Rats, Humans and Personality

Rats, Humans and Personality
Last Saturday I spoke to students of Purchase College in New York, members of Latinos Unidos, a Hispanic organization in campus.
Last year they also had me as their keynote speaker, so I had to make sure that since at least 30% of the students heard me before, I had to include new material so as not to bore them.
Since my fees for nonprofit organizations are less than my regular fee, I often try out new material in these types of events.
I decided I was going to try out my rat experiment with the group.
Years ago, a psychobiology researcher at John Hopkins School of Medicine conducted an experiment with rats that I am sure most of you, dear readers of my column, might find shocking.
The purpose of the study was to study the effect of water temperature on endurance. To do this, his team placed dozens of defenseless rats into glass jars, one rat per jar, and then filled each jar with water.
Because the walls of these jars were too high and slippery to climb, the rodents were left in a sink, which meant die, or swim situation. The researchers even had water jets blasting from atop to force the poor rats below the surface if they just tried to float lazily instead of swimming for their lives. They then measured how long the rats swam, without food, rest, or possibilities of escape, before they went under, drowned, and died. It certainly takes a special kind of researcher to be able to conduct such a cruel experiment.
But, anyhow, what is done is done, and now we can learn from it.
The researchers were astounded to find that even when the water temperatures were identical, rats of equal fitness swam for considerably lengths of time. Some of those poor animals continued swimming for an average of 60 hours before capitulating to exhaustion, and yet, other rats sank and died almost immediately.
It was as though, after fighting for 15 minutes, some rodents simply gave up, while a few others were willing to push themselves to the utmost of their physical limit.
The surprised researchers speculated whether some rats were more convinced than others that if they didn’t give up, if they continued to fight no matter what, they would eventually escape and save their lives.
A good question would be: were rats even capable of having different beliefs?
What else could account for such a significant difference in achievement, especially when supposedly the survival instinct of all the rats must have kicked in?
For animal lovers, I understand that it gets worse but that is what they did.
They took more rats and rather than pushing them into the water right away, they picked up the rats several times, each time allowing them to extricate themselves free. After a few times, they became accustomed to such handling so the rats were then placed in jars, blasted with water for several minutes, then removed and returned to their cages. This mechanism was repeated multiple times. Finally, you guessed it, they were put into the jars for the sink or swim test.
None of those rats were going to make it, unfortunately, but at least a lesson was learned from such a cruel experiment.
When the rats were thrown in each jar with water, none of the rats showed signs of giving up. They swam for an average of more than 60 hours before becoming exhausted and dying.
Most of you will feel uncomfortable describing rats as having “beliefs”, but having previously escaped from their captors several times and having also survived blasts of water, they must have believed that they couldn’t only endure abhorrent circumstances but break free of them.
Their experience had taught them that they had some control over the outcome and perhaps, that rescue was just a few minutes away. Of course, it never happened and one by one each of them died.
The big lesson here for human beings is that when the rats thought they had a little bit of control, or when they had hope that maybe, just maybe, they could be saved, they wouldn’t give up.
When human beings lose control or they perceive they have no control or when they lose hope, they will stop fighting, they will stop trying to survive.
What determines whether a human being will give up or not?
Personality.
Personality psychology concerns the nature of human nature. It answers three general questions: 1. How and in what ways are we all alike? 2. How and in what ways are all different? 3. Why do we as individuals do what we do?
So, why do some of us give up rather quickly versus some of us that don’t until we reach our goals?
Why do some leaders have the ability to think strategically while others don’t?
Why do some leaders have the inability to develop good working relationships with key stakeholders and others do?
Why do some leaders have the ability to build and maintain a team and others don’t even know what a team is?
All of these reasons are rooted in personality and even from rats we are able to learn quite a bit about human behavior.