TV: The People Watchers - Episode 4

BBC Two's new daytime pop-psychology series sees a group of psychologists use hidden camera experiments to demonstrate human behaviour, in the process explaining why we do the things we do, what tricks are sometimes used to influence us, and how or why we should avoid them. It's a little bit of Derren Brown mixed with The Real Hustle mixed with Dragons' Den mixed with Trigger Happy TV (or any other hidden camera show you care to mention). Sometimes it works and there's something to be learnt, other times it seems to be an excuse to pull off hidden camera stunts -- not necessarily a bad thing, but not quite what was advertised. At its worst, however, it's utterly misleading -- some of the experiments are very obviously being rigged.

Today's fourth episode saw two of the worst examples of this. In one, they asked mothers to predict if their child was lying (all of them were), to see if mums could really tell when they were being lied to. Their extensive survey covered three mothers, two of whom guessed correctly. Apparently this showed an "almost even split" between mothers who could tell and mothers who couldn't. Except you could equally (and almost more accurately) say that these results prove that twice as many mums can tell their child is lying as cannot -- a very different implication. Occasionally the show admits that its test samples are too small to really demonstrate the point, but in this case it was just glossed over.

But far worse was to come. In an experiment to demonstrate reverse psychology (or something along those lines), one of the team held two seminars on healthy eating. With the first group -- the Nice group -- he behaved in a friendly manner, and took an "everything in moderation" approach to what they should eat. With the second group -- the Naughty group -- he was sterner, more patronising, and took a "bad foods should never be eaten" approach. To see the effect on their behaviour, when the group members left the seminar they were confronted around the corner by two other team members giving away free food, apparently as part of some marketing thing. Would one group be more tempted than the other? Allegedly, yes -- the Nice group all resisted temptation with ease, while two of the Naughty group actively took something and the other member seriously considered it.

All well and good. Well, no. Because as the members of the Nice group passed by the two team members with the food simply stood around and let them go, but when it came to the Naughty group they actively sought them out and offered them something! It doesn't take a genius to tell that this completely skews the results of the experiment. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of result is supported by more extensive properly conducted research, but when the demonstration we're shown is so blatantly flawed it does rather undermine the point.

It's a bit of a shame, as a populist show about human psychology presented in a broadly entertaining way is no bad idea, it could just do with a little more integrity in its execution.