Sociopath V's Empath

    Recently I have been working on improving my critical thinking, which lead me onto watching a Netflix documentary called "The Push". By watching this documentary I wanted to analyse the question and place of ethics in society. This documentary is a socio experiment in which an entirely fake scenario, led by actors, fed by the magician Derren Brown, is designed to see how far a person can be set up to eventually commit murder. The documentary was aimed at raising awareness towards thinking how much people can be convinced into doing such things without questioning their own morals, but as the documentary went on it became something entirely different, and raised many other questions in my mind. 

    The 4 chosen people to take part in the experiment were carefully selected by tests which measured their conformability. Those who were less influenceable were not chosen. The experiment started by placing the chosen person in an entirely fake scenario, which was a high pressure charity event. The charity was called "push". Unbeknown to the person that as events went on, within one hour, it was all designed to make that person then push someone from a building. The acting team would perform the scenario four different times with the four different people. We were made to observe this person forced to be more and more submissive. They were placed in an uncomfortable situation where they had no choice but to move around a (fake) dead body and lie about it. The experiment was conducted, directed and narrated all by Brown. For myself and my friend it was painful to watch. We felt such empathy towards this person who was being tricked. To us the experiment deemed cruel. But as Brown was filmed from another room, conducting the lines straight into the actors ears, he seemed to watch in amusement, which was visible from his smirking and excitement as the experiment was unravelling. He seemed disappointed when one of the subjects took action to say "no" to what he was being so manipulated and cruelly convinced into doing. The viewer was lead to believe that the experiment was there to make a point at how people can be so easily influenced. I couldn't help but compare it to experiments conducted by Adolf Hitler, where doctors were forced to test on people for "the greater good", but in fact at what price by turning humans into lab rats? 

    In the end only 1 out of the 4 decided against pushing the actor from the roof. However, when the only person who didn't make the push found out it was all a set up he immediately said: "Can I push you now?" Which I found a completely normal reaction. I couldn't understand how an experiment like this could legally take place? How could Netflix endorse it? How could respectable celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Martin Freeman record videos of themselves acting to further trick the subject? Did these people get compensation? Were they given therapy? In their minds they had just been capable of murder. This whole experiment did not make me think how much could we be influenced, it raised a bigger question: How many of us are sociopaths and able to conduct and go along with such things? To what percentage did people watch this in amusement, and to what felt empathy and could see this as wrong? How many politicians and influential people in our society are in fact sociopaths? Can sociopaths and empaths really exist together in a healthy society?