BOSTON — Some local YouTube pranksters set out to perform a little social experiment in Boston and the results are pretty funny.
The Fun Time Federation goes around the Boston area pranking unsuspecting New Englanders and offering kindness in many scenarios.
But the latest video from the group is a good example of a psychological concept famously demonstrated by a Harvard researcher named Christopher Chabris.
In the Fun Time video, a man asks random people for directions to Faneuil Hall and, while they answer, hands them a random object. They call it situational blindness.
But the most famous example of this was demonstrated in the "invisible gorilla" test. Chabris and co-researcher Daniel Simons, of the University of Illinois, asked students to count how many times a group of people passed a basketball around in a video.
Partway through the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walked through the group. In most cases, only about 50 percent of the students reported seeing the gorilla.
It's called inattentional blindness or temporary blindness effect, and it happens when people are focused on something so much so they fail to recognize an unexpected stimulus in plain sight.
According to Fun Time, the people they approached were so engaged with the person seeking directions, they were trusting enough to accept objects.
The result is pretty amusing.