P.E.C.O.R.I.N.O.

P.E.C.O.R.I.N.O. (the Psychotherapy Experimentation Center for Outlawed Research into Insurrectionary Narcotics Observance), staffed by people scientifically proven to be more empathetic than you, is providing much-needed treatment to people with low empathy - the biggest danger to society, of course.

INTERACTION DESIGN

• Separation into in-group/out-group explores participants’ tendencies to unquestioningly go along with the norm of their group

• Timed phases with buffers allow for smooth experience for both sides of the show with unpredictable timing factors

• Headphones and blindfolds give a specifically-timed surprise to “low-empathy” participants

• In-world evangelization encourages participants to play characters that bring more people back for future shows

INSPIRATION

This concept was inspired by a set of horrifying treatments allegedly practiced at the Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit in the 1970s in which doctors tried to increase the empathy level of psychopaths by chaining them together naked in a padded room and dosing them with LSD for days at a time. Empathetic, right?

In reading about these experiments, witnessing Bay Area norms and expectations around empathy, and going through my own harrowing experience of being accused of psychopathy (falsely, of course), I landed on a question that I like to call the empathy paradox:

• If a community deems that “empathy” is a required trait of the in-group, are they justified behaving un-empathetically to anyone they deem “low empathy”?

• And—who gets to decide who is and is not sufficiently empathic, and is there any way to check this power?