“I can sniff out a rat from a mile away.”

I said this to a friend of mine a few weeks ago. We laughed because I may have said it with an Italian accent. Like I was part of the mafia. But I digress. With rats on my mind, I share today’s blog.

Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s, did a famous, albeit cruel, drowning rats experiment. Here is a summary of this experiment.

Curt’s experiment focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived.

12 domesticated rats were used in Curt’s first set of experiments. Three of the rats lasted a total of two minutes before drowning. The other nine rats spent their time on the surface. And they just kept swimming. They survived for literally days before eventually succumbing to exhaustion and drowning.

The second set of experiments Curt undertook involved 34 wild rats. Wild rats are excellent swimmers but, despite their “wildness”, fitness and swimming ability, not one of the 34 wild rats survived more than a few minutes.

Curt reflected on what caused some of the rats to give up:

“The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight — it is rather one of hopelessness… the rats are in a situation against which they have no defense… they seem literally to ‘give up.’”

Curt decided to experiment further.

For the last set of experiments, Curt selected a new cohort of rats who were all similar to each other. Again, he introduced them into buckets and observed them as they progressed towards drowning. This time though, he noted the moment at which they gave up then, just before they died, he rescued them. He saved them and helped them recover. He then placed them back into the buckets and started the experiments all over again.

What did he notice?

When rats were placed back into the water, they swam for much longer than they had the first time they were placed in the buckets. The only thing that had changed was that they had been saved. Curt wrote:

“the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless… after elimination of hopelessness the rats do not die.”

Hope.

Off to Wikipedia I go:

Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes… Hope is often a motivating force for change in dynamic characters. In “A New Hope” (Star Wars Episode IV) the title refers to one of the lead characters, Luke Skywalker, who is expected in the future to allow good to triumph over evil.

More on Young Skywalker this week…

I’ve always thought hope was for suckers. Hope is leading with your heart, and only suckers do that. You need to lead with your head. You need to think analytically. You need to be real. But as I have aged, have I, shall I say, softened? And when I consider those difficult times in my life I wonder if hope got me through? Can hope get me through?

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

– Emily Dickinson

For more on drowing rats: https://worldofwork.io/2019/07/drowning-rats-psychology-experiments/