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Health & Fitness

What Wouldn't You Do?

When You're On Camera 24/7

As part of my ongoing quest to find entertaining alternatives to , I like to watch online video. I found What Would You Do? when a Facebook friend posted it. As a warning, many of the videos autoplay, and contain ads.

ABC’s John Quiñones uses actors to place unsuspecting people in sticky moral dilemmas. Shady or strange transactions and deeds are staged on hidden camera to see what people will do.

Online clips tend to focus on people who do what is considered the “right” thing, and intervene in incidents involving fraud, the disabled, the elderly and other situations. People who intervene are interviewed and seem to be portrayed in a positive light.

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In this article, it says they staged a lottery ticket scam twenty times, with “more than half” the customers not doing anything.

In another clip, if reactions have not been edited out, the second pair of actors had to get up to ask for opinions from restaurant patrons. In this story, an actor solicited a reaction from a white male about an African-American girl who wants to buy a Caucasian doll

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The actor in this Toddlers and Tiaras-like clip was fishing for editorial comments from mothers, dressing the child like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman. Three girls cyber bullying in a café have to go around questing for comments before anyone gives them much more than a dirty look or a “please quiet down.”

This Tiger Mom turns it up to eleven, and takes away a child’s lunch before other diners say anything. The tone of the report appears to actively encourage people to interfere with other people’s parenting.

But wait! Here’s a clip showing a woman admonishing an actor for berating another actor’s food choices for her “daughter,” to get reactions from real shoppers. (Did you follow all that?)

More recent clips on the front page show an actor portraying an autistic child in a restaurant, people finding money, and a pawn shop scammer.

Some of the accompanying articles and captions mention other people who confronted the actors in these staged incidents, but they are not shown in the clips. It is not clear how many people react to any given condition, and how many walk away. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure exactly what prompts the “real” people to act, given the way the videos are edited.

It would seem that in spite of some pretty intense temptation, there are a lot of people out there who are minding their own business—but why? Why don’t some people react the way the videos imply (and sometimes insist) they should? Intervening in these situations looks as if it’s the politically correct, socially acceptable and even moral thing to do.

I managed a retail store in a mall for ten years, and I saw a lot of strange and frustrating things. I’ve been trapped in similar circumstances many times. My job depended on me keeping my mouth shut about things like this. We vented to each other afterward, but we would never have said anything to a customer.

Sometimes it was a matter of respect for our elders, who were experienced enough to make their own decisions. A parent can appear to be very harsh to a child, but we don’t know what happened earlier that day, or what home is like. Maybe we didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or maybe we felt it was just none of our business.

There was also fear of escalation. You simply never know when someone will react with deadly force, especially when you’re working alone at night.

But you want to do the right thing, don’t you? Especially if you're on Candid Camera 24/7.

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