The Money Tree

Pret­ty cool social exper­i­ment. I won­der, did you think peo­ple might look at the tree and think that maybe there was a catch or that maybe a cop was hid­ing some­where near­by? A lit­tle para­noid, I know, but some peo­ple think like that, I imag­ine… Will you do the exper­i­ment again?

The third reac­tion I noticed: peo­ple telling oth­er peo­ple (point­ing, by cell phone). Not exact­ly altru­ism or shar­ing (could be described as gawk­ing or expect­ing a trick). But there was no swarm­ing of the mon­ey tree.

The music sound­track made me expect that some­thing won­drous or sweet would hap­pen, rather than a war of all against all. I was pre­pared to see a val­i­da­tion of the good­ness of human nature.