From coast to coast, intrepid bands of merrymakers are staging hoaxes, stunts, and practical jokes like never before. Welcome to the Golden Age of the Prank.

This is for participants only,” announces a heavily bundled Charlie Todd through his trusty gray bullhorn. “If you didn’t come to take your pants off today, you’re in the wrong spot.” It’s a frigid January afternoon in New York City’s Foley Square, and hundreds of fearless pranksters are braving the elements to get together and shed their trousers for the eighth annual “No Pants! Subway Ride.”

Todd, a baby-faced 30-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, is the mastermind behind this gathering, and on his command the assembled crowd scatters for the nearest subway entrances…and collectively drops trou. Even in a city like New York, riding the subway sans pants is a guaranteed eye-opener, and today is no exception: Straphangers stare, chuckle, even take photos. Around 1,200 men and women have come out clad in boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs, and bloomers, not just in New York, but in 21 cities across the globe. (“Three hundred take to the subway—shameless and pantless,” the Toronto Sun would inform its readers soberly the next day.) The mission ends with a group of agents celebrating in Union Square, making snow angels, still pantless. Improv Everywhere has struck again. Mission accomplished.

The largest network of pranksters ever assembled, Improv Everywhere is the leading light in what might be called the Golden Age of the Prank. All across America and beyond, groups are gathering to pull off practical jokes, hoaxes, and ruses of all kinds, blurring the line between prank and guerrilla theater, and using the Internet to share their work with audiences far and wide. The prank, of course, has a long and illustrious history going back to…well, Adam and the serpent: “Ha! You actually ate the apple!” Summer camps and college campuses have long been jokesters’ playgrounds, while avant-gardists like Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaist movement elevated the prank to an art form. Borat and (coming soon) Bruno have taken squirm-inducing hoaxing to the big screen. But it’s the Internet—and groups like Improv Everywhere who have learned how to exploit it—that has been the primary mover in the prank renaissance. More than seven million people have watched the 2009 “No Pants!” clip on YouTube, and copycat groups have sprung up around the world.

“The use of video has spread like crazy, so pranks are getting more and more popular,” says CollegeHumor.com’s Amir Blumenfeld, whose online “Prank War” series with colleague Streeter Seidell went viral this spring. No group has demonstrated the power of YouTube and the Internet better than Saturday Night Live’s masters of the digital short, the Lonely Island. Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer (whose debut album, Incredibad, was released in February) got their start by posting their sketches, songs, and goofs on their Web site. “When we started back in 2001, most people’s computers weren’t fast enough to watch video, but slowly technology caught up,” notes Schaffer. Now the group’s clips regularly draw millions of viewers online.

While they may not have the muscle of SNL behind them, Improv Everywhere has pulled more than 80 stunts, involving thousands of so-called “agents,” resulting in countless headlines and enough TV news spots to fill a season’s worth of Punk’d episodes. Their own videos have generated more than 55 million views online. But their insidious influence has no doubt infected a far larger audience: Count literally hundreds of Improv Everywhere–inspired groups across the globe, to say nothing of the masses of bewildered, babbling “victims” each prank leaves in its wake. According to legendary prankster Alan Abel—whose Citizens Against Breastfeeding nonprofit group famously condemned what they called “an incestuous relationship between mother and baby that manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink, and even become a homosexual”—“Pretty soon we’ll have as many groups pulling pranks as we have church choirs.”

Read the rest of this article here.

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Bernard Madoff revealed our thoughtless ways.

Back in olden times, mankind found it useful to live by mottoes. A motto reduces the helpful lessons of life to three or four words, maybe two, as in the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Or, apropos now: Look before you leap.

The most famous motto in our time has been Google’s Don’t Be Evil. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but here’s a motto for the next four or five years: Don’t Be Stupid.

It would not have occurred to me to posit Don’t Be Stupid as a motto for our times had not 2008 ended with the Bernard Madoff story. Up to then, we were all preoccupied with the economic meltdown that began in mid-September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other household gods of global finance.

The economic crisis, originating in the subprime mortgage lending phenomenon, was said to be complex. Madoff’s story, however, was simple. For years, uncounted numbers of the most sophisticated people here and in Europe conveyed to Mr. Madoff tens of billions of dollars because this solitary investor, unlike virtually every other professional investor, achieved returns in excess of 10% annually in all economic seasons.

Together, subprime and Madoff have produced the Year of What Were They Thinking? As the New Year separated from the spent canister of 2008, conventional wisdom held that financial lessons had been learned. Boards of directors would exercise greater oversight. Sober investment management would replace bonus-baby overreaching. Due diligence would return from exile. Mania would give way to Protestant virtue.

Maybe.

I’m still mesmerized by the virtually uncountable number of intelligent individuals worldwide who were revealed as dumb in 2008. What happened to them? What if mass dumbing down is now the norm?

Avarice explains a lot of bad behavior. So does the Federal Reserve’s free-money interest rates, inducing a mania of moral hazard. More intriguing to me than the standard theory of manias and bubbles is the supersized human error rate of the past several years. The decline and fall of so many American financial institutions in one year can’t be written off to “mistakes.” These were cataclysmic mistakes.

Only one other area of modern life produces this unprecedented error rate: the World Wide Web. Could it be that in the world of money, the information highway was the road to ruin — www.Stupid.com?

Illuminated screens are fun — and pernicious. People have long believed that if they see or hear something on TV, it must be true. This credulity has transferred exponentially to the PC screen, the cell-phone screen and email. Sophisticated people send fake news stories or photographs from the Web to everyone on their distribution list, until someone debunks it. Then it happens again. Something about information on screens reduces skepticism.

Modern technology, which is essentially infinite button-pushing, also fills one’s days with tiny errors surfing the Web, texting or punching TV controllers. It is a trail of constant error. One gets desensitized to errors because, like mice in a maze, another “out” from one’s misstep is just another click away.

That we make these unending miscues with the small stuff may not matter, but rewiring the brain to accommodate relentless error may soften us up to making slovenly mistakes with things that do matter. The habits beneath due diligence fall away as we play in the Web’s surf.

The modern investor class, whether at Citigroup, Lehman or retirees at home, have become Googling zombies. Financial-industry workers, as elsewhere, chase data through thousands of screen changes, even as they are overwhelmed by emails. They do it because accessing new screens is more fun than the drudgery of time spent on one task. It used to be called “focus.”

This undifferentiated world of work and play is increasingly thoughtless. As in, thought-less. Accessing such massive amounts of variable information wouldn’t matter if workers were taking time to stop and produce useful thought about the numbers or words on their screens. Who has time to do that, or even wants to? Keep clicking.

As the subprime mania raged through the world’s trading rooms — and this mess was a screen-driven phenomenon — time-pressed investment managers stared at the illuminated numbers and assumed the data and models were, you know, OK, because surely somebody else, somewhere, must have taken the time to check it out. The one man who understood humanity’s slack focus better than anyone was Bernard Madoff.

Looking out at the events transpiring through the world nowadays, it might be nice if people lived by their understanding of Don’t Be Evil. Next January is likely to be better, though, if most of us just keep it simple. Don’t be stupid.

Intelligent people have long been ruined by frauds. Psychologist Stephen Greenspan, who specializes in gullibility, explores why investors continue to be swindled — and how he came to lose part of his savings to Bernard Madoff.

There are few areas where skepticism is more important than how one invests one’s life savings. Yet intelligent and educated people, some of them naïve about finance and others quite knowledgeable, have been ruined by schemes that turned out to be highly dubious and quite often fraudulent. The most dramatic example of this in American history is the recent announcement that Bernard Madoff, a highly regarded money manager and a former chairman of Nasdaq, has for years been running a very sophisticated Ponzi scheme, which by his own admission has defrauded wealthy investors, charities and other funds of at least $50 billion.

Financial scams are just one of the many forms of human gullibility — along with war (the Trojan Horse), politics (WMDs in Iraq), relationships (sexual seduction), pathological science (cold fusion) and medical fads. Although gullibility has long been of interest in works of fiction (Othello, Pinocchio), religious documents (Adam and Eve, Samson) and folk tales (“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Little Red Riding Hood”), it has been almost completely ignored by social scientists. A few books have focused on narrow aspects of gullibility, including Charles Mackey’s classic 19th-century book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusion and the Madness of Crowds” — most notably on investment follies such as Tulipmania, in which rich Dutch people traded their houses for one or two tulip bulbs. In my new book “Annals of Gullibility,” based on my academic work in psychology, I propose a multidimensional theory that would explain why so many people behave in a manner that exposes them to severe and predictable risks. This includes myself: After I wrote my book, I lost a good chunk of my retirement savings to Mr. Madoff, so I know of what I write on the most personal level.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraud in which invested money is pocketed by the schemer and investors who wish to redeem their money are actually paid out of proceeds from new investors. As long as new investments are expanding at a healthy rate, the schemer is able to keep the fraud going. Once investments begin to contract, as through a run on the company, the house of cards quickly collapses. That is what apparently happened with the Madoff scam, when too many investors — needing cash because of the general U.S. financial meltdown in late 2008 — tried to redeem their funds. It seems Mr. Madoff could not meet these demands and the scam was exposed.

The scheme gets its name from Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to Boston, who around 1920 came up with the idea of promising huge returns (50% in 45 days) supposedly based on an arbitrage plan (buying in one market and selling in another) involving international postal reply coupons. The profits allegedly came from differences in exchange rates between the selling and the receiving country, where they could be cashed in. A craze ensued, and Ponzi pocketed many millions of dollars, mostly from poor and unsophisticated Italian immigrants in New England and New Jersey. The scheme collapsed when newspaper articles began to raise questions about it (pointing out, for example, that there were not nearly enough such coupons in circulation) and a run occurred.

Another large-scale scandal that some have called a Ponzi scheme involved famed insurance market Lloyd’s of London. In the 1980s, the company rapidly brought new investors, many from the U.S., into its formerly exclusive market. The attraction to these new investors, aside from the lure of good returns, was the chance to become a “name,” a prestigious status which had been mainly limited to British aristocrats. These investors were often lured into the most risky and least productive syndicates, exposing them to huge liability and, in many cases, ruin.

The basic mechanism explaining the success of Ponzi schemes is the tendency of humans to model their actions — especially when dealing with matters they don’t fully understand — on the behavior of other humans. This mechanism has been termed “irrational exuberance,” a phrase often attributed to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (no relation), but actually coined by another economist, Robert J. Shiller, who later wrote a book with that title. Mr. Shiller employs a social psychological explanation that he terms the “feedback loop theory of investor bubbles.” Simply stated, the fact that so many people seem to be making big profits on the investment, and telling others about their good fortune, makes the investment seem safe and too good to pass up.

In Mr. Shiller’s view, all investment crazes, even ones that are not fraudulent, can be explained by this theory. Two modern examples of that phenomenon are the Japanese real-estate bubble of the 1980s and the American dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Two 18th-century predecessors were the Mississippi Mania in France and the South Sea Bubble in England (so much for the idea of human progress).

A form of investment fraud that has structural similarities to a Ponzi scheme is an inheritance scam, in which a purported heir to a huge fortune is asking for a short-term investment in order to clear up some legal difficulties involving the inheritance. In return for this short-term investment, the investor is promised enormous returns. The best-known modern version of this fraud involves use of the Internet, and is known as a “419 scam,” so named because that is the penal code number covering the scam in Nigeria, the country from which many of these Internet messages originate. The 419 scam differs from a Ponzi scheme in that there is no social pressure brought by having friends who are getting rich. Instead, the only social pressure comes from an unknown correspondent, who undoubtedly is using an alias. Thus, in a 419 scam, other factors, such as psychopathology or extreme naïvete, likely explain the gullible behavior.

Two historic versions of the inheritance fraud that are equal to the Madoff scandal in their widespread public success, and that relied equally on social feedback processes, occurred in France in the 1880s and 1890s, and in the American Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s. The French scam was perpetrated by a talented French hustler named Thérèse Humbert, who claimed to be the heiress to the fortune of a rich American, Robert Henry Crawford, whose bequest reflected gratitude for her nursing him back to health after he suffered a heart attack on a train. The will had to be locked in a safe for a few years until Ms. Humbert’s youngest sister was old enough to marry one of Crawford’s nephews. In the meantime, leaders of French society were eager to get in on this deal, and their investments (including by one countess, who donated her chateau) made it possible for Ms. Humbert — who milked the story for 20 years — to live in a high style. Success of this fraud, which in France was described as “the greatest scandal of the century,” was kept going by the fact that Ms. Humbert’s father-in-law, a respected jurist and politician in France’s Third Republic, publicly reassured investors.

The American version of the inheritance scam was perpetrated by a former Illinois farm boy named Oscar Hartzell. While Thérèse Humbert’s victims were a few dozen extremely wealthy and worldly French aristocrats, Hartzell swindled over 100,000 relatively unworldly farmers and shopkeepers throughout the American heartland. The basic claim was that the English seafarer Sir Francis Drake had died without any children, but that a will had been recently located. The heir to the estate, which was now said to be worth billions, was a Colonel Drexel Drake in London. As the colonel was about to marry his extremely wealthy niece, he wasn’t interested in the estate, which needed some adjudication, and turned his interest over to Mr. Hartzell, who now referred to himself as “Baron Buckland.”

The Drake scheme became a social movement, known as “the Drakers” (later changed to “the Donators”) and whole churches and groups of friends — some of whom planned to found a utopian commune with the expected proceeds — would gather to read the latest Hartzell letters from London. Mr. Hartzell was eventually indicted for fraud and brought to trial in Iowa, over great protest by his thousands of loyal investors. In a story about Mr. Hartzell in the New Yorker in 2002, Richard Rayner noted that what “had begun as a speculation had turned into a holy cause.”

While social feedback loops are an obvious contributor to understanding the success of Ponzi and other mass financial manias, one also needs to look at factors located in the dupes themselves. There are four factors in my explanatory model, which can be used to understand acts of gullibility, but also other forms of what I term “foolish action.” A foolish (or stupid) act is one in which someone goes ahead with a socially or physically risky behavior in spite of danger signs or unresolved questions. Gullibility is a sub-type of foolish action, which might be termed “induced-social.” It is induced because it always occurs in the presence of pressure or deception by other people.

The four factors are situation, cognition, personality and emotion. Obviously, individuals differ in the weights affecting any given gullible act. While I believe that all four factors contributed to most decisions to invest in the Madoff scheme, in some cases personality should be given more weight while in other cases emotion should be given more weight, and so on. As mentioned, I was a participant — and victim — of the Madoff scam, and have a pretty good understanding of the factors that caused me to behave foolishly. So I shall use myself as a case study to illustrate how even a well-educated (I’m a college professor) and relatively intelligent person, and an expert on gullibility and financial scams to boot, could fall prey to a hustler such as Mr. Madoff.

Situations. Every gullible act occurs when an individual is presented with a social challenge that he has to solve. In the case of a financial decision, the challenge is typically whether to agree to an investment decision that is being presented to you as benign but may pose severe risks or otherwise not be in one’s best interest. Assuming (as with the Madoff scam) that the decision to proceed would be a very risky and thus foolish act, a gullible behavior is more likely to occur if the social and other situational pressures are strong.

The Madoff scam had social feedback pressures that were very strong, almost rising to the level of the “Donators” cult around the Drake inheritance fraud. Newspaper reports described how wealthy retirees in Florida joined Mr. Madoff’s country club for the sole reason of having an opportunity to meet him socially and be invited to invest directly with him. Most of these investors, as well as Mr. Madoff’s sales representatives, were Jewish. The fact that Mr. Madoff was a prominent Jewish philanthropist was undoubtedly another situational contributor.

A non-social factor that contributed to a gullible investment decision was, paradoxically, that Mr. Madoff promised modest rather than spectacular gains. Sophisticated investors would have been highly suspicious of a promise of gains as spectacular as those promised decades earlier by Charles Ponzi. A big part of Mr. Madoff’s success came from his apparent recognition that wealthy investors were looking for small but steady returns, high enough to be attractive but not so high as to arouse suspicion. This was certainly one of the things that attracted me to the Madoff scheme, as I was looking for a non-volatile investment that would enable me to preserve and gradually build wealth in down as well as up markets.

Another situational factor that pulled me in was the fact that I, along with most Madoff investors (except for the super-rich), did not invest directly with Mr. Madoff, but went through one of 15 “feeder” hedge funds that then turned all of their assets over to Mr. Madoff to manage. In fact, I am not certain if Mr. Madoff’s name was even mentioned (and certainly, I would not have recognized it) when I was considering investing in the ($3 billion) “Rye Prime Bond Fund” that was part of the respected Tremont family of funds, which is itself a subsidiary of insurance giant Mass Mutual Life. I was dealing with some very reputable financial firms, a fact that created the strong impression that this investment had been well-researched and posed acceptable risks.

I made the decision to invest in the Rye fund when I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Boca Raton, Fla., and met a close friend of theirs who is a financial adviser and was authorized to sign people up to participate in the Rye (Madoff-managed) fund. I genuinely liked and trusted this man, and was persuaded by the fact that he had put all of his own (very substantial) assets in the fund, and had even refinanced his house and placed all of the proceeds in the fund. I later met many friends of my sister who were participating in the fund. The very successful experience they had over a period of several years convinced me that I would be foolish not to take advantage of this opportunity. My belief in the wisdom of this course of action was so strong that when a skeptical (and financially savvy) friend back in Colorado warned me against the investment, I chalked the warning up to his sometime tendency towards knee-jerk cynicism.

Cognition. Gullibility can be considered a form of stupidity, so it is safe to assume that deficiencies in knowledge and/or clear thinking often are implicated in a gullible act. By terming this factor “cognition” rather than “intelligence,” I mean to indicate that anyone can have a high IQ and still prove gullible, in any situation. There is a large amount of literature, by scholars such as Michael Shermer and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, that show how often people of average and above-average intelligence fail to use their intelligence fully or efficiently when addressing everyday decisions. In his book “Who Is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning,” Keith Stanovich makes a distinction between intelligence (the possession of cognitive schemas) and rationality (the actual application of those schemas). The “pump” that drives irrational decisions (many of them gullible), according to Mr. Stanovich, is the use of intuitive, impulsive and non-reflective cognitive styles, often driven by emotion.

In my own case, the decision to invest in the Rye fund reflected both my profound ignorance of finance, and my somewhat lazy unwillingness to remedy that ignorance. To get around my lack of financial knowledge and my lazy cognitive style around finance, I had come up with the heuristic (or mental shorthand) of identifying more financially knowledgeable advisers and trusting in their judgment and recommendations. This heuristic had worked for me in the past and I had no reason to doubt that it would work for me in this case.

The real mystery in the Madoff story is not how naïve individual investors such as myself would think the investment safe, but how the risks and warning signs could have been ignored by so many financially knowledgeable people, including the highly compensated executives who ran the various feeder funds that kept the Madoff ship afloat. The partial answer is that Madoff’s investment algorithm (along with other aspects of his organization) was a closely guarded secret that was difficult to penetrate, and it’s also likely (as in all cases of gullibility) that strong affective and self-deception processes were at work. In other words, they had too good a thing going to entertain the idea that it might all be about to crumble.

“The great showman P. T. Barnum , was of course, one of the early masters of such hype, and his credo “there is a sucker born every minute” sums up nicely the view that people are gullible when it comes to allowing others to determine whether or not an entertainment event or activity is deserving of one’s time, interest and money.” Read an excerpt from Stephen Greenspan’s new book, ‘Annals of Gullibility’

Personality. Gullibility is sometimes equated with trust, but the late psychologist Julian Rotter showed that not all highly trusting people are gullible. The key to survival in a world filled with fakers (Mr. Madoff) or unintended misleaders who were themselves gulls (my adviser and the managers of the Rye fund) is to know when to be trusting and when not to be. I happen to be a highly trusting person who also doesn’t like to say “no” (such as to a sales person who had given me an hour or two of his time). The need to be a nice guy who always says “yes” is, unfortunately, not usually a good basis for making a decision that could jeopardize one’s financial security. In my own case, trust and niceness were also accompanied by an occasional tendency toward risk-taking and impulsive decision-making, personality traits that can also get one in trouble.

Emotion. Emotion enters into virtually every gullible act. In the case of investment in a Ponzi scheme, the emotion that motivates gullible behavior is excitement at the prospect of increasing and protecting one’s wealth. In some individuals, this undoubtedly takes the form of greed, but I think that truly greedy individuals would likely not have been interested in the slow but steady returns posted by the Madoff-run funds.

In my case, I was excited not by the prospect of striking it rich but by the prospect of having found an investment that promised me the opportunity to build and maintain enough wealth to have a secure and happy retirement. My sister, a big victim of the scam, put it well when she wrote in an email that “I suppose it was greed on some level. I could have bought CDs or municipal bonds and played it safer for less returns. The problem today is there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot one can rely on, so you gravitate toward the thing that in your experience has been the safest. I know somebody who put all his money in Freddie Macs and Fannie Maes. After the fact he said he knew the government would bail them out if anything happened. Lucky or smart? He’s a retired securities attorney. I should have followed his lead, but what did I know?”

I suspect that one reason why psychologists and other social scientists have avoided studying gullibility is because it is affected by so many factors, and is so context-dependent that it is impossible to predict whether and under what circumstances a person will behave gullibly. A related problem is that the most catastrophic examples of gullibility (such as losing one’s life savings in a scam) are low-frequency behaviors that may only happen once or twice in one’s lifetime. While as a rule I tend to be a skeptic about claims that seem too good to be true, the chance to invest in a Madoff-run fund was one case where a host of factors — situational, cognitive, personality and emotional — came together to cause me to put my critical faculties on the shelf.

Skepticism is generally discussed as protection against beliefs (UFOs) or practices (feng shui) that are irrational but not necessarily harmful. Occasionally, one runs across a situation where skepticism can help you to avoid a disaster as major as losing one’s life (being sucked into a crime) or one’s life savings (being suckered into a risky investment). Survival in the world requires one to be able to recognize, analyze, and escape from those highly dangerous situations.

So should one feel pity or blame toward those who were insufficiently skeptical about Mr. Madoff and his scheme? A problem here is that the lie perpetrated by Mr. Madoff was not all that obvious or easy to recognize. Virtually 100% of the people who turned their hard-earned money (or charity endowments) over to Mr. Madoff would have had a good laugh if contacted by someone pitching a Nigerian inheritance investment or the chance to buy Florida swampland. Being non-gullible ultimately boils down to an ability to recognize hidden social (or in this case, economic) risks, but some risks are more hidden and, thus, trickier to recognize than others. Very few people possess the knowledge or inclination to perform an in-depth analysis of every investment opportunity they are considering. It is for this reason that we rely on others to help make such decisions, whether it be an adviser we consider competent or the fund managers who are supposed to oversee the investment.

I think it would be too easy to say that a skeptical person would and should have avoided investing in a Madoff fund. The big mistake here was in throwing all caution to the wind, as in the stories of many people (some quite elderly) who invested every last dollar with Mr. Madoff or one of his feeder funds. Such blind faith in one person, or investment scheme, has something of a religious quality to it, not unlike the continued faith that many of the Drakers continued to have in Oscar Hartzell even after the fraudulent nature of his scheme began to become very evident. So the skeptical course of action would have been not to avoid a Madoff investment entirely but to ensure that one maintained a sufficient safety net in the event (however low a probability it might have seemed) that Mr. Madoff turned out to be not the Messiah but Satan. As I avoided drinking a full glass of Madoff Kool-Aid — I had invested 30% of my retirement savings in the fund — maybe I’m not as lacking in wisdom as I thought.

Sidebar:

Manias and Frauds

Some financial scandals that have swept up investors over history.

Tulipmania
In the 1630s, tulip-bulb speculation raged in the Netherlands. Prices of some rare bulbs doubled weekly, or even daily, and rose so high that people were investing in shares of one bulb, rather than an entire bulb. The market crashed in February 1637.



The South Sea Bubble
The British South Sea Co. was formed in 1711 and promised a monopoly on trade to the Spanish colonies. It lured investors with the promise of riches from abroad. Prices of shares spiked and then collapsed.







The Ponzi Scheme
The infamous Charles Ponzi, who was based in Boston, began with 16 investors in 1919; his pyramid scheme eventually took in $15 million. In 1920 Mr. Ponzi was convicted of mail fraud and spent several years in jail.







The 419 Scam
Many email users are familiar with the 419 fraud, in which scammers (often based in Nigeria) offer a share in a large fortune in exchange for a fee. Some cases have gone to trial. In 2005, Amaka Anajemba (above center) was convicted of taking part in a scheme that defrauded a Brazilian bank of $242 million.

Stephen Greenspan is emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and author of the 2009 “Annals of Gullibility.” A longer version of this essay appeared at skeptic.com and will be in Skeptic magazine in early 2009.

April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks
by Benedict Carey
New York Times
April 1, 2008

Keep it above the belt, stop short of total humiliation and, if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe even a bogus call from the person’s old flame or new boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition.

Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice.

Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness.

The 1960s activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman reportedly divided practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-boxers fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as “degradation ceremonies.” Neutral tricks are more akin to physical punch lines, like wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, depositing a massive pumpkin on top of the student union building, or pulling some electronic high jinks on a co-worker’s keyboard (though on deadline this falls quickly into the “bad” category).

What Hoffman called the good prank, which humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals. The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have children make a small box and bury it in the ground, telling them that after a while a treasure will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.

Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity — only to find a sample of human feces.

The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and scare the wits out of boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in which they are showing their bravery.

“These kind of tricks are very common,” Dr. Turner said, “and they are really a way to put a person down before raising them up. You’re being reminded of your failings even as you’re being honored.”

Jonathan Wynn, a cultural sociologist at Smith College, said pranks served to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. “And you gain status by being picked on in some ways,” he said. “It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.”

In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped — anger, self-blame, bitterness — was such a singular cocktail that it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I? Where are my blind spots?

“As humans, we develop this notion of fairness as a part of our self-concept, and of course it’s extremely important in exchange relationships,” said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Vohs and her co-authors, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and Jason Chin of the University of British Columbia, propose that the fear of being had is a trait that varies from near-obliviousness in some people to hypervigilance in others.

The researchers had 55 men and women play a computerized cooperation game and demonstrated that participants who felt they had been burned would go over the experience in their heads, playing out alternative versions of how they might have behaved.

“Being duped holds up this mirror to people,” Dr. Vohs said, “and may in fact show them where they are on the scale” — too trusting or too vigilant. Paranoia, too, has its costs, and it can sour relationships.

Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating on how an embarrassing event might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking. “The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois. “A good deal of research has shown that these counterfactual insights can kick-start new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, self-improvement.”

Those observations may not leap to mind if you just showed up in go-go boots and an Elizabeth Taylor wig to a bogus 1970s cross-dressing party. Or if you fell for the e-mail message announcing you had won an award and should forward a draft of your acceptance speech to a supervisor.

But a good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing. And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure you might expect.

Brian Lynch reviews U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life? by Bruce Grierson, for www.straight.com.

This definition of pranks is from V.Vale’s introduction to his formative book PRANKS, published in 1987 by RE/Search Publications. I’ve always loved this essay. He has graciously allowed us to reprint it here. In 2006, RE/Search Publications released a follow-up book called Pranks! 2 that is equally seminal in its approach to the subject -JS

PRANKS. According to the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, a prank is a “trick . . . a mildly mischievous act . . . a practical joke . . . a ludicrous act.” The best pranks invoke the imagination, poetic imagery, the unexpected and a deep level of irony or social criticism—such as Boyd Rice’s presentation of a skinned sheep’s head on a silver platter to Betty Ford, First Lady of the United States. Great pranks create synaesthetic experiences which are unmistakably exciting, original, and reverberating, as well as creative, metaphoric, poetic and artistic. If these criteria be deemed sufficient, then pranks can be considered as constituting an art form and genre in themselves.

However slighted by Academia, pranks are not without cultural and historical precedent. A casual survey of art of the twentieth century reveals a neglected galaxy of shining star prank-events which forever altered the path of future creative activity, such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (a painting of prostitutes), Duchamp’s Fountain (a urinal which he labeled “sculpture”), and Warhol’s successful marketing of painting depicting gory car crashes as six-figure “high art.”

A prank connotes fun, laughter, jest, satire, lampooning, making a fool of someone—all light-hearted activities. Thus do pranks camouflage the sting of deeper, more critical denotations, such as their direct challenge to all verbal and behavioral routines, and their undermining of the sovereign authority of words, language, visual images, and social conventions in general. Regardless of specific manifestation, a prank is always an evasion of reality. Pranks are the deadly enemy of reality. And “reality”—its description and limitation—has always been the supreme control trick used by a society to subdue the lust for freedom latent in its citizens.

From the very onset of social interactions pranks play their part, instructing and enlightening the child toward the realization that things are never what they seem. Calling into question inherently dubious concepts such as “reality,” “trust,” “belief,” obedience,” and “the social contract,” pranks occasionally succeed in implanting a profound and lasting distrust of all social conventions and institutions.

Unfortunately, pranks are usually identified with—and limited to—pre-adult stages of development. At the point of “adulthood” the multiplication of mischief must cease; youths are supposed to “grow out of” the need to perpetrate pranks as they accept society’s restriction of their spirit through the progressive conventionalization of their behavior. The role model of the adult prankster is a scarce archetype indeed. But—pranks can continue until one’s dying breath: when he died, the great Surrealist Andre Breton was taken to the cemetery in a moving van.

What makes a prank “bad”? In America the outstanding socially-sanctioned prank is the college fraternity hazing, which means “to harass by exacting unnecessary or disagreeable work, to harass by banter, ridicule, or criticism,” Usually characterized not only by unoriginality but by conventionalized cruelty, these pointless humiliations do nothing to raise consciousness or alter existing power relationships. They are deeds which only further the status-quo; they only perpetuate the acceptance of and submission to arbitrary authority, or abet existing hierarchical inequities. Basically these include all pranks readily recognizable as “cliches”—those which contribute no new poetic imagery.

The word “prank” is strangely absent from academic psychology, sociology and anthropology texts which presumably exist to document and classify the full range of human behavior in this world. A recent look at the indexes of literally a hundred books in these categories revealed no entries! Yet even a cursory perusal of world myths and written literature will substantiate the prank as a significant, consciousness-raising, and often pivotal event in the ethical and creative development of the individual in society. Examples range from Coyote and Raven in American Indian mythology to the legends of Hermes and Prometheus.

A possible explanation for this mysterious lacuna may lie in the way genuinely poetic/imaginative pranks resist facile categorization, and transcend inflexible (and often questionable) demarcations between legality and illegality, good and bad taste, and right and wrong social conduct. Society imposes a grid of habit-forming pathways on its denizens to “produce results” without lateral detouring. Obviously, a minimum of ritualized language and behavior to facilitate the flow of goods and services for survival is necessary. However, this minimum has been well exceeded long ago. Pranks blast the rigidified politeness and behavior patterns which bespeak sleepwalkers acting on automatic pilot. They attack the fundamental mechanisms of a society in which all social/verbal intercourse functions as a means towards a future consumer exchange, either of goods or experience. It is possible to view every “entertainment” experience marketed today either as an act of consumption, a prelude to an act of consumption, or both.

Pranks challenge all aspects of “the social contract” which have ossified. Their power derives from exploration and elucidation of the inarticulate, confused areas surrounding society. They probe the territory of the taboo, which has always been concerned with sex and death. This shadow area, which has spawned most of the creative breakthroughs worth preserving, is also that area which society—striving above all to preserve its status quo—neglects, rejects and ignores, principally through the process of cultural censorship. Yet “true art is always there —where no one is waiting for it . . . Art does not come and lie in the beds we make for it. It slips away as soon as its name is uttered; it likes to preserve its incognito. Its best moment are when it forgets its very name.” (Jean Dubuffet)

Pranks are most admirable when they evoke a liberation of expression . . . and challenge the authority of appearances. While almost all pranks mock or undermine kneel-to-authority conditioning, some do more, by virtue of disclosing more levels of black humor and metaphor, or expanding our notions of reality by gifting us with a bizarre image or metamorphosis. At a single stroke a prank can dissect an intricate tissue of artifice, exposing a rigid behavioral structure underneath.

By unhinging the context for expectation, pranks explode the patterning which narrows and shrinks down our imaginative potential. What distinguishes a painting from wallpaper, or literature from stock market reports, is the tearing and ripping apart of old forms and structures to create new perceptions which renew and refresh life itself. All art attempts to rid life of banality; to expunge the habituation effect whose cause is “daily living.”

Obedience to language and image must continually be challenged, if we are to stay “alive.” The best pranks research and probe the boundaries of the occupied territory known as “society” in an attempt to redirect that society toward a vision of life grounded not in dreadful necessity, but rather, continual poetic renewal. (A society whose exchange value consisted in poetic images and humor rather than dollars can barely be imagined at this stage of world evolution.) Pranks function to evoke the parallel Land of Make Believe, that realm of perpetual surprise and delight where endless possibilities for fun and pleasure depend upon circumvention of habit and cliche. From their Shadow-world, pranks cast their Funhouse Mirror reflection of our workaday world. Ultimately, the territory signposted by pranks may represent our single supremely tangible freedom.

© RE/Search Publications