Compliance briefly offers Milgram’s classic experiment on obedience to authority  as some sort of explanation and makes a few references to Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment  throughout; but I feel that the the real-life Kentucky McDonalds case , mildly fictionalised in the film, and the 70 or so other hoax calls of varying degrees of nastiness are unfathomable enough to demand an extra dimension of explanation.

Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds touches intriguingly on bizarre beliefs shared by relatively large numbers but I was reminded of psychoses shared on a smaller scale in the folie à deux, a syndrome where delusional beliefs may be shared with another person – or, more generally, the folie à plusieurs, known to DSM as the shared psychotic disorder. A startling example of the folie à deux is that of the twins Ursula and Sabina Eriksson who, among other things, deliberately and repeatedly hurled themselves in front of motorway traffic (the strange sequence of events is worth reading about for the sheer oddness).

In the film and in the real-life fast-food restaurant case the film lightly fictionalises it seems to me that the participants were doing more than obeying authority. They were sharing in a fiction that became gradually more incredible through the ratcheting demands of the hoaxer – but a fiction that was supported and maintained by the repeatedly tractable participants in the hoax. Halfway through the proceedings, the restaurant staff and even perhaps the principal victim were already suspending disbelief and supporting each other in a narrative that would have been preposterous to anyone who hadn’t been carefully prepped stepping freshly into their strange world.

These musings cause me to wonder then if some similar folies à plusieurs aren’t perhaps the stuff of our everyday lives. Perhaps we might expect to find our families and our workplaces relying upon this penchant for shared delusions and our willingness to maintain implausible fictions.

In the film the bubble is burst when a maintenance worker who hasn’t been at the restaurant all day is confronted with the horrifying consequence of the hoax and simply says ’No!’ Similarly, a few weeks after you’ve left a long-held job, say, the day to day urgencies seem very like a strange psychotic episode, and the hierarchies, demands and necessities of what was just a short time ago so terribly important suddenly vanish – not only because you’re no longer working at that particular job but because the delusion that that job and that company were so very vital and important is no longer being shared.

http://twitter.com/cdarwin

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It was invaluable for navigation using Google’s offline maps (5 x 80Mb worth of offline maps at any one time was easily enough to cover a day’s driving).  Since I’ve returned I haven’t yet worked out how it will fit into my life – what are the use cases for it, exactly. But it’s very lovely.

In Beagle time it’s now 1836 and Charles, Fitzroy and The Beagle are heading north for Ascension Island and then home to England and then that’s the end.

So here’s the question: what should I do with the Twitter account?

Biologist and Galapagos-visitor Karen James has asked if I’ll keep tweeting from it. Academic and author J F Derry (new book project here) makes me wonder if I could use it to promote various Darwin-related stuff.

I don’t know. The diary has a natural end so while I could carry on tweeting from Darwin’s subsequent life there’s no obvious and easy narrative source to use and the account’s pretty specific – it’s the Beagle Diary – so I’d feel it wrong to use it for another, very different purpose. 

If anyone has any ideas I’d be interested in hearing them