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...