[Netflix] The Push - using social pressure to convince someone to commit murder

This came out a couple of years ago in England, but they just released it on U.S. Netflix. This Derren Brown guy sets up an elaborate experiment with dozens of actors to attempt to convince the mark to commit murder. They get him to accept more and more troubling situations before getting to the final decision: whether or not to push a guy off a ledge to his death.

It's really unsettling stuff and probably unethical, like the Stanford prison experiment and the one where they had people thinking they were electrocuting other people on the other side of a wall.

Even if you're told it was a setup in the end, how could you go on knowing you essentially committed murder?

 

Spoiler

The guy they spend the whole show on doesn't do a couple of things they try to get him to do (opening a box with a dead body in it in front of a crowd of people, kicking the dead body to put bruises on it to make it look like a fall), so he does put up some resistance to social pressure eventually. In the end, he doesn't push the guy to his death. But then they reveal three other test subjects, all of whom did every questionable act they were pressured to do, including the murder.

 

Social pressure and the threat of jail time.

I feel like what bumping my own thread, but y'all need to see this show. It shook me to the core.