There's also weird stuff how things like fuel consumption is measured. In the US we use "miles per gallon" which makes sense in a non-metric country. I was born in a metric country where we used "kilometers per liter" which also makes sense. But then cars have this setting for European countries where they show "liters per 100km". WTF? Who in the hell measures things like that and why?
TL;DR it's possible to do stupid things with any measuring system.
Oh I've seen this in the past. It's part of a video (documentary?) on phobias. This guy had lobster phobia and they were trying "shock treatment" to see if it would help. IIRC it didn't.