Australia's primary operator of payphones made them all free a couple of years ago. More as a way to keep them as advertising space than any particular good-will gesture.
It's modelled on the same way that HongKong pay phone booths from PCCW were setup a long time ago.
Still, if you're already subscribed to the mobile service, wifi on the sidewalk isn't worth much.
I would find a bank of 3 busy payphones on a weekend, get 2 of them to display the message, and sit there with my mates laughing at the long line of payphone users.
Last I tried, this no longer worked on the free Telstra payphones. End of a mildly amusing prank era.
We all did stupid things when young, but most of us have by now realized that what they did wasn't actually funny.
But it also means acknowledging later on that it was actually harmful to others.
You get the 3 payphones.
If you have them all present the message, someone gets curious and lifts a handset, resolving the issue.
But if you disable only 2, everyone just lines up behind the working payphone. Its a repeatable experiment, one we performed everywhere we saw telstra payphones.
Apologies if you happen to be a disgruntled telstra payphone user.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
And I'm curious enough to have patents.
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.
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?