Psychology: “An Experimentally Produced Social Problem in Rats” circa 1940 O.H. Mowrer, Yale U.

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Of rats, food, lever pushing, and competition. Silent.

Public domain film from the Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.

Orval Hobart Mowrer (January 23, 1907 — June 20, 1982) was an American born psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois from 1948 to 1975 known for his research on behaviour therapy. Mowrer practiced psychotherapy in Champaign-Urbana and at Galesburg State Research Hospital. In 1954 Mowrer held the position of president of the American Psychological Association. Mowrer founded Integrity Groups (therapeutic community groups based on principles of honesty, responsibility, and emotional involvement) and was instrumental in establishing GROW groups in the United States…

Academic positions were scarce during the Great Depression, so in 1934 Mowrer began a Sterling Fellowship at Yale University researching learning theory…

At the time, most psychologists agreed with William James that fear (in this usage, synonymous with anxiety) was an instinctive response. Mowrer suspected fear was a conditioned response and designed a way to create fear in the laboratory…

he found that a cycle could be produced in which the subject became more and more responsive to conditioning. He concluded that anxiety was basically anticipatory in nature and ideally functions to protect the organism from danger. However, because of the circumstances of conditioning, the degree of fear is often disproportionate to the source. Anxiety can be created artificially, and relief of anxiety can be used to condition other behaviors. Mowrer’s term for the state of expectancy produced by carefully timed aversive stimuli was the “preparatory set,” and it was foundational to his later thinking in both learning theory and clinical psychology.

In 1940 Mowrer became Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education…

A laboratory rat is a rat of the species Rattus norvegicus (brown rat) which is bred and kept for scientific research. Laboratory rats have served as an important animal model for research in psychology, medicine, and other fields…

Origins

Laboratory rats share origins with their cousins in domestication, the fancy rats. In 18th century Europe, wild Brown rats ran rampant and this infestation fueled the industry of rat-catching. Rat-catchers would not only make money by trapping the rodents, but also by turning around and selling them for food, or more importantly, for rat-baiting.

Rat-baiting was a popular sport which involved filling a pit with rats and timing how long it took for a terrier to kill them all. Over time, breeding the rats for these contests produced variations in color, notably the albino and hooded varieties. The first time one of these albino mutants was brought into a laboratory for a study was in 1828, in an experiment on fasting. Over the next 30 years rats were used for several more experiments and eventually the laboratory rat became the first animal domesticated for purely scientific reasons…