Video: Social hierarchy: the rat experiment
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
Didier Dezor, a researcher at the Biological Behavior Laboratory of the University of Nancy (France), conducted a study of rat behavior, which showed results of interest to psychologists.
In order to study the swimming abilities of rats, he placed six animals in one cage. The only exit from the cage led to the pool, which had to be crossed to get to the trough with food.
During the experiment, it turned out that the rats did not swim together in search of food. Everything happened as if they had assigned social roles to each other: there were two exploiters who never swam at all, two exploited swimmers, one independent swimmer, and one non-floating scapegoat.
The process of food consumption was as follows. Two exploited rats dived into the water for food. Upon returning to the cage, the two exploiters beat them until they gave up their food. Only when the exploiters were full did the exploited have the right to eat up the leftovers.
The exploiting rats themselves never swam. To eat their fill, they limited themselves to constantly giving the swimmers a thrashing. Autonomus (independent) was a fairly strong swimmer to get food himself and, without giving it to the exploiters, to eat it himself. Finally, the scapegoat, who was beaten by everyone, was afraid to swim and could not intimidate the exploiters, so he ate the crumbs left by the rest of the rats.
The same division - two exploiters, two exploited, one autonomous, one scapegoat - reappeared in twenty cells, where the experiment was repeated.
To better understand the mechanism of the rat hierarchy, Didier Dezor put the six exploiters together. The rats fought all night. The next morning, the same social roles were assigned: autonomous, two exploiters, two exploited, a scapegoat.
The researcher obtained the same result by alternately placing six exploited rats in one cage, then six autonomies and six scapegoats.
As a result, it became clear: whatever the previous social status of individuals, they always, in the end, distribute new social roles among themselves.
Researchers at the University of Nancy continued the experiment by examining the brains of experimental rats. They came to a seemingly unexpected conclusion that it was not the scapegoats or the exploited rats that experienced the greatest stress, but just the opposite - the exploiting rats.
Undoubtedly, the exploiters were very afraid of losing their status as privileged individuals in the rat herd and did not really want to be forced to work themselves one day.
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