Alright, time to learn something about the human nature.

First, watch this short clip enough times to understand what happened. Who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, that kind of thing.

Then, continue reading. Thread ↓ https://twitter.com/ThirstHotel/status/1304958147203866624

I don't want to spoil things for people so I'll put filler in the first few tweets.

Filler content like this.

Thread continues.

Stay tuned.

Still nothing.

But we're getting there.

Hope you formed an opinion on the video above.

Ok, ready?

Let me ask you one thing: How recorded the video?

I mean, was there a person randomly standing on a sidewalk, recording a guy standing next to a stroller? When the car started backing up into the stroller, did they just continue recording?

Or, is it more probable that this is staged?

The answer is: it's totally staged. I just checked on TikTok and that account is full of the guy on the right. Not a random passer-by.

Also, if you rewatch the video enough times, the acting is obvious.

But when you look at the replies to the tweet I quote-retweeted, most people seem to assume it's something that actually happened. I started as one of them, too. You might have started as one of them, too.

When we see something like that, it's really hard to be initially skeptical.

First of all, it's emotional. There's fear, anger, comeuppance. Especially righteous anger is a potent reason-blocker.

Second, the authors made every effort to conceal the fact that the video is staged. It's clearly taken with a phone, vertically, like someone's random video might. The action is fast _and_ sped up, so it's hard to detect bad acting. And there's no diegetic sound.

But the first reason, the emotional one, is interesting. If the video was just someone standing around their stroller, with nothing happening, you'd be asking "who's shooting the video and why?" pretty quickly. But the emotional content overrides that thought for most of us.

This is just one example. I've seen a few others recently. Sometimes, when I point out that the video might have been staged, people refuse to even acknowledge that possibility.

It think it's a case of “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.” (Mark Twain)

People get emotionally invested in those little stories. The videos often validate their points of view. ("I hate people like that, too!")

Some common themes in these staged videos:

* A member of some *other* group of people (younger people, older people, this race or that race, etc.) acting unbelievably stupid or morally wrong
* "What has the world come to?"
* A threat
* Righteous indignation
* Comeuppance

A good antidote is to always remember to ask: who's recording this and why? Quite often, there's no believable reason for someone to randomly be recording at the time.

Unfortunately, this antidote will not work for long. It's easy for authors of such staged videos to make it look more like a random person walking by. Just add a second at the start with the person going "Hi, can you--".

So, the only long-term antidote is to be skeptical of highly emotional content like this, especially if it comes without context. And to recognize the common themes above.

Fear, righteousness, judging and anger are the mind-killers.

The end.

* When I say "How recorded", I mean "Who recorded". Ugh!

The actual end.