Mirror Mission
Wednesday 27 April 2005 ◷ 01:20
The TV show Mirror Mission attempts to show how easy people can be influenced into supposedly unexpected behaviour.
But the whole issue I have with these shows containing "experiments" is that it's obviously hard to sell a show if it's not clear the outcome will be worth watching (Remember Geraldo Rivera?). So the environment of the experiments is so souped up a spectacular outcome of the experiment is almost guaranteed, but at the same time the scientific weight is reduced to zero. Mythbusters is more clear about this: if the myth is busted they use something else to blow something up, they don't secretly change the environment to unrealistic circumstances just to be able to show a spectacular result. But Mirror Mission is for example able to keep their subject awake for a long time, or have their judgement otherwise impaired until they do what they are supposed to do: make somewhat entertaining television.
The only thing Mirror Mission kind of proves is that a team of professionals can pick a team of subjects and create an enviroment that gives them enough footage of behaviour that can be edited into a show that roughly could be used to pretend to claim their hypothesis for a laymen audience. Little to no attempt is made to point out results could be caused by something else than the relations they are claiming, there are no dull null hypotheses and no statistics about how plausible their fabricated evidence is. Instead they mix it with some dramatic music and gratis footage of Nazis to stress their own pretentiousness.
But I'm probably to old or to highly educated to watch BNN anyway...