5. The Heist
The Premise In 2006 Derren brought us The Heist. The premise here was simple, could he convince someone to commit an armed robbery?? How It Was Done The Heist was a great example of perceptional programming. After doing the usual selection of potential participants the intention here was to make someone commit an act of armed robbery, seemingly of their own volition. The theories he used here were of course sound, despite the criticism once again of them using actors. Participants would attend one of Derren Browns motivational seminars. By using principles of Classical Conditioning he would use the seminars to bring everyone up to a highly motivated state. At this point various sounds/colours and pictures were shown in their peripheral vision, which over a period of time caused the heightened state of mind to be subconsciously linked with those stimuli. Once this link had been formed, he was then able to re-create their heightened state by simply presenting them with those stimuli. All he needed to do then was create the right environment to test this (in this case the possession of a gun, and the fact they were walking past a security van), present the stimuli and see what happened. Of the 4 who were ultimately presented with the scenario, 3 of them went through with the robberywould you have???