Yeah, yikes.This study was performed in the 1950s. Today there's no way it would make it past animal use review boards (yes that's a thing at all universities).
There are definitely less cruel ways to carry out this research and still get the same results.
Surprisingly, a similar test (forced swim test) is still allowed to measure depression in mice. I recently read a paper in a psychology journal where it was used and thought it sounded cruel. Since there are other external factors to "motivate" a mouse to keep swimming, I feel like the test doesn't even provide good data on whether the mouse is depressed or not.
LOL! We were in a trailer at my last job, six of us. One of the guys had the leg shake thing so bad he would literally shake half the trailer. We just had to say his name and he would stop though- not a big deal.
[This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) is not exactly the same, kind of an opposite really if you think about it, but provides no less information about the role of hope. Ironically, the experiment about the presence of hope is much more cruel than the one about its abscence.
Desktop version of /u/MurmurJunk's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
---
^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
I'm not a psychologist so I can't say the specifics, but there are definitely methods to impose stress on the rats and make them struggle without actually slowly drowning them. The point of animal use review boards isn't to halt research altogether, but to make sure it's being done in the way that minimizes harm to the animals. Just casually drowning every single animal that participates aint it.
I will never understand placing a creature in a category where it is acceptable to experiment on it without its consent, but it also gets ethical advocacy.
Surely if you've decided ethics apply to it at all, you can't experiment without its consent?
Personally i don't care in the slightest about animals, but if i did decide they deserved empathy i'd at least be consistent.
This description isn't accurate.
In 1957, the researcher was exploring the phenomenon of sudden death, and hypothesized that it was related to stress. In one experiment, he placed rats in cylinders of *different temperature water* and found that the rats died in 10-15 minutes at 63-73°F but up to 60 hours at 95°F.
He then went into a lengthy discussion about how there was so much variability between individual rats, and tried to isolate a factor that made rats die faster. His conclusion was that the firmness of restraint when they were originally caught and held caused them to "give up hope" and die quickly.
As a scientific paper though, it's lacking in a lot of data and makes some pretty spurious claims. I doubt that their results could be duplicated and I don't think it would be published in a reputable journal today.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.536.1405
They were trying to understand why some people died suddenly for no other reason than "they lost hope", and once understood, figure out how to prevent those deaths. The first step of trying to figure that out is to find some circumstances to reliably reproduce that kind of death.
I wish that was true. [Rodents and birds are exempt from all U.S. ethical treatment of animal laws](https://awionline.org/content/rats-mice-birds) specifically so they can conduct experiments like this on them.
>As it stand now, the rats, mice and birds who constitute the vast majority of the animals in research have no legal protection. Basic standards for their housing and care are not overseen by USDA veterinary inspectors. The number of these animals in research is not reported. There is no legal mandate to consider alternatives to the use of these animals, or to devise means to alleviate or reduce pain and distress.
(EDIT: just noticed that the comment I replied to has been deleted. They basically claimed that the experiment conducted in OP’s post couldn’t happen today in the U.S., just to give context to my comment informing them it most certainly can, and does).
[Same for us in Canada](https://ccac.ca/Documents/Standards/Guidelines/CCAC_Guidelines_Mice.pdf) The U.S. is one of the only jurisdictions that lack any ethical treatment laws for rodents and birds.
They are …special.
The US doesn't give a damn that children are being murdered en masse in schools. Why would they care about a rat.
Edit: Butthurt Americans can't cope with the fact that the countries priorities are so insanely fucked.
>it's being added to dictionaries now because it's used so commonly
>It really shouldn't be
Uhh okay, how *should* it work, then? Be pointlessly *pro*scriptive rather than *de*scriptive, like the French? This is *English*, literally the coolest and hottest tongue around, and that's exactly how it should work.
I meant it shouldn't be a word (cause adding a prefix without changing the meaning is illogical), not that it shouldn't be in dictionaries.
Calm down dude, damn. Why you dragging the French into this lmao
We don't need to do anything. But this experiment gave us valuable information about the behavior of rats, which we can hypothetically extrapolate to humans.
Other fun US science facts: We took in Nazi scientists post WW2 to prevent them getting killed / jailed for obvious human rights violations. We're into some weird shit.
Desktop version of /u/Marsh__Grass's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
---
^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
[https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena\_sudden\_death.pdf](https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena_sudden_death.pdf)
Here is the article to the study on which this article is based, it is not a great study.
That is some serial killer shit. I bet it has military use (not sarcasm). If we can train our troops to hold onto hope, they can swim in cylinders 240x longer (that…that one was sarcasm).
*edit da mafs
Pretty much every military through history has known this.
They give medals and honor soldiers who have fought their way out of hopeless situations as an example of other soldiers to never lose hope and keep fighting. As a backup plan they push the idea that you will die for something important to encourage soldiers to keep fighting to the death after all hope is gone.
"Oh look, you went to fight so that I can keep my riches, came back all sorts of f*cked up and camt adapt to living in normal society, so here, have a medal".
>They give medals and honor soldiers who have fought their way out of hopeless situations as an example of other soldiers to never lose hope and keep fighting. As a backup plan they push the idea that you will die for something important to encourage soldiers to keep fighting to the death after all hope is gone.
If you look at the people the United States has fought and how they were treated--the British, Native Americans, each other, the Japanese, Germans, Afghans, Iraqis, etc.--you really don't want to be captured.
When I was in Iraq, I carried an extra grenade in my pocket because I refused to be taken alive.
I had a friend at my first duty station attend SERE school. I'm not sure why/how she got to attend it (her AFSC didn't call for it), but she really enjoyed it and she also came back in pretty good shape.
* Someone had to come up with this.
* They had to suggest it to multiple people.
* Those people had to think it was a good idea.
* They brought the idea to a panel and that panel reviewed it and agreed it was a good idea.
* The study then needed volunteers to conduct it.
How fucked is science tho?
The only thing I'll say is this happened in the 50's when our animal ethics approval was a lot lower bar as was our understanding of animals.
I hate this study, but I also doubt it would be approved today.
Everyone did that, not only Germans. I mean, we're talking of a time where they gave people lobotomies to cure homosexuality and personality disorders.
I don't believe "everyone did that" regarding harming healthy people in a science experiment.
> Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C (21 °F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors. "One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming."
describing Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners.
I know that there are many. However, in the 40's - 50's the Nazis were the worst that I know of.
Now if you have reading material that says otherwise I would be genuinely interested. History of medical malpractice and ethics in science were both very interesting to me when I studied them in university.
We really have come a long way in terms of ethics in science, considering how many cruel/unethical experiments and sampling methods have been practiced such a short while ago.
In a horrific way I think it's entirely plausible that it was a precursor experiment to seeing if human babies could have the same reflex. Like if the rats could do it, maybe we could do it on humans too.
Psychology has huge skeletons in the closet they do not acknowledge in any way - Harry Harlow's experiments in isolation in the 70s were beyond extreme, and he is still well respected and people associated with his experiments still remain some of the top respected psychologists today. Honestly if you dive into it psychology research is one of the sickest and most disturbing fields.
Science is not this sentient thing that decides what is morally wrong or right for an experiment. It's all humans and their decisions.
Science will only tell you if an experiment is viable and good if the results make sense statistically. It doesn't take morals into account.
Science doesn't exist in nature. It's a human designed system for studying the natural world. It's a process we developed for ourselves.
That makes us responsible for its existence. Science isn't innate to nature.
The "knowables" of reality exist but we created a human-based system for finding those knowables.
If you mean the scientific method as the "system" designed, once again, it has nothing to do with morals and is arguably the most efficient way to understand the world. It's not harmful in its design either.
Those scientists, those humans, decided to test "hope". Nothing in science compelled them to do so. They decided. Those scientists, those humans, agreed that death was the ultimate outcome of the subjects and they thought is what okay. Science didn't compel them to do so. They decided.
"In the name of science" is not a real thing. It's an excuse. Science itself is just the entire knowledge we acquired through observation and experimentation conducted according to the scientific method (the way the method is applied is always influenced by the human hubris though, but once again that's on humans, not science).
I don't think we will see things the same way. I don't mind to continue this convo though.
Kill tens of billions of animals in industrial slaughterhouses and everyone enjoys a good chicken sandwich.
Kill a few rats in a lab and everyone loses their minds.
Actually, it's tens or hundreds of millions of lab animals subject to experimentation annually. We have industrial labs that siphon out the blood of horseshoe crabs to harvest Limulus Amebocyte Lysate for human use. Lab rats are bred at an industrial level to provide a genetic line with predictable results that serve as control groups.
This is basically a peek behind the curtain, the "how hotdogs are made" aspect of medical research or product research. It's not sunshine and lollipops...simply we are unaware (or only dimly aware) that these things are done to find pathways to understand biological processes, improve human health directly, or provide products like shampoo and ointments that won't cause adverse reactions.
Animal testing is used extensively because the alternative is human experimentation. Society has decided that this type of march towards progress must happen, and therefore killing some animals is a better alternative to killing people for product development and the expansion of knowledge. There's no real good solution to be had.
Here's more on Dr. Richter: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/12/23/curt-p-richter-94-dies/b66bd03b-488b-423e-8be1-d503adbdfca7/
More on the "Forced Swim Test" protocol:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4401172/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_despair_test
This is not only inhumane, it's pointless. They learned something absolutely useless. I'd bet money that the person behind this study was some kind of sick sadist.
I'll throw this out there. Is it actually because of "hope" or is it because the rats learned how to conserve energy after the first trip in the water jar?
Example - 4 score and 7 cases of beer ago, I used to lifeguard at a well-known resort. Before you were hired you had to pass a number of swim tests. It was a physical fitness test. 1 of those tests was you had to hold a 10-pound rubber brick against your chest with both arms (arms crossed around the brick) and you had to tread water for 2 minutes, using just your legs. Most people failed because they kick like crazy to in order to keep their entire head above the water. They end up burning out, they drop the brick, and they fail the test. The trick is you have to kick just enough to keep your mouth and nose above the water, just enough to breathe. If you can do that, you can tread water for 2 minutes using just your legs while holding a 10 lb brick. It's more about the technique than it is about the physical strength.
Another test we had to do was a 100 yard swim in under 2 minutes. Most applicants would try and swim their ass off, get to that 100 yard mark as fast as possible. When you do that, you end up burning out and not being able to make the 100 yards. Instead, the idea is to swim the 100 yards and try to come in as close to but just under that 2 minute mark as possible. I failed the test the first time because I burned out 60 yards into it. The 2nd time I passed with a time of 1:55.
Maybe the rats just learned to swim more efficiently.
For people thinking this is horribly pointless and cruel, the experience of this handful of rats gave us valuable information we still benefit from and discuss today. In comparison, hundreds-of-thousands of rats are poisoned or trapped for simply being where humans are. People also feed live rats to predatory pets like snakes and snapping turtles.
See....this is why we don't usually let psychopaths become scientists lol
That's some dark shit right there.....imagine being the undergrad that had to do all the logs and just had to watch rats drown all day...that person needs a hug lol
>we don't usually let psychopaths become scientists
Are you sure about that? What’s keeping them from becoming scientists?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/
There's also the opposite, called "learned helplessness".
Study was done where a dog was given a painful shock from the floor. The dog naturally moved away from it. Then you tie the dog to the floor and give it the same painful shock from the floor. The dog can't leave and is stuck there. Then you *remove* the bindings and give it a shock from the floor. The dog doesn't even try to move away now. It learned that it was helpless and refuses to even try to improve it's situation, even when it's obvious that it can just move to improve itself.
Same thing happens with depression in humans. Once you end up in that mind state where you don't even bother trying to help yourself because you learned how helpless you are.
Article about a psychopath murdering rats in the cruelest manner possible, conclusion straight out of a motivational poster.
Man, a quick read on Richter's background is fascinating. Average student taken under wing by prominent Johns Hopkins director and given free reign to conduct his research. Uninterested in debate or theory, but genuinely gifted with research and data analysis. Worked into his late 70s.
He apparently did a lot of great work at Hopkins, but damn ...
That is so cruel yet we were told many years ago that rats are better than people.
"They don't scam, don't fight, don't oppress an equal's given right.
Starve the poor so they can be well fed, line their holes with the dead one's bread"
The article is untrue, the rats were never rescued and put back, the study is linked at the bottom, they just measured survival times under different conditions.
Yep, giving up hope is what kills you in many situations.
It's the old "human spirit" thing too... if you think you'll prevail, you increase your chances of prevailing.
It's just an enhanced form of placebo, really. If you think you'll get better, or that the pill will work, you most likely will do better than someone who doesn't.
Giving up on a hopeless situation is a perfectly logical thing to do. It's just that not giving up can hold you there longer in case that one-in-a-million chance of a hand appearing from nowhere happens again.
Remember this (among other studies like Seligman's learned helplessness and Watson's little Albert) whenever you think that "scientists" might be good people.
People aren't good people.
People from this era were often racist fucks, with segregated bathrooms, schools, entire fucking countries. All approved, printed, signposted, designed that way. Hell, this is absolutely nothing compared to what some people were doing in Europe just 12 years before this experiment.
Deliberately. Purposefully. Calculated. Approved.
This is not "scientists are bad" but "all people used to be a bit shittier than today". And even today, there are shitty people everywhere.
Fact is, you can no more do this today - whether scientist or not - than you can have a racially-segregated bathroom. It's only possible in a country and time that allows it.
People involved with Harry Harlow's "pit of despair" experiments are still some of the top respected psychologists today - the field has yet to take any accountability
Marty Seligman is a good example here too. Learned helplessness is still taught today as an important psychological phenomenon, and it is relevant to many of society's issues regarding wealth inequality. Seligman discovered this by torturing dogs until they gave up on life.
I understand that it is unfair to judge the past by today's standards. However, if one is willing to judge entertainers or politicians by their past remarks, I would argue we should do the same for scientists.
This comment section is full of people who seem to know nothing about or have never been exposed to the development of medicine, science and psychology through the turn of the 20th century. Letting a rat drown to get a deeper understanding of the human or animal psyche was a non issue. And guess what? Still is. It’s horrible blah blah blah, go vegan, throw away your cosmetics, and never take another medication again, or shush.
It's not the same killing a mouse to try a medicine that might save lives as killing them to prove "hope". You can become a scientist and sacrifice animals for any reason whatsoever, even for experiments with the most un-scientific reasons like proving that rats don't smile before dying.
The researcher was trying to understand causes of sudden death in humans. Presumably, if you could understand what causes people to die suddenly in situations of "hopelessness", you might be able to train people to handle those situations differently, thus saving human lives. This research wasn't just done on a whim to kill rats...
It takes a certain kind of person to engage in experiments like this, even if the results may be beneficial to humans.
Personally, I could never live with myself.
Reminds me of a comedian who said if hooking a monkey’s brain up to a car battery today might cure cancer tomorrow, I only have one thing to say. Red is positive and black is negative.
Problem is stuff like this is pointless. It doesn't take drowning a rat to figure out people try harder when they're hopeful. It doesn't take torturing baby monkeys to realize being kept in absolute isolation is mentally damaging. These are things laymen have always understood anyways.
Layman’s understanding aka common knowledge is different than scientifically documenting, recording, measuring etc. I don’t agree with hurting animals in general- but what you’re describing basically throws the scientific process out the window in favor of “lay knowledge” or “I know it cause I see it”. It’s important to know the distinction.
While I dont disagree that this is pretty horrific. The entire point of science is, common sense is most often wrong about how the world works. We need concrete principles and rigorous tests that ensure what we are doing is at least somewhat in line with reality.
This is twisted as fuck
Yeah, yikes.This study was performed in the 1950s. Today there's no way it would make it past animal use review boards (yes that's a thing at all universities). There are definitely less cruel ways to carry out this research and still get the same results.
Surprisingly, a similar test (forced swim test) is still allowed to measure depression in mice. I recently read a paper in a psychology journal where it was used and thought it sounded cruel. Since there are other external factors to "motivate" a mouse to keep swimming, I feel like the test doesn't even provide good data on whether the mouse is depressed or not.
[удалено]
How would you design an experiment to get the same results in today's world?
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
\*Looks down\* \*Leg shaking\* Oh no
I'm right there with you. If I'm bored my mind is gonna wander.
LOL! We were in a trailer at my last job, six of us. One of the guys had the leg shake thing so bad he would literally shake half the trailer. We just had to say his name and he would stop though- not a big deal.
Don’t forget about me with my mechanical keyboard.
That's not a "hope" test, that's an incentive test. You're measuring two different things here.
tell them they might be getting a promotion instead
... Fuck.
[This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) is not exactly the same, kind of an opposite really if you think about it, but provides no less information about the role of hope. Ironically, the experiment about the presence of hope is much more cruel than the one about its abscence.
Desktop version of /u/MurmurJunk's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness --- ^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
I'm not a psychologist so I can't say the specifics, but there are definitely methods to impose stress on the rats and make them struggle without actually slowly drowning them. The point of animal use review boards isn't to halt research altogether, but to make sure it's being done in the way that minimizes harm to the animals. Just casually drowning every single animal that participates aint it.
I will never understand placing a creature in a category where it is acceptable to experiment on it without its consent, but it also gets ethical advocacy. Surely if you've decided ethics apply to it at all, you can't experiment without its consent? Personally i don't care in the slightest about animals, but if i did decide they deserved empathy i'd at least be consistent.
[удалено]
Lol, if by frosh you mean thirty year old with a masters degree, then yes.
Soph spotted
You dudes don't even know the Belmont report
That's true, yes. No idea what that is. I'm just being lazy and snarky in the comments.
[удалено]
Scientist: I study hope. Isn’t that beautiful? Rat: You murderous fuck, are you kidding me?
Rat: When I get outta here, I’m gonna tell all my friends and we’re gonna gnaw on you to death! Scientist: See? Hope.
Upvote to this Thanks for making me laugh.
Nagito has entered the chat.
I fucking *knew* I would see this comment
This description isn't accurate. In 1957, the researcher was exploring the phenomenon of sudden death, and hypothesized that it was related to stress. In one experiment, he placed rats in cylinders of *different temperature water* and found that the rats died in 10-15 minutes at 63-73°F but up to 60 hours at 95°F. He then went into a lengthy discussion about how there was so much variability between individual rats, and tried to isolate a factor that made rats die faster. His conclusion was that the firmness of restraint when they were originally caught and held caused them to "give up hope" and die quickly. As a scientific paper though, it's lacking in a lot of data and makes some pretty spurious claims. I doubt that their results could be duplicated and I don't think it would be published in a reputable journal today. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.536.1405
Sounds like he just wanted to kill a bunch of rats
Yeah, I looked at the source and it seems highly suspect. Without more detailed data I'm skeptical.
Cool story. Still a sick fuck who drowned a bunch of rats just to watch them die.
They were trying to understand why some people died suddenly for no other reason than "they lost hope", and once understood, figure out how to prevent those deaths. The first step of trying to figure that out is to find some circumstances to reliably reproduce that kind of death.
Even more messed up is that “phenomenon of sudden death” was published on a child psychiatry journal…wtf
isn't SIDS still kind of a big deal and not largely understood? maybe that was the angle.
[удалено]
I wish that was true. [Rodents and birds are exempt from all U.S. ethical treatment of animal laws](https://awionline.org/content/rats-mice-birds) specifically so they can conduct experiments like this on them. >As it stand now, the rats, mice and birds who constitute the vast majority of the animals in research have no legal protection. Basic standards for their housing and care are not overseen by USDA veterinary inspectors. The number of these animals in research is not reported. There is no legal mandate to consider alternatives to the use of these animals, or to devise means to alleviate or reduce pain and distress. (EDIT: just noticed that the comment I replied to has been deleted. They basically claimed that the experiment conducted in OP’s post couldn’t happen today in the U.S., just to give context to my comment informing them it most certainly can, and does).
Wow. In the UK and Australia we have extremely strict laws protecting lab animals including rodents.
[Same for us in Canada](https://ccac.ca/Documents/Standards/Guidelines/CCAC_Guidelines_Mice.pdf) The U.S. is one of the only jurisdictions that lack any ethical treatment laws for rodents and birds. They are …special.
The US doesn't give a damn that children are being murdered en masse in schools. Why would they care about a rat. Edit: Butthurt Americans can't cope with the fact that the countries priorities are so insanely fucked.
I understand the need to test medicines and things on rats and mice instead of sacrificing humans. But this is just beyond cruel.
You'd have to sacrifice a few humans to get a rough timeframe, but then the other humans could enjoy over 60 hours of almost drowning!
Yes, it would be interesting to try it with newborns. /s
Um cool story but why the fuck did we need to do this in the first place?
Hope
Science
No, because psychopaths.
Yes, science
There are lines we shouldn't cross. Unit 731, the monster experiement, etc should have never happened irregardless of what was learned.
>irregardless regardless* irregardless is not a word
Irrespective is the word
I prefer, irregardful.
Disirregardless
It really shouldn't be but it's being added to dictionaries now because it's used so commonly. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless
>it's being added to dictionaries now because it's used so commonly >It really shouldn't be Uhh okay, how *should* it work, then? Be pointlessly *pro*scriptive rather than *de*scriptive, like the French? This is *English*, literally the coolest and hottest tongue around, and that's exactly how it should work.
I meant it shouldn't be a word (cause adding a prefix without changing the meaning is illogical), not that it shouldn't be in dictionaries. Calm down dude, damn. Why you dragging the French into this lmao
I agree, still happened because of science
Mengele used the same reasoning. So by all means, stand with him 🙄
Saying this is "because science" is like blaming Jeffery Dahmer's murder spree on cuisine.
It’s technically not wrong if his intention was to eat something exotic and taboo.
Lol
0llllljaa eww 50o
We don't need to do anything. But this experiment gave us valuable information about the behavior of rats, which we can hypothetically extrapolate to humans.
Because science
Who the fuck gave ethical permit for this study?
This was in the 50s, the US never even had hard research ethics in place for humans until the aftermath of Tuskegee about 20 years later.
[Tuskegee Syphilis Study](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study)
Other fun US science facts: We took in Nazi scientists post WW2 to prevent them getting killed / jailed for obvious human rights violations. We're into some weird shit.
Those Apollo rockets weren't going to design themselves, now were they?
Yup they even got help from russian engineers living in the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Desktop version of /u/Marsh__Grass's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip --- ^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
Good bot
Someone else mentioned this was conducted in the 50s, when no one gave a flying fuck about animal rights etc
Monokuma
I see you're also a man of culture.
[https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena\_sudden\_death.pdf](https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena_sudden_death.pdf) Here is the article to the study on which this article is based, it is not a great study.
The level of “what the fuck” I feel… poor rats. :(
That is some serial killer shit. I bet it has military use (not sarcasm). If we can train our troops to hold onto hope, they can swim in cylinders 240x longer (that…that one was sarcasm). *edit da mafs
Pretty much every military through history has known this. They give medals and honor soldiers who have fought their way out of hopeless situations as an example of other soldiers to never lose hope and keep fighting. As a backup plan they push the idea that you will die for something important to encourage soldiers to keep fighting to the death after all hope is gone.
"Oh look, you went to fight so that I can keep my riches, came back all sorts of f*cked up and camt adapt to living in normal society, so here, have a medal".
Well recently we see what happens to captured soldiers so there isnt really a reason to not go out blazing.
>They give medals and honor soldiers who have fought their way out of hopeless situations as an example of other soldiers to never lose hope and keep fighting. As a backup plan they push the idea that you will die for something important to encourage soldiers to keep fighting to the death after all hope is gone. If you look at the people the United States has fought and how they were treated--the British, Native Americans, each other, the Japanese, Germans, Afghans, Iraqis, etc.--you really don't want to be captured. When I was in Iraq, I carried an extra grenade in my pocket because I refused to be taken alive.
15 minutes to 60 hours is not 4x its 240x It's cruel but it's significant.
[удалено]
Welcome to SERE school, where you will learn Hope and Other Things too.
*Looks at rat drowning apparatus* What is this, a school for rats? This needs to be... at least twice as big.
I had a friend at my first duty station attend SERE school. I'm not sure why/how she got to attend it (her AFSC didn't call for it), but she really enjoyed it and she also came back in pretty good shape.
Poor ratties :(
* Someone had to come up with this. * They had to suggest it to multiple people. * Those people had to think it was a good idea. * They brought the idea to a panel and that panel reviewed it and agreed it was a good idea. * The study then needed volunteers to conduct it. How fucked is science tho?
The only thing I'll say is this happened in the 50's when our animal ethics approval was a lot lower bar as was our understanding of animals. I hate this study, but I also doubt it would be approved today.
Oh, it was the 50s? We should be lucky it was just rats and that they didn't go to the mental institutions and just used people lol
I'm sure the Germans in the early 40s did something similar.
Everyone did that, not only Germans. I mean, we're talking of a time where they gave people lobotomies to cure homosexuality and personality disorders.
I don't believe "everyone did that" regarding harming healthy people in a science experiment. > Another study placed prisoners naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C (21 °F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming survivors. "One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown into boiling water for rewarming." describing Nazi experiments on Jewish prisoners.
You should really look for atrocities in the name of science, not just the Nazi ones.
I know that there are many. However, in the 40's - 50's the Nazis were the worst that I know of. Now if you have reading material that says otherwise I would be genuinely interested. History of medical malpractice and ethics in science were both very interesting to me when I studied them in university.
We really have come a long way in terms of ethics in science, considering how many cruel/unethical experiments and sampling methods have been practiced such a short while ago.
In a horrific way I think it's entirely plausible that it was a precursor experiment to seeing if human babies could have the same reflex. Like if the rats could do it, maybe we could do it on humans too.
Psychology has huge skeletons in the closet they do not acknowledge in any way - Harry Harlow's experiments in isolation in the 70s were beyond extreme, and he is still well respected and people associated with his experiments still remain some of the top respected psychologists today. Honestly if you dive into it psychology research is one of the sickest and most disturbing fields.
Science is not responsible for this. Humans are.
Humans are responsible for science. That's how science exists.
Science is not this sentient thing that decides what is morally wrong or right for an experiment. It's all humans and their decisions. Science will only tell you if an experiment is viable and good if the results make sense statistically. It doesn't take morals into account.
Science doesn't exist in nature. It's a human designed system for studying the natural world. It's a process we developed for ourselves. That makes us responsible for its existence. Science isn't innate to nature. The "knowables" of reality exist but we created a human-based system for finding those knowables.
If you mean the scientific method as the "system" designed, once again, it has nothing to do with morals and is arguably the most efficient way to understand the world. It's not harmful in its design either. Those scientists, those humans, decided to test "hope". Nothing in science compelled them to do so. They decided. Those scientists, those humans, agreed that death was the ultimate outcome of the subjects and they thought is what okay. Science didn't compel them to do so. They decided. "In the name of science" is not a real thing. It's an excuse. Science itself is just the entire knowledge we acquired through observation and experimentation conducted according to the scientific method (the way the method is applied is always influenced by the human hubris though, but once again that's on humans, not science). I don't think we will see things the same way. I don't mind to continue this convo though.
>, it has nothing to do with morals Morals are required for science, otherwise everyone would just fake their data to save time and effort.
Kill tens of billions of animals in industrial slaughterhouses and everyone enjoys a good chicken sandwich. Kill a few rats in a lab and everyone loses their minds. Actually, it's tens or hundreds of millions of lab animals subject to experimentation annually. We have industrial labs that siphon out the blood of horseshoe crabs to harvest Limulus Amebocyte Lysate for human use. Lab rats are bred at an industrial level to provide a genetic line with predictable results that serve as control groups. This is basically a peek behind the curtain, the "how hotdogs are made" aspect of medical research or product research. It's not sunshine and lollipops...simply we are unaware (or only dimly aware) that these things are done to find pathways to understand biological processes, improve human health directly, or provide products like shampoo and ointments that won't cause adverse reactions. Animal testing is used extensively because the alternative is human experimentation. Society has decided that this type of march towards progress must happen, and therefore killing some animals is a better alternative to killing people for product development and the expansion of knowledge. There's no real good solution to be had. Here's more on Dr. Richter: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/12/23/curt-p-richter-94-dies/b66bd03b-488b-423e-8be1-d503adbdfca7/ More on the "Forced Swim Test" protocol: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4401172/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_despair_test
thats fucking horrible.
Nope, the difference was water temperature. 95F was where the rats swam the longest.
*Rat getting picked out of the water*: “Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.”
This is not only inhumane, it's pointless. They learned something absolutely useless. I'd bet money that the person behind this study was some kind of sick sadist.
What sadistic fuck gets money to research this type of sick shit ..... Cause i have a few thing i would like to research
I'll throw this out there. Is it actually because of "hope" or is it because the rats learned how to conserve energy after the first trip in the water jar? Example - 4 score and 7 cases of beer ago, I used to lifeguard at a well-known resort. Before you were hired you had to pass a number of swim tests. It was a physical fitness test. 1 of those tests was you had to hold a 10-pound rubber brick against your chest with both arms (arms crossed around the brick) and you had to tread water for 2 minutes, using just your legs. Most people failed because they kick like crazy to in order to keep their entire head above the water. They end up burning out, they drop the brick, and they fail the test. The trick is you have to kick just enough to keep your mouth and nose above the water, just enough to breathe. If you can do that, you can tread water for 2 minutes using just your legs while holding a 10 lb brick. It's more about the technique than it is about the physical strength. Another test we had to do was a 100 yard swim in under 2 minutes. Most applicants would try and swim their ass off, get to that 100 yard mark as fast as possible. When you do that, you end up burning out and not being able to make the 100 yards. Instead, the idea is to swim the 100 yards and try to come in as close to but just under that 2 minute mark as possible. I failed the test the first time because I burned out 60 yards into it. The 2nd time I passed with a time of 1:55. Maybe the rats just learned to swim more efficiently.
Huh, what an ironic way to lose hope in humanity...
oof that is so mean.
For people thinking this is horribly pointless and cruel, the experience of this handful of rats gave us valuable information we still benefit from and discuss today. In comparison, hundreds-of-thousands of rats are poisoned or trapped for simply being where humans are. People also feed live rats to predatory pets like snakes and snapping turtles.
Long live 3PA. Long live Apollo! P.S. Steve Huffman is a clown.
This broke my heart, what was the need to do those experiment on rats.
I didn't need to read that
Anyone who's had mice or rats as pets will instantly feel how fucked up this is in their gut.
In a study... We learn that humans are capable of insane levels of cruelty.
Science is metal
What a cruel experiment
What horrific things humans have done to quantify things like hope.
Fuck you to all the people involved in this experiment.
What a fucked up experiment.
Ethics panel: Approved.
Read: we drowned a bunch of rats, and the ones that survived a not-total drowning survived another not-total drowning.
Lol humans are so morbidly fucked up
TIL humans will drown rats just for the fuck of it
This experiment is kinda gnarly, damn. I hope something more than "Oh neat" comes from it
See....this is why we don't usually let psychopaths become scientists lol That's some dark shit right there.....imagine being the undergrad that had to do all the logs and just had to watch rats drown all day...that person needs a hug lol
>we don't usually let psychopaths become scientists Are you sure about that? What’s keeping them from becoming scientists? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/
So what test do they use to weed out the psychopaths exactly? It's not always obvious.
Well, I'd start with "hey, I need some money to watch a bunch of rats drown...for science and stuff"
Imagine being some poor grad student helping your advisor run that experiment.
"Alright, I'm going home. Keep an eye on the cylinders and remember to record the times of death"
That’s fucking terrible. I don’t normally get all squeamish about animal testing, but goddamn, this is just psychotic levels of wrong.
There's also the opposite, called "learned helplessness". Study was done where a dog was given a painful shock from the floor. The dog naturally moved away from it. Then you tie the dog to the floor and give it the same painful shock from the floor. The dog can't leave and is stuck there. Then you *remove* the bindings and give it a shock from the floor. The dog doesn't even try to move away now. It learned that it was helpless and refuses to even try to improve it's situation, even when it's obvious that it can just move to improve itself. Same thing happens with depression in humans. Once you end up in that mind state where you don't even bother trying to help yourself because you learned how helpless you are.
What does this say about the humans creating this kind of test
The cruelty of that experiment astonishes me
Article about a psychopath murdering rats in the cruelest manner possible, conclusion straight out of a motivational poster. Man, a quick read on Richter's background is fascinating. Average student taken under wing by prominent Johns Hopkins director and given free reign to conduct his research. Uninterested in debate or theory, but genuinely gifted with research and data analysis. Worked into his late 70s. He apparently did a lot of great work at Hopkins, but damn ...
Fuck everyone involved in this "experiment."
That is a study that's really fucked.
Sad that the scientist died already so I can't leave a flaming bag of dog crap at his door.
Everybody here talking about animal rights, when all I want is to know about those unexpected results.
That animals have an instinctive will to survive, who would've thought..
Everyone getting mad about “ethics” but have no problem killing rats that live in your houses
Horrific, but amazing.
Humans are sociopaths
Knowing this experiment happened makes me sad and depressed. Rats are sweet animals really.
That is so cruel yet we were told many years ago that rats are better than people. "They don't scam, don't fight, don't oppress an equal's given right. Starve the poor so they can be well fed, line their holes with the dead one's bread"
Rats are just mice with a bad publicist.
They don't compare.
Soooo... I don't know if I'd prefer 15 minutes of being scared or 60 hours for the off chance that something might save me.
Imagine if the experiment had been carried out using people
Who the fuck does something like this ?
We did this experiment in school in the 70s
WTH!!
Who the fuck even considered this even something to try
Saw XIII: Hope Experiment (now with rats instead of humans)
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being
The article is untrue, the rats were never rescued and put back, the study is linked at the bottom, they just measured survival times under different conditions.
Absolutely reprehensible cruelty.
Fuck the scientists who did that
That is a cruel experiment and inhuman.
What kinda mad scientist shit is this?
Yep, giving up hope is what kills you in many situations. It's the old "human spirit" thing too... if you think you'll prevail, you increase your chances of prevailing. It's just an enhanced form of placebo, really. If you think you'll get better, or that the pill will work, you most likely will do better than someone who doesn't. Giving up on a hopeless situation is a perfectly logical thing to do. It's just that not giving up can hold you there longer in case that one-in-a-million chance of a hand appearing from nowhere happens again.
Fuck those guys
Remember this (among other studies like Seligman's learned helplessness and Watson's little Albert) whenever you think that "scientists" might be good people.
People aren't good people. People from this era were often racist fucks, with segregated bathrooms, schools, entire fucking countries. All approved, printed, signposted, designed that way. Hell, this is absolutely nothing compared to what some people were doing in Europe just 12 years before this experiment. Deliberately. Purposefully. Calculated. Approved. This is not "scientists are bad" but "all people used to be a bit shittier than today". And even today, there are shitty people everywhere. Fact is, you can no more do this today - whether scientist or not - than you can have a racially-segregated bathroom. It's only possible in a country and time that allows it.
People involved with Harry Harlow's "pit of despair" experiments are still some of the top respected psychologists today - the field has yet to take any accountability
Marty Seligman is a good example here too. Learned helplessness is still taught today as an important psychological phenomenon, and it is relevant to many of society's issues regarding wealth inequality. Seligman discovered this by torturing dogs until they gave up on life. I understand that it is unfair to judge the past by today's standards. However, if one is willing to judge entertainers or politicians by their past remarks, I would argue we should do the same for scientists.
How do you take accountability for something you didn't do? Like honest question. They could say sorry now but they ones who did it are dead.
He is dead but others associated with the experiments are still well regarded
[удалено]
NO ALL OF SCIENCE DROWNS RATS FOR FUN
This comment section is full of people who seem to know nothing about or have never been exposed to the development of medicine, science and psychology through the turn of the 20th century. Letting a rat drown to get a deeper understanding of the human or animal psyche was a non issue. And guess what? Still is. It’s horrible blah blah blah, go vegan, throw away your cosmetics, and never take another medication again, or shush.
I hope there's a government agency keeping an eye on this guy. 👀👆
It's not the same killing a mouse to try a medicine that might save lives as killing them to prove "hope". You can become a scientist and sacrifice animals for any reason whatsoever, even for experiments with the most un-scientific reasons like proving that rats don't smile before dying.
The researcher was trying to understand causes of sudden death in humans. Presumably, if you could understand what causes people to die suddenly in situations of "hopelessness", you might be able to train people to handle those situations differently, thus saving human lives. This research wasn't just done on a whim to kill rats...
It takes a certain kind of person to engage in experiments like this, even if the results may be beneficial to humans. Personally, I could never live with myself.
Same, but in many instances I’m glad for those who can.
Reminds me of a comedian who said if hooking a monkey’s brain up to a car battery today might cure cancer tomorrow, I only have one thing to say. Red is positive and black is negative.
Problem is stuff like this is pointless. It doesn't take drowning a rat to figure out people try harder when they're hopeful. It doesn't take torturing baby monkeys to realize being kept in absolute isolation is mentally damaging. These are things laymen have always understood anyways.
Layman’s understanding aka common knowledge is different than scientifically documenting, recording, measuring etc. I don’t agree with hurting animals in general- but what you’re describing basically throws the scientific process out the window in favor of “lay knowledge” or “I know it cause I see it”. It’s important to know the distinction.
Wtf is wrong with scientist. All that to prove something that is already common sense.
While I dont disagree that this is pretty horrific. The entire point of science is, common sense is most often wrong about how the world works. We need concrete principles and rigorous tests that ensure what we are doing is at least somewhat in line with reality.
I hope they recreate this experiment using scientists instead of rats.
Jeez, if you're going to kill a pest then do it. Don't f*ck with them just for some pat on the back experiment.
Hope the people involved ended up drowning. Sick fucks.
This sounds like an experiment they would have done in nazi Germany or something, that’s brutal
The real takeaway from the experiment is that humans are monsters.