Derren Brown and Benjamin Caron, “Derren Brown – The Heist” (2006)
Under the pretence of training a group of middle-level managers in a corporate workshop on motivation set in a country retreat, Derren Brown aims to see if he can persuade ordinary people with psychology against their consciences into committing a bank robbery. The psychological methods he uses play on the managers’ deference to authority and authority figures and their desire or willingness to conform. Firstly he brings the businessmen and women to the country retreat and trains them in his motivational methods, flavoured with plenty of business pop psychology and loads of bulldust; during the training, he inserts subtle subconscious messages that stealing money and robbing banks are not really unethical activities.
Gradually Brown introduces the managers into committing small deviant acts of shoplifting lollies under the cover of an exercise designed to boost their confidence and induce a positive attitude. The shoplifting exercise is hilarious in itself: the shopkeeper and his assistants watch and comment in disbelief as adult men and women in business suits stroll into the shop, nick all manner of small objects off the shelves and confidently walk out. Finally the shopkeeper corners one student and tosses him out into the street; the businessman so dispatched confesses to feeling a failure!
After eliminating four people once this exercise is done, Brown puts the remaining nine through a version of the famous Stanley Milgram / Yale University test in which they must give instructions to a pupil to do something and if he fails to do it correctly, they give him electric shocks. Some of the business people balk at giving the pupil extra painful shocks but the “scientist” supervising the test tells them to continue the shocks even as the “pupil” screams at the pain when he gets the wrong answers and finally falls into a “coma”. The results Brown obtains, apart from being depressingly the same as the results that Milgram obtained in his original experiments, enable him to choose four people who will carry out the heist. Finally Brown gets his subjects to believe through hypnosis, positive thinking teaching, deliberately loaded language including words like “steal” and “grab”, subliminal training and various mental and image associations that they can overpower a security guard.
Brown then brings each of his subjects separately to Gresham Street where a van is parked and a security guard is carrying suitcases of money towards it. The subject must threaten the guard with a toy gun, force him to drop the money and fall to the ground, and then run off with the money.
The results are intriguing: one of the subjects chosen actually resists his conditioning and walks past the security guard even though he has received all the cues the others got. The curious thing though is that in the shoplifting exercise, he stole more goodies than the others did! For another participant, the heist is a traumatic experience as he actually threatened to kill the guard; he was also the one who objected most vociferously to increasing the voltage of shocks to the “pupil” during the Milgram tests. The different results Brown gets out of his subjects suggest the situation and its context are powerful influences on whether the subjects decide to carry out each and every one of the activities they are asked to do.
The episode moves at a brisk pace and at times Brown talks rather too fast for people to absorb all the necessary information about how he influences people through hypnosis, mental imaging, positive self-talk and other psychological techniques to do things they would otherwise never dream of doing. The camera moves quickly as well, panning around Brown as he walks and circles about in Gresham Street, giving the episode a jumpy edge suited to its heist theme.
The lesson to be learnt from the heist experiment is that people are much more conformist and deferential to authority than they are prepared to admit but at the same time the extent to which they’ll conform depends very much on the situation and its general social, maybe cultural and political context in which they find themselves, and what they bring to it from their own upbringing. The guy who hesitated at increasing the voltage of the shocks he was delivering to an actor had no hesitation at threatening to kill a security guard but doing so nearly had him gagging and in shock; the happy fellow who stuffed his pockets with lollies and went all the way to 450 volts, which would have killed the actor had they been for real, simply walked past the guard. He later explains that he’s a “good” person.
Hmm, what was Brown tapping into when he was conditioning these people? If I’d been one of the subjects, would I have forced the security guard to the ground simply because I felt I had to conform to Brown as an authority figure or would he have somehow appealed to the inner rebel in me that says fuck the Bank of England because it already steals from the common people and favours the British political elites? Would I have walked past the guard because my little voice told me not to go through with the heist or because regardless of what I think or feel about Brown and the Bank of England and what that institution represents and does, stealing just is immoral anyway? Did the man who walked past the guard do so because he wants to be thought of as “good” (in other words, he conforms to a higher external authority than Brown, such as government or a religious authority) or because he is “good” in himself (that is, he has internalised goodness as part of his being and essence)? At this point, we have entered the realm of philosophy and morality ethics and Brown’s experiment has been left way behind.
The episode is also critical of motivation seminars and self-help programs that use pop psychology and motivation techniques to induce a sense of personal power and invincibility that may be shallow or be applied in situations that could actually harm the person who has been exposed to these self-help tools. One thinks of native American warriors who were told that if they underwent special magic rituals or wore special talismans, paint or ointment on their bodies as part of their preparation to fight battles, they would be invincible to bullets. Perhaps the creepiest part of the episode is that nearly everyone who participated in the experiment failed to see that the motivational and self-help pop psychology they received was practically a form of brainwashing. The episode also highlights the use of language and how it can be a tool to persuade people to make mental and linguistic connections between things and acts that are considered good and those considered bad.