Name: The Psychology of Package Thieves
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:31:42.000Z
Duration: 4 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So I assume that you, like everyone else on the Internet, has seen Mark rubbers Amazing new video in which he builds a bait package that explodes glitter on people when they steal it.

I don't want to take away from the amazing Engineering year.

But the reason I've watched this video five times isn't that, like, amazing Glitter swirled and it isn't the well engineered fart spray, er, if the part where the thieves don't look or act the way I thought that they would.

I don't actually know what I thought they were gonna look like.

Maybe because I dehumanized what a thief was in my head.

But that challenge to my expectation, whatever it waas immediately changed the way I was thinking about thieves.

And I went from, like, maybe a little bit of anger and also pity, tomb or curiosity and also stealing because getting offended that, like your theft, ended in a prank.

So I did a bunch of research because that's what I do.

And some of that research involved talking to package thieves, which I managed to do.

And here in the voice of actors, not the people themselves, are some of the things that I heard from those people.

All of my friends were doing it on didn't have that many friends, and I didn't know how to make new ones.

There's some satisfaction in just getting away with something I had a debatable need to steal.

I could sell or trade the stuff I had stolen.

You don't ever know what people might have ordered could be a USB cable.

It's like anything addictive, and this is better than my other addictions and never really thought about the consequences.

But I knew that even if someone called the cops, I'm young, charming white and I have a clean record, so the consequences wouldn't be too bad.

We were just having fun until we put together the fact that this was almost certainly a toy meant for a child to open on Christmas morning.

It stopped being fun then, and and we took it back.

All these perspectives were super helpful for me and understanding how theft happens without the need for a theft.

That doesn't mean excusing it, the better understanding it at the same time, like I felt very out of my depth like I'm not a psychologist.

But Dr Robert Tyminski is, and he wrote a book called The Psychology of Theft and Loss, and I just called him off.

My job most theft is not because people need it.

There's a small category that's opportunistic, based on, like social and economic deprivation.

They felt like there was strength and getting away with it that they can fool people and do them and the rush.

There's also really interesting to me that this was often not a solitary activity, and that's like a defense against experiencing the guilt that, like if you are prone to some guilt, then somehow you get to divide not quite as bad, but more than that when I came away from this thinking is that theft, like all sociological enterprise, is super complicated.

Did a lot of research on theft this week and one of the most fascinating studies that came across was from Dr Dan really did an experiment where a whole bunch of people came into a classroom and they had to answer math problems and for everyone.

But there was one actor in the group, and the actor stood up 30 seconds into the test, walked to the front, said that they got all of the questions right, took the money and left.

So did the existence of an obvious cheater make it more or less likely that the other students would cheat?

Well, that depended on what sweater the cheater was wearing if they were wearing a sweater from the same university that all the rest of the students were from cheating increase.

But if they were wearing a sweater from a rival university, cheating decreased.

I came away from that research thinking the same thing I thought about Mark.

 Rubbers, video genius, design and theft is a lot more complicated than I wanted it to be. 