Strip Club Physics

Serious decisions need serious settings

What would you do if top government officials—including the Vice President and CIA director— added you to a group chat discussing secret attack plans against a terrorist group in Yemen? This was the position that Jeffrey Goldberg, senior editor at The Atlantic, found himself in several weeks ago. He leaked the text transcripts in a now-viral article titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” (See images below).

The public was rightly outraged. Clearly a main source of outrage was the leak itself—letting top secret plans fall in the wrong hands jeopardizes national security. But another source of outrage was due to the setting in which the plans were being made: a group chat on the Signal app.

Figures 1-2. On March 15, 2025, the editor of the Atlantic was added to a group chat used by the government to plan upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Source: Fox News

There’s nothing overtly wrong about Signal as a platform. It’s highly secure with end-to-end encryption that prevents even the developers from seeing messages. Despite the data security that Signal ensures, using it to message about war plans just feels wrong. But why?

The answer can be found in the stories of two (seemingly unrelated) household names: 1) Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the last century, and his unconventional method to solving physics problems, and 2) Sabrina Carpenter, a breakout pop singer, and her run-in with the Catholic church.

A Physicist and a Pop Star Walk Into a Bar

Richard Feynman is to thank for some of the most pivotal physics discoveries of the 20th century. He helped design the atomic bomb, uncovered the cause of the Challenger space shuttle crash, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965. Where did the “smartest man in the world” pen his groundbreaking discoveries? On a placemat at the local strip club. After finishing his lectures at Caltech, he was known to head straight to a topless bar to solve equations, contemplate the function of gravity, and sketch the dancers when he hit a wall.

Unsurprisingly, the stark mismatch between Feynman’s scientific contributions and his unorthodox leisure time rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. How can something so serious and insightful be done when dancers are gyrating on stage with flashing lights and blasting music? Physicists belong in a sterile laboratory with a white coat!

Figure 3. Richard Feynman’s physics breakthroughs at a local strip club confused many.

Feynman’s problem was that his work violated a fundamental intuition we have: that serious work requires a serious setting. But other times, the setting is too serious for our behavior.

In 2023, the Grammy-award winning pop singer Sabrina Carpenter was almost cancelled for a racy music video featuring her dancing provocatively in front of the altar of a Catholic church surrounded by candy-colored coffins. The backlash was so widespread that it led to the eventual investigation and demotion of the church’s priest. Viewers were scandalized, especially so when Carpenter denied the drama, saying only that “Jesus was a carpenter.”

Just like Feynman solving equations in a strip club, the outrage directed towards Carpenter was likely driven by the mismatch between behavior and context: churches should be reserved for weddings, funerals, and holy rituals.

But what can these behavior-context mismatches teach us about the outrage surrounding the Signal scandal?

A Place Doesn’t Just Set the Mood—It Sets our Minds

Places aren’t just physical locations. They come with a set of behaviors, emotions, and norms that we’re expected to follow. It’s okay to show up in sweatpants to a New York bodega, but it would get you kicked out of an upscale restaurant. We’re so attuned to these social norms that we typically don’t even realize we’re following them until we’re in an unfamiliar context. For example, American tourists are often chastised for talking loudly at foreign restaurants, something that’s more acceptable in the U.S. than it is in Europe.

A particularly strong social norm revolves around seriousness: how much a setting calls for serious and solemn behavior versus fun and rowdy behavior. It’s immediately obvious when someone violates this norm, like laughing at a funeral, or twerking in a church.

It’s also, we think, why the Signal group chat leak was such a fiasco—more so than it would have been if the plans were leaked from official White House documents. It’s obvious to everybody that online group chats are for casual conversations, and making important decisions about war requires a serious setting.

And we’re right to worry. There’s a lot of psychological research showing that people's behavior is drastically influenced by the setting they’re in and their expectations about social norms.

In one study, researchers designed a fake restaurant where participants thought they were going to taste test a new company’s food. Upon arrival, they were greeted by a hostess and brought to a restaurant-style room with another person. The research team put a lot of effort into making people feel like they were in a real restaurant, even though it was actually a research lab. A “waitress” then served them a set of three grapefruit cocktails. They didn’t know how much they were drinking, so importantly, some people thought they were enjoying a strong drink, but it actually didn’t have a drop of alcohol (the rim was sprayed with vodka for a realistic taste).

After consuming the drinks, participants were asked to season their partner’s plate of mashed potatoes with salt and hot sauce. Unbeknownst to them, their partner was actually an accomplice on the research team who was instructed to be intentionally hostile to rile them up: cursing at them, kicking their chair, and being an all-around terrible meal partner.

The key question was how these participants behaved in response to this maltreatment: did the participants who thought they were drinking alcohol—even though they were dead sober—behave like drunk people, or sober people?

Ultimately, the participants who thought they were drinking a lot put significantly more hot sauce on their obnoxious partner’s dish. Even if they were physiologically sober (no alcohol in their system), the research team influenced them to feel drunk and therefore, act more aggressively. The actual amount of alcohol participants had did not influence their behavior.

Figure 4. People who thought they were drinking alcohol in a fake restaurant were more aggressive towards a hostile study partner. From Bègue et al., 2008.

The environmental cues—a swanky restaurant, tossing back a (fake) cocktail, a mean tablemate—changed people’s behavior above and beyond their actual alcohol consumption. Even sober people will act drunk if the cues about context and norms suggest they should. Our behavior depends on what we think is “normal” in a given environment.

What constitutes “normal behavior” when communicating in a group chat? The norms are typically much more casual and unserious than in official government buildings. We use group chats to gossip about our days, complain about our bosses, and make plans for weekend parties.

We’re right to feel that government officials shouldn’t be using a group chat. It’s possible that the casual environment and lack of serious social norms makes them think and act in ways that are completely different than the decisions they’d make in the basement of the Pentagon.

Save the War Plans for the White House

The government’s Signal mishap was understandably outrageous. Our highest ranking officials shouldn’t accidentally add anyone to their top-secret chats. But more than that, we think that the context of the leak (a group chat) was a significant contributor to why people are so angry.

When we try to understand moral outrage, we spend a lot of time thinking about what people do—for example, was the bombing of Yemen justified or not? But it’s likely just as important to consider whether what people are doing fits where people are when they’re doing it. We are a species that cares a lot about place when making judgments: we get upset about physicists who do their work in strip clubs (even when their equations work), and we’ll turn off a music video if the dancing doesn’t fit the setting. And we’re right to care. The environment can change our behavior, so holding each other accountable for where we choose to make decisions is important.

It’s possible that some people can make huge physics breakthroughs in a strip club, and maybe that some people can make balanced decisions about war plans in a group text, but it certainly doesn’t sit well with our minds. So consider saving your serious decisions for a serious setting. If it’s time to fire someone, maybe don’t tell them while you’re on the back of a mechanical bull at a country western bar.