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Most people can be wrongfooted if you behave in a way that's unexpected. Once I was walking along a street when a man said threateningly: 'What are you looking at?' I answered a completely different question, saying: 'The wall outside my house is not 4ft high.' He looked dumbfounded and repeated his question. I again gave a completely irrelevant answer, saying: 'I used to live in Spain.' He was so perplexed by my failure to respond in the way he'd anticipated that he gave up and ran off.

Let's see how confounding people's expectations can be used to manipulate them.

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See also:
» The lost taxi driver
» The magic doll
» Are you feeling sleepy?
» Séance

When I leave a cash-filled wallet on the pavement in a busy street all day, I am playing with people's perceptions. By drawing a line around it, I disconcert them even more by making it look 'official'.

No one touches the wallet because they think it's too weird or perhaps some sort of trap. People know that lines are drawn round the shape of the body if someone has died in suspicious circumstances, so that makes them feel the wallet has been put there by the authorities. The line makes it clear that it's not lying there by accident.

I don't think the trick would work without the line around the wallet. It makes the object look surreal, as though it has been put there for some unknown purpose. People walking past suspect that both they and the wallet might be being observed, so they don't touch it. The context and appearance of the wallet are too odd for people to be able to process the information that they have about it.

The aim of this trick of the mind is to make people feel so weird about picking up the wallet that they would rather play safe and not touch it. And it works!

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