The Heist was shown on 4 January 2006 at 21:00, on Channel 4. In the show, Derren Brown used his skills on selected participants who answered an ad. “Under the guise of a motivational seminar” (where they would allegedly learn Derren Brown’s skills) Brown eventually got participants to rob a security van – in what was ultimately an elaborate set up. The robbery involved holding up a security van and guard (played by an actor) with a realistic-looking toy pistol that Brown had given them earlier, and taking a case filled with real money from him. Four people were selected to carry out the robbery from an initial field of thirteen, with three of them actually carrying out the “robbery”. The idea was that after the conditioning they received, they would voluntarily rob the van of their own accord. There was no mention of the ‘crime’ to the participants, and they were not (directly) instructed to do it. The three that did it did so as a result of the conditioning and their own choice, not instructions from any third party including Brown.
Brown associated colour, music and phrases to build the participants into a highly-motivated state, converging all of those psychological empowerment tools into a single set up. The seminar subliminally anchored freedom, childhood, opportunity and romance into various criminal acts. After having previously been convinced to steal sweets from a shop based in Codicote High Street in Hertfordshire (for real), they were shown the euphoria that could be gained from criminal acts.
This programme also contained a re-enactment of the Milgram experiment carried out by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s with the aim of selecting four of the most obedient of the group. 65% of the subjects in this experiment were willing to administer lethal electric shocks to another person on the instruction of an authoritative figure (unbeknown to the subjects, the electric shocks were not actually real); these were the same results as Milgram himself found.
Source: Wikipedia
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