3. THE HATCH: Human Testing
The orientation film claims the hatch was originally used to study the island's ''unique'' electromagnetic energy. And indeed, there is a curious wall that seems to be humming with the stuff. But the filmstrip also states that the DeGroots were following B.F. Skinner, a psychologist famous for his Skinner boxes: controlled environments used to study animal behavior. Folks, the hatch is a human Skinner box.
Why wasn't this mentioned in the orientation film? Because the orientation film is part of the experiment! The film was fiction, designed to induce paranoia and fear and observe the test subject's reaction. What Dharma was studying was the behavior every Lost fanatic engages in: the human imperative to organize seemingly random details into some kind of order. The problem is that someone — someone we haven't seen or met yet — was put in the hatch and had a psychic break of world-altering proportions.
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