I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to play one on television!

Sublight · January 30, 2003, 12:32pm

Well, a psychologist, anyway.

This is partly an announcement to other Dopers in Japan and partly an announcement that I have finally lived one of my childhood fantasies: getting paid to smash stuff with a sledgehammer.

The show Tokumen 200X: Far East Research Company (Sunday, Feb. 16, 8pm, NTV) a weekly science/entertainment show, will run a segment about Philip Zimbardo’s “broken window” experiment:

from the book “Broken Windows”
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by gvandalsh within ten minutes of its gabandonment.h The first to arrive were a family – father, mother, and young son – who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began – windows were smashed, parts torn off, the upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult gvandalsh were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the gvandalsh appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

In the re-enactment, I will be playing Dr. Zimbardo.

We had an absolute blast filming this. Few things are as stress-relieving as picking up a huge hammer, smashing something with it, and having people applaud afterward. I don’t know where they got the car (more of a late-80’s model than a 1969), but by the time filming was finished, we had completely demolished it. Most of us said (among ourselves, of course, we’re not stupid enough to give the people paying us any ideas!) that we would have done this for free.

Rilchiam · February 1, 2003, 1:53pm

WTG, Sublight!

jjimm · February 1, 2003, 2:03pm

I hate it when I gabandon my car and gvandals gvandalize it.

In other news: well done Sublight. Is it going to be on streaming video anywhere?

Sublight · February 1, 2003, 5:08pm

jjimm, I don’t think so, but I’ll check. I could tape it, save it to my hard drive and share it through Kazaa, but that would be an illegal copyright violation and morally wrong.