The year was 2005. I was an 11 year old boy: Pyromaniacs, the lot. Ergo, a few summers prior, I'd accidentally set fire to a portion of my backyard. Undaunted, I bought nine cigarette lighters off an older boy. When my sisters then began regularly watching an action movie I wasn't yet allowed to see (Paycheck- I highly recommend it), I snuck onto the staircase overlooking the family room just in time to see Ben Affleck torch a man's face using a standard can of hairspray and, you guessed it, a cigarette lighter.
Cue: A few days of me coating the bathroom sink with Lysol and subsequently cleaning the blackened porcelain before anyone knew what I'd been up to (yes, there may have been cackling).
I wasn't alone for long, of course: I had to show my friends the cool trick I'd learned.
After a few experiments, we learned that, if applied to one of our hands, we could temporarily create the visual of ignition without the pain of combustion. Pretty cool, right? And it was... For a time.
From the instant I'd shown them my magic, my friends began scheming ways to apply it, and they weren't content with our little "It doesn't actually burn me!" gag (They later invented "Fire Ball:" Soccer with a flaming ball... But that's off-topic); they wanted something more like this:
Convincing me to spray Lysol all over my body took a while, but they kept saying things like, "Come on, man- we'll put it on StupidVideos" and, "We're guys! We're not afraid of anything!"
...Long story short, that's how I ended up with my eyelashes melted together and a ruined sweater.
Turns out you really shouldn't try everything you see on TV.
And your friends won't actually record it.
Sounds like a classic case of persuasion by gradually escalating the stakes. It seems that this would be one of the best tactics to use. It would have been absurd for you to start out setting yourself on fire, but by continually making things more extreme, it left the ultimate result much bigger.
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ReplyDeleteAh, the power of positive peer pressure and its ability to push us on to the greatest limits of the human experience! I think the power of our peers to use even such basic rhetoric to sway us is a great example of the power of ethos.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this way more than I should have. :) I think it's important to note that the fact that it was your friends attempting to persuade you made it it more effective. If a random stranger stopped you on the street and tried to get you to light yourself on fire, I sincerely hope you would reject the idea. However, since it came from your friends who you respected and wanted to impress, it's more understandable. Finding the right persuader is important.
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