What Would You Do? aka Save us, John Quinones! 英会話・英語　アミック

I recently stumbled upon a series of short videos from an American TV show called “What Would You Do?”on YouTube. The premise of the TV show is basically to put actors in compromising situations and see if the people around them will intervene. The host, John Quinones, feeds information and directions to the actors depending on the situation. He also interviews bystanders and asks their opinion on the matter and why they did or didn’t speak up. The show covers a variety of controversial topics from racism to shoplifting and everything in between. The show also repeats many of the experiments with actors of different gender and races to see if the results change. 

The following video is one of the tamer examples of “What Would You Do”: 

In this video, we see an actress posing as a young, spoiled, wanna-be social media star. She and “her mother” go shopping at a clothing store and the girl proceeds to be rude and irritating to a shop clerk. The girl throws clothes on the floor and verbally berates the clerk and the store. Her mother does nothing to allay the situation, leading to an uncomfortable shopping environment for the shop’s patrons. While all the shoppers show their amazement at the girl’s behavior, a few women confront her and tell her to be kind to the clerk. Everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief when John Quinones steps in. 

I would personally love to see this experiment done with a teenage boy. In America, we are bombarded with the trope of entitled, spoiled, rich girls. Entitled, spoiled, rich boys have yet to make an appearance (on Dr. Phil) so I wonder if the same amount of people would complain about his behavior. 

Most people would say that they would stand up to someone who was bullying or otherwise treating someone unfairly. It’s heartwarming to see that so many people will take action in these situations, even if they are scripted.