Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment with its elaborate deception and sleight-of-hand was conducted in 1961 in the basement of a building at Yale University.
Not that you’d know it today. There’s no plaque, no reminder that the experiments dubbed the most famous in social psychology, took place at Yale.
Now Yale is about to cement its reputation as the go-to university for research involving con men and tricksters with the appointment of a Professor of Pickpocketing.
This week, in response to a New Yorker story about Apollo Robbins, the world’s leading pickpocket, Yale acknowledged the establishment of a new Department of Defense (DOD) research and training facility to investigate the counter-terrorism applications of pickpocketing and con techniques. Robbins, whose light fingers are legendary, will be adjunct professor of psychology.
While details of the research are still sketchy, it seems the DOD is interested in the applications of the research to anti-terrorism.
Yale might seem an unlikely setting for research into illusion and fakery. But architecturally speaking, things are not what they seem. While Yale might look as ancient as Oxford or Cambridge, it’s an illusion. The ancient looking stone buildings, the gothic spires and turrets, were built between 1917 and 1931. Stone building blocks are reinforced by steel framing; glass in the diamond window panes has been buried in sand to get the right cloudy, scoured medieval look.
Yale’s Payne Whitney gymnasium looks from the street like a huge cathedral. But behind the facade, is a maze of basketball courts, swimming pools, rowing clinics, and a rooftop baseball pitch. The reason? The 90-year-old female benefactor of the Payne Whitney wanted to donate a cathedral for Yale, but her two sports-loving sons wanted to build a gymnasium. They got the architect to design a building that looked like a cathedral from the outside so that they could drive their mother past and point out the grand entrance and the soaring spires.
Yale’s the perfect place for research into conjuring, trickery and manipulation and for a new psychology professor who calls himself “The Gentleman Thief.”
Interior Yale's Payne Whitney 'cathedral'