Old payphones get new life, thanks to Vermont engineer

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!

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.

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 :)

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.

"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.

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?