When Persuasion Kills!
Imagine an unwitting person gets invited to philanthropy event to that specialized in persuasion to raise fund for needy people, then everything goes wrong and that person gets involved in unlawful acts that finally oblige him to cover up the mess he made by pushing off a man from the top of a building.
This is what Derren Brown the famous mentalist introduced in his new TV show, where he wanted to prove through an elaborate set-up that ordinary citizens can commit a heinous crime they haven’t ever thought they would do.
It all begins when they invite Chris, a 29 year old man to pitch for a contract from the charity organization. The personal assistant of the owner of the charity is an actor who takes on the mission of persuading Chris to follow his orders by persuasion him .
Bernie, the owner of the charity meets the Chris before the party begins, and he rehearses his speech, but suddenly, he keels over because of an apparent heart attack, he is dead. His assistance rapidly recovers from the shock, and he urges Chris that if people finds out about the Bernie’s death, the party will be canceled and the money to be raised to poor children will never reach them, so for the good cause, they have to hid Bernie’s cadaver in a casket. The crowds arrive and enter the event room. The assistant convinces Chris to act as if he was Bernie in order to pitch his speech, and no worry as no one of the guests ever met him before, and finally Chris accepts.
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The events are getting escalated, and Chris gets more involved in the matter, and Bernie’s cadaver was about to be exposed to the guests, so both of them tries to hide it at the stairwell, but finally Bernie wakes up, and he managed to record all what happens since he passed out. The final scene is at the roof of the building, where Bernie, the assistant, Chris and four other people who are acting as the board directors of the charity.
Bernie begins cursing and threatening all of them for what they did while setting on the ledge, So the group of board directors opt to kill the Bernie so to save their future and save Chris from being imprisoned for the scam he did. So, they all encourage Chris to push Bernie off the building.
Although the huge pressure of the assistant and the other people, Chris refuses and he leaves the scene…. but another three ordinary participants did accept, and pushed Bernie off the building.
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Although Derren Brown employed many persuasion tactics to push Chris’s mind so to push off the innocent Bernie using priming technique, by setting the name of charity as Push. Also, social compliance, disruption, inducing scarcity of time were effectively employed in the set-up. Yet the most powerful tactic used was “the escalating commitment”, where it began when Bernie’s assistant asked Chris to offer him a tiny favor and to decorate the cakes in a certain way, and once Chris complied, his mind subconsciously elevated Bernie’s assistant into a higher authoritarian stature, and in the same time Chris’s mind positioned himself in a more responsive status to the man’s orders, and this has an unbelievable psychological impact on us once we commit to the slightest requests.
That’s why the Bernie’s assistant successfully escalated his requests and took them to a higher levels, like requesting Chris to assist him to put a dead body in a casket, accepting fooling people and pitching Bernie’s speech, and doing many other unlawful matters, till complying to push the man off the building.
The good news for the people who complied till pushing off Bernie is that the whole thing was a stunt show, where no harm afflicted anyone in real, yet the bad news is that there is another show that resulted a fatal harm to many people around the world, those people actually committed suicide in order to comply to the requests of a lethal game called The Blue Whale. This satanic game invented by a Russian youngster that caused tens of young people around the world to end up their lives mainly by hanging themselves.
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This game consists of many savvy persuasion tactics, yet it goes as Derren Brown show, it depends mainly on the tactic of escalating commitments, which takes more than thirty days so the gamer slowly complies with those simple and challenging requests of the game, till the final pops out demanding the player to kill himself, and unfortunately many of them complied.
Resisting the first compliance is the blocking door to this series of evil persuasion.
Escalating commitment might be one of the strongest persuasion tactic ever used. People, who complied with small requests of an evil person not knowing to where it shall lead them, finally committed heinous acts that they never thought they would do. Resisting the first compliance is the blocking door to this series of evil persuasion, and that’s why, we have to teach our children and ourselves how to say No to even the smallest requests coming from suspicious people. Otherwise this decent, intellectual, and polite person may one day find himself…… pushing someone off a cliff.
