How Hope Can Influence Survival: The Science of Hope
“Hope: is a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.”
In the 1950s, Curt Richter, a professor at a North American university, conducted a famous drowned rat psychology experiment. This experiment, although cruel, is one of the proofs that having hope and not succumbing to despair can be the difference between life and death.
Curt’s experiment focused on how long it takes a rat to drown. He conducted an experiment, putting rats in buckets of water and seeing how long they survived.
This experiment was divided into 2 phases:
First, he placed 12 domestic rats inside the bucket of water. The overwhelming majority of the rats survived for days inside the bucket until they could stand it no longer.
Then he did the same with 34 recently captured wild rats. The wild rats are excellent swimmers, so he expected them to survive longer than the domestic rats, but in fact, they didn’t last more than a few minutes.
From this first phase of the experiment, it can be concluded that the domestic rats survived much longer because they were already used to being fed and helped by humans, so they survived for days in the hope of being helped. The wild mice, on the other hand, are solitary beings, and after a few seconds, they realized that they had no way to escape, and they fainted without putting up a fight because they didn’t know about the possibility of being helped.
In the second phase of the experiment, Professor Curt used only wild rats, put them in a bucket with water, and after a few minutes, they would stop swimming and give up fighting for their lives. At this point, they were taken out of the bucket, dried, and given time to recover. When they had recovered, they were put back in the bucket, and this time, instead of giving up after a few minutes, they lasted on average 50 hours.
The conclusion is that, now, the wild rats came to believe that they could be rescued again, and this gave them the strength to keep fighting for their lives until they couldn’t take it anymore.
In the first experiment, the wild rats did not die from physical exhaustion, but because they had no hope of being rescued, they survived much longer in the second phase, simply because they had hope.
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