The Push

Poster.

The Push, known in the UK as Pushed to the Edge is a Derren Brown program about social coercion, first broadcast on 2016-01-12. In the program, Brown uses hidden cameras and films people as he puts them through various social coercion techniques to convince them to do things they wouldn't normally do, including murder.

Though I didn't know about this program when it first came out, when I saw it on Netflix, I had to watch it because I've loved everything else I've seen by Derren Brown.

Review

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The entire program kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It was very intense!
• The introduction, where a random person is convinced to steal a stranger's baby is a great opener because it shows just how susceptible people are to coercion, even from a single anonymous apparant authority figure.
• I love how the situation just continues to snowball as the marks keep agreeing to doing more and more terrible things.
• I think the show will act as a good vaccine to any viewer who may be similarly susceptible to other forms of social coercion.
• At first I was comforted by the fact that the Chris refused to kick a corpse or push a living man off a building, but when I saw how the majority of the marks reacted, my fear of humanity rose. Still, I view this as a successful learning experience to any of the viewers.

Bad

• I fear for the sanity of the people involved in the show. The amount of stress they went through thinking they had just committed murder must weigh really heavy on them despite their smiles in the wrap-up. I feel like real psychologists would never be allowed to perform such an experiment in a scientific setting due to ethics concerns.

Ugly

• Nothing.

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