You and me, we're both just rats in a cage.

Come on.

Let's go find out what I'm talking about.

All right, everybody.

I got a lot of requests to do this one and redo this one and do it again in short form.

So let's go here and take a look.

This is episode 46.

By the way, this is video upload number 1,000 in my career. So, whey. Rats in a cage. Update number one. Let's go take a look at what this means. So it works like this. Look, if you put a rat in a cage, you just get a lonely rat. That's what we have over there. It's just a lonely rat. Now, what happens if we give it no means of escape and suddenly we're shocking it? You know, we're evil researchers with like the Milgram experiments. We got the white coat. Hey, this is in the name of science, right? We don't care. No morals. I'm just going to shock this. Well, if you shock one rat, it gets very unhappy. It'll curl up in a ball, but nothing really happens to it, except it gets really unhappy.

The problem in this story comes when we put two rats in that same cage.

Again, it's a cage, there's no means of escape, the floor is electrified. Now they're getting shocked.

But now each of these rats has somebody to blame for their

pain and their misery. Each other. And this is where the trouble begins because now these rats are

going to begin fighting and if you shock them long enough, they may even fight to the death. Sound

extreme? Sound like a crazy experiment?

Well, it is, and these experiments have been run for a very, very long time.

These experiments go back 60 plus years at this point in time.

We have up top this one journal of experimental analysis of behavior.

From 1972, shock-induced aggression as a function of prior experience with avoidance,

fighting, or unavoidable shock.

Let's look at the next one.

Persistence of shock-induced aggression.

This comes to us from 1964.

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