Derren Brown: The Guilt Trip
Derren Brown, an English mentalist and hypnotist, is a skeptic, illusionist, and skeptic. Derren Brown employs techniques like cognitive psychology, hypnosis and memory. His shows combine the magic and hypnotist skills to create psychological illusions. His show “The Experiments” featured an experiment that he called the “Guilt Trip”. Derren says that guilt has been used to manipulate people throughout history. Modern depression is characterised by shame and guilt.
This experiment is designed to test whether an innocent person can confess to a crime that didn’t happen by manipulating cognitive learning, memory and emotion. Brown rejected the subject after he auditioned for Brown’s show. Jody, the subject, was psychologically tested to ensure his stability. Jody was later invited by a hotel in the country to give a speech on how to get graduates to work. Jody did not realize that the entire thing was staged. He thought that the covert cameras and ground crew were filming his seminar. To make Jody feel guilty, triggers where created during the first stage. Jody was told to feel guilty by acting. Derren would play a tone of a hotel bell while Jody felt the squeeze. Jody began to associate guilt feelings with the sounds of the bell and a shoulder squeeze. Jody was also made to believe that an artist Jody admires had appeared as an entertainer at a seminar. The second stage was intended to make Jody question his memory. He was distracted by a series of strange events, including changing furniture and speakers changing the color of his clothes. Jody was then notified that expensive jewelry had gone missing. The jewels were reported missing by Jody. He claimed that he had stolen them, but he was unable to remember what it was. The last stage of the experiment was where the victim was made rude and cheating. Jody consumed alcohol that night, which made his memories more fuzzy. Jody fell asleep while his consciousness was being altered to a hypnopompic mode, which was somewhere between wakefulness, sleep, and dreaming. He awoke outside without any memories of how or why he arrived there. The police later informed the participants of the murder. Jody was eventually arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.
As discussed in Chapter 7: Memory, The Guilt Trip showed that innocent people are willing to confess to their crimes by being given false information, distorted memories or other false information. The experiment also looks like Ivan Pavlov’s classic conditioning. This is a process that enables the learner to adopt a new behavior by association. This was also explored in Chapter 6: Learning. The experiment examined the subject’s mental state. Through hypnosis, it was possible to place the subject in a middle-state of wake and sleeping (hypnopompic condition). This is similar to Chapter 5 on States of Consciousness.
The Guilt Trip can be educational and informative in many ways. It gives an in-depth understanding of how easy it is to manipulate a person’s mind. It also shows how our memories are not reliable. It also demonstrates how unconsciously we can learn to associate things with stimuli.
Similar situations can affect many people, especially in criminal justice systems. Many innocent people have been held in jail for false testimony. These can be either from witnesses, victims, or the defendant.
