Competition and Dominance Hierarchies in Rats (1940)

★★★★ · A Real Rat Race · Christine Hennig · 2005-03-04

Stark, silent college psychology film showing a behavioral experiment done on white rats. Three white rats are placed in a cramped beaker and forced to compete for a single food pellet. When they are well-fed, this results in competition but not outright battles. When they are underfed, however, it gets nasty. After a number of fights, they eventually settle into a hierarchy, with the rat whose the biggest bully getting first grabs at the food pellet, the middle rat occasionally offering mild resistance, and the submissive rat becoming so scared he refuses to eat even when alone. The stark…

★★★ · ..Try to take over the world! · Wilford B. Wolf · 2005-02-17

Another in a group of silent psychology/sociology films aimed at college students. This one deals with how hieracrchies of dominance are created. The film is mostly static shots of three rats in a small enclosure, with intertitles explaining the action. The action is a bit dry, but it still is interesting to see how, as the scientists underfeed the rats, a hierarchy is formed and changes in behavior. However, the obvious point of this, especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was an extrapolation of rat behaviors to human psychology. This point is made most clear at the end equating…