88 Key Staircase

I just found this video, and I think it is amazing how easy it was to change people without them knowing it. It makes you wonder what we do everyday that is controlled by someone else?? Here it is, courtesy of Volkswagon via YouTube:




Isn't that just crazy? At the beginning of the video, the escalator is full to the point that no more people could possibly fit on it. After the stairs get done up to look, and more importantly, sound like a piano, nearly everyone takes the stairs.

Not only are there people who stop and look at the piano, take it all in, and then decide to try it out. There are also people who are presumably doing business, walking from place A to place B. These people might take the stairs normally (because the escalator is normally bursting with lazy people), but the fact that there are more people on the stairs may give them reason to expend the energy needed to traverse the stairs. Their thinking could be something like:

Wow, there are a lot of people on the stairs, and oh, the stairs look like a piano. Hey! I hear a piano. Oh, it's from the people walking on the piano stairs. I'll just take it and see what happens. What is there to lose?

If someone's really busy, not worrying about stairs v. escalator, they may not even realize that they're walking up a piano and that with every step, they play a C scale. These people are too preoccupied with their cell phone, and just see the people running up and down the stairs (attempting to play Chopin). Unconsciously, they decide that if they take the stairs, they will have fun, too.

That is why I think there are so many more people on the stairs at the end of the video. First, observant individuals are drawn to the piano, placed there by someone else. Then the non-observant, focused people are drawn to the stairs without even thinking about it, because someone else is having fun. It is almost a form of learning through observation. In one of my favorite videos (sans music), even though, there really is no string, most people step over it. Some of these people don't even look down, they just do it because they saw someone else do it.

To mix the two examples, I would like to see if people will skip a step if you color it differently and skip it? Let's try it! Unless you have other ideas... I'll take suggestions.