Of course people are doing psychological study on pranks. Apparently people are trying to use psychology to more effectively fool people. Oh, humanity. There have been some pretty good April Fool's jokes, though. My favourite is the BBC spaghetti harvest: In 1957 on April 1, the BBC news showed a short documentary about the spaghetti harvesters of Switzerland which included images of Swiss women picking cooked spagetti off trees. As not too many Britons had seen spaghetti in 1957, the BBC got calls asking how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. You can watch the video at the link.
Another good one is the Guardian's San Serriffe, a 7 page report about a non-existent island nation in the Indian Ocean with names all taken from fonts and typography (the two islands, shaped like a semi-colon, are called Upper and Lower Caisse). It was so convincing that when people called in asking about it, they refused to believe that it didn’t really exist.
If that’s not belief perseverance, I don’t know what is.
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