As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which all

As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which allows most of humanity to coexist. I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up and unplugged his computer. Retelling that story now, I feel just a bit of remorse. -- Oh, another example, probably apocryphal. At the dawn of cinema, audiences were said to recoil the first time they saw a disembodied head, like when you cutaway for a close up.