stanley Milgram summed up the findings of his experiments quite well by saying “The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

Image: Netflix/YouTube Screenshot.