What Makes People Tick?

In the fifties, when experiments of the kind no longer permissible today were still allowed, Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins university, did a famous psychology experiment using rats. As the World of Work Projec t website explains: " Curt’s experiments focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived. He introduced a range of variables into the experiment, that yielded some interested results. " Some of those different variables were to examine why domesticated rats swam and swam and swam, while wild rats gave up swimming and died, often within only a few minutes.  What makes the experiment noteworthy to me and why I'm writing about it is that, as Heartbeat Services' article Hope Floats explains: "I n a follow-up experiment, as the rats started to give up and sink, he pulled the drowning rodents to safety, dried them off, gave them a br...