Derren Brown: The Experiments- The Gameshow What is the experiment?

Brown’s second instalment in his series of ‘experiments’ was designed to show us how being anonymous in a crowd can, in his words, “turn perfectly nice people into internet bullies, or rioters, or hooligans”. To demonstrate, audience members were led to believe they were participating in a new interactive game show in which the fate of an unwitting member of the public was placed in their hands. The ‘target’ was a young man who was out for a drink with some friends.  Along with various actors, the man’s friends were in on the plan and were in contact with the studio via hidden earpieces.

Throughout the show, the audience were presented with a choice between two scenarios (one positive and one negative) for the man. The severity of the negative outcomes increased throughout the episode, and ranged from being mistakenly charged for an extra round of drinks, to being kidnapped by a ‘gang of thugs’.  The audience chose the scenario with a negative outcome each time, and for Brown, this was evidence of the moral depravity that inevitably follows anonymity in crowds.

Evaluation of the experiment

It is worth briefly noting several methodological problems with the study. These include the fact that it was not actually an experiment (as claimed by the title) since no independent variable was manipulated (there was not a sample making equivalent decisions alone or without masks), the ‘bad’ choice was always presented to the audience second, the audience understood that the consequences of their actions weren’t ‘real’, and Brown, who offered the audience the choices, is renowned for his skill in influencing people’s decision-making processes.

Brown stated during the episode and in an interview on his website that ‘deindividuation’ within crowds causes people to lose their identities and consequently behave in inevitably anti-social ways. Over thirty years of empirical work from the social identity tradition has discredited these claims. This research has shown that rather than a loss of identity within crowds, there is a shift from personal to social levels of identification.

The audience acted in terms of their collective identity as audience members in at least two ways. First, the very object of being in a game show audience is by definition to be entertained. Each time the audience were faced with a choice, they picked what was clearly the most entertaining option, and the selection that would prolong their involvement in the event. Second, the menacing masks that audience members wore were hardly neutral cues; in fact the very same masks were later worn by the ‘group of thugs’ who attempted the kidnap in the final scene. This is reminiscent of a famous study by Johnson and Downing (1979), who noted that when people were given robes resembling those of the Ku Klux Klan they displayed more anti-social behavior than control participants. However, when participants were given nurses’ uniforms they displayed significantly less anti-social behavior than controls.

By Jenna Nicholas and Nicole Kuruppuarachchi