Fifteen Million Merits Analysis

Psychological Viewpoint of Black Mirror S01E02: Fifteen Million Merits
- Tarun Sharma
I feel like I am having an emotional hangover after watching “Fifteen Million Merits”. It is directed by Euros Lynn who is a Welsh director, and this is his only episode of black mirror that he has done. Charlie Brooker is the mastermind behind the show and he co- wrote the episode with his wife Connie Huck. This whole episode has a theme of artificial reality you have an avatar that in many ways has more important than you as a real person. Where you talk about this a lot, you talk about how you have your virtual identity on social media versus your real self in real life and…………
We see Bing wake up and smack the rooster. This act gives him the Illusion of

Previously it had been advertised that the price was 12 million instead of 15 million. This technique is called the “Foot in The Door” method, a form of compliance based on commitment which involves getting a person to agree to a large request by first setting them up by having that person agree to a modest request.
The crowd in Hot Shot is one of the most interesting as well as the most terrifying thing of the episode (We find one thing in almost every episode of the black mirror). The crowd is a simulation of people, who in reality are somewhere else like their cells, and their dopples are actually present in the audience. We see a typical conforming behaviour in the crowd when they start yelling "DO IT, DO IT....". This can also be related to a form of Mob mentality where people confirm to each other, or rather to the

This is what Devil effect actually is. It is a form of cognitive bias that causes one's perception to another to be unduly influenced by a single negative trait. It is a form of stereotyping where we perceive an individual from one of his/her traits rather than giving weightage of their traits and categorize them into a specific category. Although the judges, as well as Bing, were seeing the same person, Abi, but they interpreted and evaluated her differently. (Social Perception).
This is a form of attribution error made by the judges. They could have reduced this error if they tried to empathise which Abi. The reasons for attribution error arises when we focus on action and content and not really the cause.
At the end when Bing stands up on the stage to give a heart-breaking speech, he ends up making a controversial decision. It can be related to hive mentality. An article on Scientific American states the following about the singular hive mind, where Jason Castro writes:
Every decision you make is essentially a committee act. Members chime in, options are weighed, and eventually a single proposal for action is approved by consensus. The committee, of course, is the densely knit society of neurons in your head. And “approved by consensus” is really just a delicate way of saying that the opposition was