Community Episode 1.04 Social Psychology

Senor Chang confronts the class on a critical evaluation that he received from Annie. After class, Shirley waits for Jeff to walk to their next class together, but Jeff pretends to forget something to avoid walking with her. Instead he walks with Britta.

While walking with Jeff, Britta is greeted by a shirtless guy named Vaughn playing hackeysack. Jeff is suspicious.

Annie approaches Prof Duncan in the cafeteria to ask him if she can join his psychology lab, even though it's for second-year students. Duncan thinks she is hitting on him; he makes it clear he can't date students, but if that is okay and she still wants to join his lab, she can. He tells her that she must bring two human subjects to participate. She agrees with utter delight.

At the coffee stand, Pierce opens up a package with his brand-new invention -- the ear noculars. He created a device that looks similar to a Bluetooth cell phone earpiece, but it allows you to spy on people's conversations from a distance. He puts it on and tests it out on campus.

Jeff decides that Britta needs to be rescued from talking to Vaughn so he interrupts their conversation at the coffee stand. Annie gets Troy and Abed to agree to participate in Duncan's psychology experiment.

Annie listens to Professor Duncan as he sets the stage for the psychology experiment. All the subjects are sitting in a room waiting for the experiment to begin, but what they don't know is that waiting is the experiment. "The Duncan Method" assumes that the subjects will all have a breaking point and lose it, exiting the room before what they think is the start of the experiment. Annie lets the subjects know that they are running a little behind and it will be a while longer till they start. With that, they lose their first subject: Senor Chang.

Jeff tries to avoid walking without Shirley again, but she manages to catch him anyway. After a few moments of awkward silence as they start walking to class, they actually find their stride and begin to gossip about the others in the group.

With only Troy and Abed left at the experiment, Troy hits his breaking point. Abed is the sole participant left in the room for the experiment, patiently waiting for it to start. The next day, while on their way to class, Jeff and Shirley find Britta and Vaughn kissing on the grass.

Shirley tries to get Jeff to gossip about Vaughn, but Jeff, trying to be a good friend to Britta, won't bite. Shirley keeps trying. Back at the psychology experiment, 26 hours later, Abed still sits patiently in the chair waiting for the experiment to start. Duncan and the students are a wreck in the next room and at a loss as to why is he still there. Finally Annie tells Abed to go home.

Jeff sits with Vaughn and Britta in the cafeteria to show that he is a good friend and wants to get to know Vaughn. Shirley comes over asking Vaughn where he got his shirt, knowing that he'll take it off. Shirley wants to taunt Jeff and show him Vaughn's small nipples, hoping she can get him to gossip with her again.

Britta and Jeff are studying Spanish in the student lounge when Britta asks for some advice about Vaughn. She shares a poem that Vaughn wrote to her. While she isn't looking, Jeff snaps a picture of it with his cell phone. Afterward, he meets up with Shirley to read the poem out loud and resume their gossip sessions.

Annie confronts Troy and Abed about the psychology experiment. Mad that Abed ruined it, she yells at him, but then he says he stayed because she asked him to and she's a friend. Annie then feels bad she gave him a hard time, but Jeff and Shirley walk in and distract the group with Vaughn's poem. While the group is laughing over it, Britta walks in with Vaughn, who figures out why they are all laughing. He leaves humiliated.

After the Vaughn poem debacle, Jeff and Shirley try to change their ways and not gossip. But, before they stop gossiping for good, Shirley drops a bomb on Jeff. She tells him that Britta confided in her that she had a sex dream about him.

As an apology for yelling at him after the experiment, Annie brings Abed the first three Indiana Jones movies as a gift. Abed assures her that they are "cool." Britta tries to stay away from Jeff, pissed after what he did, and tells him that Vaughn broke up with her.