Social Conformance To The Extreme: The Push 🤯

I went and watched The Push last night after

suggested it and wow...

That show is TWISTED!

This dude Darren Brown orchestrates an incredibly elaborate setup designed to manipulate an ordinary person into committing an unthinkable act: pushing someone off a building to their apparent death.

Brown creates these situations where the participant is surrounded by actors who all engage in increasingly unethical behaviors. As the situation escalates, the pressure to conform to the group and follow instructions become super intense.

At the beginning of the show, he convinced a stranger to steal someone's baby! And yes, he manipulates multiple people to make the push.

A few lessons that I took away from the show:

Authority: People are more likely to follow orders from someone they perceive as an authority figure, even they aren't a legitimate authority and the orders are unethical.
Social Proof: When people are uncertain on what to do, they look for others on cues for how to behave or act, especially in intense situation
Gradual Commitment: The participant is led through a series of small commitment the whole way through the show. After a few small micro commitments, he's eventually led to the ultimate commitment of pushing someone off a ledge.
Social Conformance: People conform to the norms and expectations of a broader group.

This show definitely raises some ethical questions around the extent to which people can be manipulated.

But I believe we can also use some of these principles to ethically persuade people into buying from us so that they can help themselves.

A few observations I've noticed from Russell, Tony Robbins, Myron Golden, and Alex Becker that follows along the lines of social conformance: