Turning Trump supporters into moral heroes

Previously, Derren Brown has taught us how to turn each other into murderers :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DUBMNo9PFZj
This time he has a much nobler objective : persuading the kind of person who keeps feeling the need to say "I'm not racist" into taking a bullet for an illegal immigrant. Spoilers follow, for those who don't want to watch and hour long documentary. It's much better to watch it than read about it though.




This is excellent, but it does have one major weakness : unlike the attempts to convince people to kill, this one has a single test subject. Of course, this isn't a rigorous, professional study (no university ethics board would ever allow this), it's more of a demonstration. So we can't say anything about how frequently the techniques used here work, or even if the guy wouldn't have behaved the same way anyway (although on the face of it that seems unlikely).

Phil is the sort of guy who believes in "Make America Great Again", that illegal immigrants are the worst problem (despite never encountering any) for America, and repeatedly feels the need to confess to not being a racist. Charming stuff. Brown's experiment is designed to convince him to take a bullet to save the life of an illegal immigrant. Which, given that people rarely intervene in even minor altercations, seems like an awfully big ask.

As usual, Brown uses a wide variety of techniques, and Phil has no idea of what's really going on. He thinks he's learning about self-control and testing some clever microchip (complete with fake implant surgery) designed to increase motivation and the desire to act decisively. He thinks it's controlled with an app that plays a little jingle, a sort of conditioned-response/placebo effect. All it really does is play back little audio clips from Brown. Not that these are insignificant, as Brown demonstrates with the rubber hand illusion. He teaches Phil how to use this reduce pain with another conditioned response.

After some time (weeks ?) of using this app, Brown attempts to get Phil to take a 50 ft jump into a lake. Phil hates heights. This part of the experiment fails, but narrowly : Phil is extremely afraid, and feels like there's a battle going on inside his brain.

Brown then invokes a more direct (bearing in mind that Phil has no idea what's happening) approach. He give Phil the real results of a genetic test, which reveals that he has ancestors from Syria and Mexico. At this point, Phil starts to regret what he's previously said about such people. Immediately Brown has him perform another empathy experiment : staring into the eyes of a non-Caucasian for several minutes, which has been shown to have remarkable effects. Which it does here. Phil basically breaks down - in his words, it's an overwhelming experiment. He ends up crying and hugging the guy.

Brown tells Phil that everything is now complete. In reality, the main test is about to begin.

Back in America, sometime later (Phil continues using the app) Phil gets invited by a friend to join him on a free trip to Vegas. Everything from this point on is fake and controlled by Brown; only Phil's behaviour is genuine. Their car breaks down, Phil is left in a biker bar while his friend tries to get the car fixed. Phil is then befriended by the local biker gang who embrace him as one of their own, giving him a jacket. They offer to give him a ride to the mechanic, which is some distance away.

The bikers are of course stereotypical racists. When some Mexicans enter the bar, they are violently removed. When the bikers leave, they find their bikes are overturned and they set off in pursuit of the Mexicans. Phil is clearly torn about this but doesn't really have a choice but to go along.

The endgame occurs when the bikers catch the Mexicans and interrogate them. They have them at gunpoint and threaten to kill them. Phil is still in the car at this point. What I find interesting is that he's clearly in a massive conflict. He's just been embraced by people with views much more similar to what he used to have, but he's clearly no longer so sure of these. I wonder if the attempt of the bikers to bring Phil into the group is Brown trying to demonstrate just how successful the techniques are, or if this gut-wrenching internal conflict* is part of the process, forcing him to choose while putting him in a highly emotional state.

* And it would be a conflict. If I was in a car while their was a potential shooting about to happen right outside, I doubt very much I'd have anywhere near the courage needed to go out and do something.

Eventually, on the radio, the trigger sound of the app plays. Phil makes a choice : he gets out, confronts the bikers, stands between them at gunpoint while they give him five seconds to get out of the way... and gets shot. There's even a squib in the jacket and fake blood, so for a few seconds he really believes he's been hit. At which point of course, Brown and Phil's wife emerge and the setup is revealed.


So there you have it. A blatant racist who becomes an undeniably heroic non-racist. While it would be interesting to repeat this on a much larger sample and I'd like to know a lot more about Phil's background and general personality and behaviour, perhaps the most important lesson is simply that people can act in much better ways than we'd think. As Brown concludes :

The stories we tell ourselves dictate the corners we fight from. One story tells us to protect our group, and guard against outside threat - even at the expense of the disadvantaged. The opposite story tells us to protect the disadvantaged, even at the expense of overall stability. Each side is convinced the other is mad, or bad, yet it's precisely in the dialogue between sides that we find truth, and humanity flourishes. We can protect our groups and maintain compassion. So this experiment wasn't to make someone switch from one narrow political story to another... I think what emerged in Phil's defining moment was something more important and more unifying : which is kindness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpUpNv9uNSI