...to Believe We Are Better Than Rats

Turns out, rats are a lot nicer than you might think. On NPR's Morning Edition today, Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on a study done by Peggy Mason at the University of Chicago in which she observed rats coming to the aid of a friend in need.  According to the study, which appears in the journal Science,  rats appear to experience empathy and act on it to help a fellow rat.  In the experiment, rats shared a cage for several days, after which time one of the rats was removed from the shared cage and confined in a clear plastic tube.  Unable to move about the cage, the confined rat appears none too pleased at his new living quarters. He squirms and struggles to free himself to no avail. When his former cage mate arrives on the scene,  he immediately understands his friend's distress and works diligently to free him, biting the edges of the tube, knocking against the sides of it, even grabbing the confined rat's tail when it happens to emerge from an air hole.  Finally, the free rat's efforts pay off when he  triggers a release that opens the tube and frees his friend. 

image courtesy of Wikimedia

As I listened to this report, I couldn't help but think about the two boys we know about who were seen being sexually abused by Jerry Sandusky. According to the grand jury report, two witnesses described in no uncertain terms what they saw, and yet neither they nor the superiors to whom they reported the incidents did anything effective to stop the horrific acts that they witnessed or any subsequent sexually abusive acts by Sandusky that allegedly followed.  The Italian Mama wondered what Peggy Mason's rats would do in a similar situation.

While neither witness knew the boys in question as the rats in the study did, the Italian Mama has to wonder why these men did not come to the rescue of those children or the ones who allegedly came after them.  David Brooks, author and columnist for the New York Times, offers a provocative answer to this question in his column "Let's All Feel Superior."  In it he describes what psychologists call the "Normalcy Bias," which prevents some people from processing disturbing events they witness or experience.  "Motivated Blindness" causes some people to completely overlook things that are not in their interest to see.  They simply "shut down and pretend everything is normal." And still others will choose to not look at things that make them uncomfortable. 

These survival mechanisms do not excuse the apparent negligence of the many people who knew about what Jerry Sandusky was seen doing in the shower to ten-year-old boys, but they do help to explain how grown men with good reputations and honorable records could ignore the victimization of young boys.  Other explanations leap to mind as well - fear of reprisals from superiors; devotion to a football program whose pristine reputation must be protected at all cost; concern for the reputation of an esteemed university whose reputation rests at least in large part on the success of its football program.  We may never know what went through the hearts and minds of the people who knew what was going on and yet did nothing to help.

But because we are thinking beings, having the knowledge that we do about the human psyche and the ways in which the mind works to protect itself and those around it, should make us able to realize when our gut instincts will prevent us from protecting innocents and erode the social fabric.  How many times has your fight or flight instinct inspired you to punch someone who posed a threat but you didn't because your more rational side took control, resulting in a heated discussion instead of a fistfight?  That's what thinking people do: they recognize when their survival instincts will do more harm than good and use their superior intellects to resist them.  Surely we can act with at least as much social responsibility as rats.