You can even prove it to yourself. After they pass by, you can open your block and they'll turn back. Close the block again and they move away.
Evil idea... Using the trick of block/unblock, you could slowly collect a large group of them and then unleash them as a group on an unsuspecting AI
That is evil, although could potentially backfire: To work, you have to keep your cities barb-blocked long enough for the stack you've created to be nearer an AI than to you. And since in this game, the nearest AI is a very long way away, that's a long time. If you settle a city inland, thereby removing your barb-block before the barbs have gone far enough, then I would imagine the stack of barbs will turn around and head right back to you.
After reading this thread, I actually tried a couple of barb-blocking games to test out the idea, as I didn't know about it before. It worked - but on one game about 15-20 turns after I'd settled my first non-peninsula city, literally about 8-10 barbs suddenly arrived from the East - I'm sure they'd been heading for the Incas and turned around when I settled that city. And that was without trying your evil trick. If I had tried it, I dread to think how many would've turned up!
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