"I am in black bag, and I'm lying on a desk at the back of the lecture theater. From the feel of it, I imagine it to be a desk with metal legs, painted a glossy gray, and the surface to be a pine-colored fake wood veneer. But why shouldn't I imagine the room to be far nicer than it may, in fact, be?"
"At the University of Oregon and a professor called Charles Goetzinger, who was using it to test the mere exposure effect - the idea that we become fond of things just by encountering them over and over again, even if we dislike them at first. The experiment ran for a whole term, and the students at first disliked Black Bag and found his presence in the classroom abject and unsettling."
"But then they came to quite like him over the weeks, and they ended up standing up for him, if anyone criticized his appearance or his silence. And by the end of the semester, they were sort of inviting him out for the kind of end-of-term party... Even though he never said a thing. He never responded when he was spoken to."
Luke Kennard's novel 'Black Bag' centers on an unemployed actor hired by Professor Dr. Blend to participate in a university experiment. The actor zips himself into a black leather bag and sits silently in the back of a lecture hall throughout an entire term. The novel is inspired by a real 1967 experiment at the University of Oregon conducted by Professor Charles Goetzinger to test the mere exposure effect—the psychological principle that people develop fondness for things through repeated encounters, even if initially disliked. In both the actual experiment and Kennard's fictional adaptation, students initially find the bagged figure unsettling and abject, but gradually come to appreciate and defend him, eventually inviting him to social gatherings despite his complete silence and lack of response.
#psychology-experiment #mere-exposure-effect #fiction-based-on-real-events #human-perception-and-familiarity
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