Derren Brown - The Experiments: The Game show

• In Derren Browns program ‘The Game Show’ he looked at how being part of a crowd effects our judgement of right and wrong. 
• In this episode he advertised that he was starting a new game show where the audience would anonymously decide the events in one man’s life for the day – he did not tell the audience that this was a psychological experiment. 
• The experiment involved the audience wearing plain white masks so their faces were covered and selecting event A (usually the good option) or event B (usually the bad option) on an individual key pad the each had. 
• This anonymous way of selecting the events that would occur in this man’s day meant that soon people started to feel that they could not be blamed for their choices as it was seen as a ‘group decision’. 
• With each question the majority chose the negative event – as the game progressed the negative events were designed to get gradually worse for the victim and so tested the audience on how far they were willing to go for the game. 
• The negative events, for example, progressed from amusing but overall insignificant events such as being accused of not paying for a drink to serious and traumatic events such as being kidnapped by a gang.
• As each vote happened Derren openly told the audience the percentages that had voted for each option; the audience started with almost 100% selecting the negative option. 
• Though this percentage did go down as some people started to feel uncomfortable with the situations, the majority always chose for something bad to happen.
• The overall affect on the audience was clear when Derren revealed what the program really was - all looked uncomfortable and some seemed very distressed as they realised what they had done.