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As you grow up and experience more of life you come to realise that you thought of as harmless “pranks” probably had a real impact on people’s lives. Who knows

As you grow up and experience more of life you come to realise that you thought of as harmless “pranks” probably had a real impact on people’s lives. Who knows that the people in that queue were trying to do or who they were trying to contact. It’s only by experiencing these moment and stresses ourselves that gives us the perspective to put ourselves in others shoes and gain empathy.

protocolture 1y ago
They were only psychologically limited. Thats the point. All someone has to do is pick up the handset and the condition clears. Instead they line up, flocking with other humans. A human being curious enough to lift a second handset immediately resolves the issue. The experiment just demonstrates how rare that condition is. And judging by your responses I feel like you would not have been curious enough to either lift a handset or identify the method to create the condition in the first place.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  One night I was fresh off the plane in Barcelona and my friend had taken me to a restaurant for supper. Knowing plenty of Spanish and Romance languages, I could mostly figure out how to read menus and signs. I went to find the Men's Room which was downstairs. I must've pushed the door instead of pulling it, then I decided it was locked, and so I loitered there waiting for the other guy to exit the bathroom, and I waited a long time, being still rather disoriented in a foreign country for the first time. And one guy emerged, and I tested the door again, but decided it had locked behind him. A second guy came out and I was like "hey wait, this is not a one-man room!" And that is when I rediscovered how bathroom doors work. Nothing in this scenario was actually unfamiliar or unusual, but I suppose being in Catalonia instead of the U.S., I expected it to be so!
- shakna 1y ago
  Curosity takes energy. If life is going to shit, and that phonecall is your lifeline, you usually have no mental bandwidth left for someone screwing around.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    If your laptop stalls out you turn it off and on again. If you rock up to a pedestrian crossing, and you dont know if the button has been pressed, you give it a good tap to make sure its been done. If theres 2 handsets you havent even examined, without humans, and a line behind human A using a phone you can be reasonably expected to go jingle the handset of one of the unused ones. And the repeatable result is still both interesting and novel to me.
    - shakna 1y ago
      No. Someone who is at the end of their rope does none of those things. They break the laptop. They throw it out the window. They cross the road without looking. And confronted with a kid messing around, they punch them in the face. People have limits. Don't risk yourself by finding what everyone else's is.
      - protocolture 1y ago
        People are responsible for their own actions. Just like Dell has never been held morally accountable for some kid getting punched in the face, neither is the state of a payphone handset. I get it, this is a fun game redditors play to turn normal people into monsters using therapy words. But dont expect me to play along.
        shakna 1y ago
        People are responsible, yes. But that still does not stop the consequences happening. Like the consequences for you enjoying being a dick to everyone around you. I'm not the only one who has given you warnings here. Some self reflection would not go amiss.
        protocolture 1y ago
        You dont want me to self reflect, you want me to come to your conclusion. I have reflected, and I would do the same thing again today. Wrap it up however you like.
- 0xEF 1y ago
  I don't know why you are getting dogged on for this. Yeah, it was probably annoying in a variety of ways to those people, but it demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate us when we are in an agitated state. This is the number one weapon of modern scammers. As an aside-but-related experiment, I worked in a bookstore in an American mall when I was young. It was always rather quiet in our store compared to the rest of the mall, so when someone purchased something, our cash register noise could be heard through the whole bookstore. After awhile, I realized every time someone made a purchase, I'd end up with a line formed almost immediately behind them. It seemed like the cash register noise triggered some Pavlovian response to the customers still browsing in the store, as though they needed to hurry up and get it line before it got too long. So, I tried an experiment. When nobody was in line and we had customers milling about, I'd run a mid-day report from my register which sounded similar to someone making a purchase. Lo and behold, people lined up, almost absent-mindedly. Every customer did not come when called by the register, but most did. I'd be hard-pressed to repeat the experiment today with the tap payments and touchscreens, though. Same mall, a few years later, we also realized that if we stood outside a store or kiosk in very specific spots where traffic flowed certain ways, people would would begin to line up. Never did figure that one out, but the mall was two levels with these wide open spaces where you could look down from the top, making for an excellent observation deck on human movement. We'd send a friend down to stand in one of the designated spots and sure enough, there'd be a few more distracted people behind him just waiting for nothing. Maybe humans secretly love to queue :)
  - thijson 1y ago
    It is interesting how human psychology works. When my Dad was a kid, there was a park that normally cost money to be admitted into. Him and his brothers would sneak in though, and the owner did nothing about it. My Dad realized it's because when other kids saw my dad and his brothers having fun, they would bug their parents to pay for them to get in. Kids are pretty susceptible to copying each other I guess, and parents are easily influenced by their kids.
- lores 1y ago
  That's a weird, thoroughly unempathic - not to use the word sociopathic - take. A queue in front of a phone box means everyone thinks the other ones are out of order. The large majority of the time, the phones will indeed be thoroughly out of order, and the majority of the rest of the time, people don't think they have the skills to make them work again. Not taking your place in the queue means you may well lose a spot or two as you try to figure it out. It's totally rational to queue, so a very poor experiment. And I'm curious enough to have patents.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    You are a bit late to patent a novel device for testing payphone service status.
- yusina 1y ago
  "But they could have just ..." does not take away the fact that the impact on their lives was real. An impact that you caused. Again, discovering this situation via what you call an "experiment" wasn't perhaps bad outright. But the longer it went and the more you guys were observing that people actually behaved that way and how negatively they were affected was less and less justifiable. Any scientific experiment involving humans or animals nowadays requires ethics considerations and approval by an ethics board. For good reason. Just saying "well they could just ..." is not good enough.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Yeah no sorry you can make me out to be evil all you like, but I dont see how any harm was caused or intended.
- 542354234235 1y ago
  The phones said "OUT OF SERVICE". Are you going to flood the bathroom because you tried to flush a toilet with an ” OUT OF ORDER” sign? Are you going to try and ride elevators that say "OUT OF SERVICE"? Do you leave fingerprints on the wall because you wanted to see if the sign that says “WET PAINT” is actually true? If someone says “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t give me your money” does it matter that the gun is empty and you are just “psychologically” compelled, rather than physically?
  - protocolture 1y ago
    If I see a device with an operational screen displaying out of order, and bits hanging off of it designed for my interaction, I would 100% go mess around to see if I can fix it. In fact I probably did this in the course of discovering this quirk.

protocolture 1y ago

They were only psychologically limited. Thats the point. All someone has to do is pick up the handset and the condition clears. Instead they line up, flocking with other humans. A human being curious enough to lift a second handset immediately resolves the issue. The experiment just demonstrates how rare that condition is. And judging by your responses I feel like you would not have been curious enough to either lift a handset or identify the method to create the condition in the first place.

AStonesThrow 1y ago
One night I was fresh off the plane in Barcelona and my friend had taken me to a restaurant for supper. Knowing plenty of Spanish and Romance languages, I could mostly figure out how to read menus and signs. I went to find the Men's Room which was downstairs. I must've pushed the door instead of pulling it, then I decided it was locked, and so I loitered there waiting for the other guy to exit the bathroom, and I waited a long time, being still rather disoriented in a foreign country for the first time. And one guy emerged, and I tested the door again, but decided it had locked behind him. A second guy came out and I was like "hey wait, this is not a one-man room!" And that is when I rediscovered how bathroom doors work. Nothing in this scenario was actually unfamiliar or unusual, but I suppose being in Catalonia instead of the U.S., I expected it to be so!
shakna 1y ago
Curosity takes energy. If life is going to shit, and that phonecall is your lifeline, you usually have no mental bandwidth left for someone screwing around.
- protocolture 1y ago
  If your laptop stalls out you turn it off and on again. If you rock up to a pedestrian crossing, and you dont know if the button has been pressed, you give it a good tap to make sure its been done. If theres 2 handsets you havent even examined, without humans, and a line behind human A using a phone you can be reasonably expected to go jingle the handset of one of the unused ones. And the repeatable result is still both interesting and novel to me.
  - shakna 1y ago
    No. Someone who is at the end of their rope does none of those things. They break the laptop. They throw it out the window. They cross the road without looking. And confronted with a kid messing around, they punch them in the face. People have limits. Don't risk yourself by finding what everyone else's is.
    - protocolture 1y ago
      People are responsible for their own actions. Just like Dell has never been held morally accountable for some kid getting punched in the face, neither is the state of a payphone handset. I get it, this is a fun game redditors play to turn normal people into monsters using therapy words. But dont expect me to play along.
      - shakna 1y ago
        People are responsible, yes. But that still does not stop the consequences happening. Like the consequences for you enjoying being a dick to everyone around you. I'm not the only one who has given you warnings here. Some self reflection would not go amiss.
        protocolture 1y ago
        You dont want me to self reflect, you want me to come to your conclusion. I have reflected, and I would do the same thing again today. Wrap it up however you like.
0xEF 1y ago
I don't know why you are getting dogged on for this. Yeah, it was probably annoying in a variety of ways to those people, but it demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate us when we are in an agitated state. This is the number one weapon of modern scammers. As an aside-but-related experiment, I worked in a bookstore in an American mall when I was young. It was always rather quiet in our store compared to the rest of the mall, so when someone purchased something, our cash register noise could be heard through the whole bookstore. After awhile, I realized every time someone made a purchase, I'd end up with a line formed almost immediately behind them. It seemed like the cash register noise triggered some Pavlovian response to the customers still browsing in the store, as though they needed to hurry up and get it line before it got too long. So, I tried an experiment. When nobody was in line and we had customers milling about, I'd run a mid-day report from my register which sounded similar to someone making a purchase. Lo and behold, people lined up, almost absent-mindedly. Every customer did not come when called by the register, but most did. I'd be hard-pressed to repeat the experiment today with the tap payments and touchscreens, though. Same mall, a few years later, we also realized that if we stood outside a store or kiosk in very specific spots where traffic flowed certain ways, people would would begin to line up. Never did figure that one out, but the mall was two levels with these wide open spaces where you could look down from the top, making for an excellent observation deck on human movement. We'd send a friend down to stand in one of the designated spots and sure enough, there'd be a few more distracted people behind him just waiting for nothing. Maybe humans secretly love to queue :)
- thijson 1y ago
  It is interesting how human psychology works. When my Dad was a kid, there was a park that normally cost money to be admitted into. Him and his brothers would sneak in though, and the owner did nothing about it. My Dad realized it's because when other kids saw my dad and his brothers having fun, they would bug their parents to pay for them to get in. Kids are pretty susceptible to copying each other I guess, and parents are easily influenced by their kids.
lores 1y ago
That's a weird, thoroughly unempathic - not to use the word sociopathic - take. A queue in front of a phone box means everyone thinks the other ones are out of order. The large majority of the time, the phones will indeed be thoroughly out of order, and the majority of the rest of the time, people don't think they have the skills to make them work again. Not taking your place in the queue means you may well lose a spot or two as you try to figure it out. It's totally rational to queue, so a very poor experiment. And I'm curious enough to have patents.
- protocolture 1y ago
  You are a bit late to patent a novel device for testing payphone service status.
yusina 1y ago
"But they could have just ..." does not take away the fact that the impact on their lives was real. An impact that you caused. Again, discovering this situation via what you call an "experiment" wasn't perhaps bad outright. But the longer it went and the more you guys were observing that people actually behaved that way and how negatively they were affected was less and less justifiable. Any scientific experiment involving humans or animals nowadays requires ethics considerations and approval by an ethics board. For good reason. Just saying "well they could just ..." is not good enough.
- protocolture 1y ago
  Yeah no sorry you can make me out to be evil all you like, but I dont see how any harm was caused or intended.
542354234235 1y ago
The phones said "OUT OF SERVICE". Are you going to flood the bathroom because you tried to flush a toilet with an ” OUT OF ORDER” sign? Are you going to try and ride elevators that say "OUT OF SERVICE"? Do you leave fingerprints on the wall because you wanted to see if the sign that says “WET PAINT” is actually true? If someone says “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t give me your money” does it matter that the gun is empty and you are just “psychologically” compelled, rather than physically?
- protocolture 1y ago
  If I see a device with an operational screen displaying out of order, and bits hanging off of it designed for my interaction, I would 100% go mess around to see if I can fix it. In fact I probably did this in the course of discovering this quirk.