Student Showed Up to Class Every Day With a Black Bag Over His Head His Identity Was Never Revealed

Описание: In January 1967 students returned to Oregon State University in Corvallis after winter break and found something waiting for them in instructor Charles Goetzinger's basic speech persuasion class. At the back of the room sat a person completely covered from head to bare ankles in a black fabric bag. Only his feet were visible. Goetzinger confirmed it was a real enrolled student who had asked to remain anonymous. Nothing else was explained. The student attended every class, sat in his seat and never communicated with anyone.
At first classmates resented him. One followed him after class and tried to stick a label on his back. Another poked him with an umbrella. But week by week something shifted. The same people who had mocked him started accepting him — then protecting him. When CBS Evening News, Life magazine, the Associated Press and United Press International all descended on Corvallis to cover the story, it was his classmates who shielded him from the press. The experiment revealed something psychology would later formalize as the mere exposure effect — the principle that people grow to like what they initially dislike simply through repeated exposure, with no new information required. The Bag Man had become proof that judgment softens when there is nothing left to judge. At the end of semester he walked out of class, got into a waiting car, entered a nearby building still wearing the bag — and was never identified. His name has never been published anywhere.

Sources:
https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/ba...