Futility Closet - 249-The Robbers Cave Experiment

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a telekinesis display to an incomprehensible speech. This is episode 249. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1954, a social psychologist started a war between two teams of fifth graders at an Oklahoma summer camp. He wanted to investigate the sources of human conflict and how people might overcome them. In today's show, we'll review the robber's Cave Experiment and examine its evolving reputation.

Starting point is 00:00:45 We'll also dredge up a Dalek and puzzle over a hazardous job. In June 1954, a yellow school bus made its way east from Oklahoma City to Robber's Cave State Park in the foothills of the Sands Boys Mountains. It was carrying 12 11-year-old boys. They hadn't known each other when they left the city, but most of them had made friends by the time they reached the park. The park had got its name because it had served as a hiding place for Jesse James, Belle Starr, and other legendary outlaws. The boys would be staying there for three weeks in their first experience of summer camp. The 12 had the park to themselves for a few

Starting point is 00:01:25 days, and they spent their time exploring it, hiking, canoeing, and swimming. After seeing two snakes at the creek, they named themselves the Rattlers. They didn't know that another school bus had arrived shortly after theirs at the other end of the park. It was carrying a second group of boys who would call themselves the Eagles. The boys had been told this was an ordinary summer camp, but in fact it was an experiment being run by a social psychologist named Muzaffar Sharif. Sharif and his team of researchers would pose as camp staff members while they oversaw a week-long contest of games and feats of skill between the two groups. The winning team would get a prize. Sharif had predicted that this rivalry would breed hostility between the two groups.

Starting point is 00:02:03 Sharif's theory was that prejudice and conflict arise between groups because they're competing for limited resources, but he hoped to show that this was reversible. If the groups had to cooperate to find a solution to a shared problem, then their differences would dissolve and the enemies would become friends. If this sounds familiar, it may be reminding you of Lord of the Flies, William Golding's novel about a group of boys who were stranded on an island and descend into savagery. In fact, that book came out in the same year that Sharif ran his experiment, 1954. Both were inspired by the recent experience of World War II. Golding believed that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, and described his novel as

Starting point is 00:02:41 an attempt to trace the defects in society back to the defects in human nature. He said the moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system. Sharif thought basically the opposite. He thought human nature had little to do with it. People are inherently good and learn to hate others because of inequality among social groups, which leads to discrimination, mistreatment, conflict, violence, and war. He hoped that by studying group psychology, social scientists could help to reduce prejudice

Starting point is 00:03:09 and persecution among nations and foster peaceful coexistence throughout the world. For the Robber's Cave experiment, Sharif recruited white, middle-class, Protestant fifth-graders from similar backgrounds to control for personality, ethnicity, and religion. The experimenters told the parents they were recruiting boys for a study on leadership, and they asked them not to visit the camp because it might cause homesickness. This was before the era of ethics review boards, so I don't think you'd get this done today. Neither the parents nor the kids were ever told that this had been a psychology experiment. Oh, wow. Like, you could just experiment on kids. Wow. And send them home again. And in fact, they read the kids' outgoing mail while they were at camp to forestall any trouble from parents.

Starting point is 00:03:49 To make sure that the kids didn't say anything to the parents that they didn't want the parents to know, you mean? Yeah, just things like, I mean, it could be something as simple as homesickness, but anything else that might bring a worried parent to the camp to sort of interfere when they're trying to run this experiment. Also, they had practical reasons for doing this with 11-year-old boys, but I don't know how representative that is. I've been an 11-year-old boy, and I don't know if my behavior would tell you anything valid about human beings. About all of society.

Starting point is 00:04:15 During the first five days, the two groups were unaware of each other. The two cabins were more than a mile apart at opposite ends of the camp, and each group had its own separate swimming, boating, and camping areas. The counselors gave each group tasks that had to be done together, such as cooking, improving a swimming hole, and playing sports. After five days, each group had bonded into an organized hierarchical unit with its own leaders and established norms of behavior. In this case, the Rattlers were tough, brave, stoic, and cursed a lot, and the Eagles were caring, considerate, and cooperative, but it sort of doesn't matter what the norms were. They were just two distinct groups. On the fifth day of camp,

Starting point is 00:04:49 each group was made aware of the other, and each quickly said it wanted to compete. Already they regarded each other as outgroups. The Rattlers claimed the communal baseball diamond by hanging a flag and a keep-off sign on the backstop. Now the counselors announced a series of contests, 16 events scheduled over four days, three baseball games, three tug-of-war contests, a game of touch football, three tent pitchings, a daily cabin inspection, a contest of skits and songs, and a treasure hunt. The winners would get medals and pocket knives. The losers would get nothing. They were giving four-bladed pocket knives to 11-year-old, unsupervised 11-year-old boys. There's more ethics concerns there. Sharif's report on the experiment is shocking.

Starting point is 00:05:28 The groups quickly devolve into warring tribes. When they met at the baseball diamond, they began calling each other names almost from the first. The Rattlers won the game, 16 to 14, and at the lunch hall, they thanked God for their victory. The groups kept calling each other names and sang derogatory songs back and forth. The Rattlers also won the tug of war that evening, and after they left the field,

Starting point is 00:05:47 the Eagles took down the Rattler flag from the backstop and burned it. One of the counselors later remembered, the burning of the flag was exactly like a declaration of war. By the next morning, they were fighting with fists, and the counselors had to separate them. The Eagles won the next baseball game and tug-of-war, but that evening, the Rattlers staged a raid on their cabin, overturning beds and stealing a pair of jeans, which they carried the next day like a flag. The Eagles replied with a raid of their own, dumping mud in the Rattlers' cabin so they would

Starting point is 00:06:12 fail inspection. When they returned to their own cabin, they filled socks with rocks to have ready as weapons. The counselors had arranged to keep the two teams neck and neck by manipulating the scores, but by the end they arranged to let the Eagles win the tournament because it seemed as though they might dissolve entirely if they lost. Some boys were thinking of just going home altogether because they were so oppressed and demoralized, I think. The end of the tournament was not the end of the war. While the Eagles were away celebrating, the Rattlers raided their cabin again, stealing the medals and knives, tearing screens from the windows, overturning beds, and tearing comics. Down at the lake, they turned loose the eagles' canoes. When the eagles discovered this, they ran to the

Starting point is 00:06:48 rattlers' cabin and started a fight. The counselors broke it up and led the eagles away, and they kept the boys apart the next day to give them time to cool down. But Sharif reported that relations were so fractured now that simply bringing the two groups together wouldn't mend relations between them. They abused each other outside the mess hall, and once inside, they pelted each other with food and insults. This was the signal for stage three. Now that the group seemed permanently alienated, Sharif wanted to show that they could be reconciled again by solving a shared problem, one that neither could solve on its own. All the drinking water in the camp came from a reservoir on the mountain, and Sharif and another experimenter shut it off and told the boys there seemed to be a problem with the water supply.

Starting point is 00:07:27 In investigating, the boys were reluctant to work together at first, but when they discovered the problem, they cooperated to fix it and celebrated when they succeeded. They also cooperated on several other tasks, such as paying for a movie rental and pulling a stalled food truck. There was not total harmony between the groups, but there was more friendly mingling, and they were willing to share ideas and give credit. By the end of the final camping trip, the Rattlers offered to buy malted milks for both groups. One of the experimenters, O.J. Harvey, said later, We were delighted, just delighted with the outcome.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Sharif challenged the idea that individuals are the problem or that they are inherently antagonistic. We created factions. We showed that by putting a group of normal 11-year-old WASP boys in competition for highly desirable goals, you could mold them into factions. Then you could dissolve them again. It was an idealistic sort of thing for us, and we really felt we had a cure for our problems. Published in 1961, Sharif's study became a landmark in social psychology. It was hailed as brilliant, a modern classic, unparalleled, and ingenious. It seemed to show that Lord of the Flies was wrong. We don't fight because of human nature. We fight because of the society we've built for ourselves. If people are forced to compete for limited resources,

Starting point is 00:08:28 they'll resent one another. But if they cooperate to reach a shared goal, they can live in harmony. That's a profound conclusion about human society. But it turns out that Sharif's report didn't tell the full story. It didn't explain everything that had happened in the robber's cave experiment and in the years before, and the full context changes the picture considerably. Sharif had undertaken similar studies twice earlier, in Connecticut in 1949 and in New York in 1953, and hadn't gotten the results he'd wanted. In 1949, he could produce conflict but couldn't extinguish it, and in 1953, he couldn't even produce it. He had made the mistake of allowing the boys to make friends at the start, and then they wouldn't fight. In fact, they had accused the counselors of manipulating them. For a book called The Lost

Starting point is 00:09:08 Boys, which came out just last year, the Australian science historian Gina Perry tracked down some of the boys who had participated in the studies, who were now men in their 70s. They complained that the experimenters had constantly intervened to encourage a certain outcome. Duane Hall, who had participated in the 1953 study, told her, There was no way that the fighting between us was natural. It was crazy, a crazy situation run by crazy people. We had to look after ourselves because the counselors weren't going to. Sharif was following a tradition from the 1930s in which experiments were regarded as demonstrations to confirm a theory.

Starting point is 00:09:37 He was trying to prove an existing idea. That gave him a strong incentive to manipulate events to get the results he wanted. O.J. Harvey told Perry, Oh, he had a definite script in mind, all right. His mind was not open. In the 1953 study, hoping to encourage strife, experimenters had stolen clothing and cut a rope that held up a flag. They had crushed one group's tent,

Starting point is 00:09:56 threw their suitcases into the bushes, and broke a boy's ukulele. When some boys discovered a fly in their tent, their counselor had urged them to name it after the other team and burn it. But the boys couldn't be persuaded to hate each other. When one team lost a tug of war, they said the other was better and deserved to win. When their clothes were lost, they decided it had been due to a mishap at the laundry. And when their rivals swore on a Bible that they hadn't vandalized their property, they believed them. Instead, they openly accused the counselors of trickery. One said, you want to make us fight the others.

Starting point is 00:10:26 Another openly asked a counselor whether this was an experimental camp and said, maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be. Decades later, one of the participants said of the experimenters, they weren't researching it, they were trying to prove they were right. At their nightly meetings, the experimenters had argued among themselves about the ethics of interfering in this way. One of them, Herb Kelman, later said, I pointed out that they were going beyond observation of behavior. You're supposed to

Starting point is 00:10:47 observe, not directly influence the way the boys respond, because that's manipulation. Sharif eventually excluded him from the meetings. But Kelman said, my role was to point out, come on, you're not supposed to do that. It's like getting into the maze with the rat and pushing it, and you're not supposed to push the rat. When the 1953 experiment fizzled, Sharif didn't report the failure to his funders, the Rockefeller Foundation, until six months after it happened, and then only at their inquiry. He said he just needed a little time, and Perry says he conceived the Robbers' Cave study as a last-ditch attempt to rescue the project using the dregs of his grant money. But at Robbers' Cave, the

Starting point is 00:11:18 provocations had been even more dire. The boys felt under attack. Perry wrote, they fought one another not because one group won the tournament, but because they had been violated, their flags burned, their huts raided, their prizes stolen. And even at Robbers Cave, the boys had tried to resist the provocations. When the counselors first described the long list of competitions they faced, one boy had said, maybe we could just make friends with those guys. They thought it seemed unfair not to have prizes for the losers, that it would lead to resentment. On the baseball diamond, each winning team volunteered three cheers for the losers in a show of good sportsmanship. When the Eagles dumped mud in the Rattlers' cabin, they did it at the suggestion of a counselor who would refuse to punish the Rattlers for their own raid. At the end, one of the participants

Starting point is 00:11:57 remembered the boys were just glad it was over. He said the end of the tournament meant the end of the fighting. And even then, the victorious Eagles gave three spontaneous cheers for the Rattlers. Even after the tournament was over, Sharif had wanted to fan animosity to prevent any spontaneous reconciliation. He finally backed down only when two counselors threatened to quit. Perry wrote, it seemed to me that what happened at Robber's Cave wasn't a test of a theory so much as a choreographed enactment with the boys as the unwitting actors in someone else's script. The men had encouraged hostility and fighting. She added, I thought how frightening that idea must have been to some of the children. They were in a remote rural wilderness with men who intimated there were few holds barred and where the values of home and church and school had no

Starting point is 00:12:37 force. Respect and fairness were discouraged. Cursing, bullying, cheating, and fighting were rewarded. And again, the boys weren't even told afterward that this had been a psychology experiment. I just, as you're saying all this, I'm just like, the ethical violations in my mind are just like piling up, you know, to be encouraging 11-year-old boys to try to hate each other and physically fight with each other almost, and then not even to tell them. Yeah, and then carry the memory of that experience through decades of your life, through your whole life. Right, and then carry the memory of that experience through decades of your life, through your whole life. And not even let them know

Starting point is 00:13:06 that they'd been manipulated to do that. I mean, right, it could have changed the self-image of some of the boys for who they were or how they would respond to things. Yeah, yeah. At Robert's cave, Sharif got the results he wanted and his study was widely praised. And some of his findings had been borne out

Starting point is 00:13:22 in later investigations. In particular, the value of superordinate goals in reconciling groups has been found to be an important principle. But the manipulation that Perry uncovered seems to muddy Sharif's other conclusions. The full picture shows that groups can refuse to turn against one another, even when they're competing for limited resources, even when they're encouraged to fight. The values of understanding, forgiveness, and good sportsmanship had been so thoroughly embraced by a group of 11-year-old boys that they stood up for them even on their own, far from home in the woods of southeastern Oklahoma. Of the 1953 study in which the boys had refused to become enemies,

Starting point is 00:13:53 Gina Perry told one interviewer, I do think it is a kind of optimistic view. It makes you smile, doesn't it? The fact that they mutinied against these guys, really, and refused to be drawn into it. One of the participants had told her, It reminds me of that sense of kinship you read about when strangers have been through an experience together and they develop a bond. When it came down to it, we stuck together, didn't we?

Starting point is 00:14:32 Our show really relies on the support of our listeners to be able to keep going. We just wouldn't be able to commit to the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to support us in a more ongoing way, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get access to outtakes, extra information and discussion on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on what Sasha, the Futility Closet podcast, has been doing lately. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link at the website. And thanks again to everyone who helps support the show. We wouldn't still be here without A few episodes ago, we mentioned that apparently Gmail's spam filter had been eating some of our email, and that if anyone had sent email to us and hadn't gotten any kind of a response to it,

Starting point is 00:15:36 that we'd appreciate it if they'd send it again. Nick Moffitt very nicely followed up on this by resending an email that he'd sent several months ago. So thank you, Nick. And thank you also for the pronunciation help with the Japanese. Nick was responding to a topic that we had gotten into a few months ago about some of the difficulties of traditional address systems and some of the features of What3Words, one of the newer address systems that's been developed. Greetings once more to the podcat and podcatoators. In episode 218, you read some mails regarding new address systems and the problems with interactions between older ones. The Japanese

Starting point is 00:16:12 word for when text written in one character encoding system comes out garbled in another is called mojibake and literally means character garbling. This was common when software needed to explicitly declare the language of a document to view the characters in it correctly, using so-called code pages or larger ideographic encoding schemes such as Big Five. Quite often, people sending something to a foreign country did not even know enough about the language to recognize the differences between that nation's writing systems and random symbols, so they would dutifully copy what was on their screens or trust the label that came out of their printers. Thus, a special sort of postal

Starting point is 00:16:50 Mojibake expert was often needed in many post offices around the world. The wider spread of Unicode in its UTF-8 format on the internet has reduced confusion caused by Mojibake, but Microsoft operating systems and software written in the Java programming language still use the incompatible UTF-16 for text handling, and you do still sometimes see mix-ups. And I had never heard of Mojiba K before, but it turns out there is a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to it if anyone wants to learn more about it. Apparently, it can be quite a problem when someone attempts to work with characters from another language that they are just completely unfamiliar with. They can copy them incorrectly, or they can't properly check them to make sure there aren't errors. So I bet these postal

Starting point is 00:17:33 mojibake experts would have had to learn to really try to just guess what someone was attempting. Like, I can imagine that if I were trying to copy something in Cyrillic or Arabic, I would probably make a complete hash of it. Yeah, and then it would fall to the post office to figure out what you meant. Figure out what my completely incomprehensible symbols were. Nick also said, I noted with interest your coverage of the What3Words system as they fall prey to a problem many engineers run up against. You mentioned that the Plus Code system avoids vowels to avoid spelling rude words,

Starting point is 00:18:05 and that what3words.com removes rude words from their system. The problem is that random words, however carefully vetted, create new meanings when combined in new contexts. And Nick explains that some friends of his started playing around with what3words to see what they could find, and they did find some pretty amusing addresses, such as ancient alien pyramids in a remote area of Canada, alien crash location in Poland, and secret alien headquarters in Texas. Enormous insects everywhere is in Russia, and every angry duck is in Alaska.

Starting point is 00:18:40 But also in Alaska is impaled roving youths, which is not a very pleasant image. And they found more of these somewhat less innocuous combinations. Nick says, spider-filled miniskirt is located in, and I am not passionately, nicely baked cheerleader, streaking bridesmaid photo, and patient grabs nurse. Nick also sent some that veer even further from family friendliness. A few that I could read on the show are compromised purity pledge, sleepover with boss, and dude weds sheep. sleepover with boss, and dude weds sheep. But between some others that are rather more lewd and some that are downright racist, I take his point that even if you remove the ruder words, there are many ways to put together words that can result in some not so nice combinations.

Starting point is 00:19:37 And there's no way to check this with a machine, right? You'd have to have a human. Right. And I mean, how many billions of addresses would they have to go through? Nick says, working in IT, I have had to argue against memorable word combination systems in the past. After failures that were not quite as spectacular as the what three words examples above, the team maintaining the phrase generating tool settled on an adjective animal pairing, and that helped somewhat. I had to stop fighting against the idea at that point and move on to other things.

Starting point is 00:20:07 Of course, we still get mocked for records that show up in our systems as deep maggot. I maintain that I was right about these things being impossible to boulderize fully. And he concludes with, but have you considered moving to Detroit? And sends the what three words address cats, cats, cats. Oh, that's good. David White sent us a link to a Telegraph article from March about the use of What3Words in action in the UK. The title of the article was Weekend Foggy Earphones, How Three Random Words Help Police Come to Rescue of Mother and Daughter. And from this and some other reports, I learned that What3Words has been adopted for use by a number of emergency services in the UK. Valerie Hawket and her four-year-old daughter are believed to be the first people rescued with the help of this

Starting point is 00:20:54 location service last October after Hawket lost control of her car and it flipped into a ditch in a remote area of Somerset. Hawket managed to pull herself and her daughter out of the vehicle, but shaken up and completely disoriented, she had no idea where they were and couldn't direct the police on how to find her. Complicating the situation further, her vehicle wasn't even visible from the road. But the call handler texted her a link to the What3Words map that showed her her current three-word address of Weekend Foggy Earphones, and that led the police straight to her. A member of the Avon and Somerset police said that previously,

Starting point is 00:21:30 officers would have had to ask questions like, where have you come from, where were you heading, what can you see, and so on, just to try to hopefully guess where the person was. But this new system is much more accurate and efficient. The BBC reports that what3Words has been used in several other emergency situations since being implemented in the UK, including rescuing a victim of sexual assault

Starting point is 00:21:51 who was being held hostage and directing emergency responders to a remote riverside path where someone had found a lost child. That's really good to hear. I mean, you're right. Before, I guess you just have to try to describe your surroundings

Starting point is 00:22:04 when you're all shaken up. Yeah, you're shaken up and you're right, before, I guess you just have to try to describe your surroundings when you're all shaken up. Yeah, you're shaken up and you're in a field in the middle of nowhere. And now if you have your phone or something, you can just literally just read three words and it'll pinpoint your location. Right, it pinpoints it down to a three meter by three meter square. So, I mean, even if you could tell police what road you were on, they're going to, you know, go up and down a road. And if you're in a ditch, you know, they'd have to find you.

Starting point is 00:22:24 Yeah. So, I mean, I hadn't thought about it, but. That's really useful. It is. Jonathan Knoll sent in an update on the topic of odd things that are sometimes found underwater, which we've covered a few times on the show. I have been trying to not revisit topics too, too many times, but sometimes someone sends in something on a topic that is rather different.

Starting point is 00:22:45 Jonathan wrote, Dear Greg, Sharon, and Sasha, and also Doug, whom I believe should also be shouted out. I am sorry to say that I have fallen behind on your podcast, but I am quickly trying to catch up. Around the time that I left off, there was a rousing collection of updates on the hobby of mudlarking, which brought this story bubbling to my mind. And Jonathan sent a link to a Telegraph article from March 2009 titled, And just in case there is anyone besides me who doesn't know what a Dalek is, Wikipedia tells me that they are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants, principally portrayed in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who. And they are violent, merciless, and pitiless cyborg aliens who demand total conformity to their will and who

Starting point is 00:23:44 are bent on the conquest of the universe and the extermination of what they see as inferior races. So I imagine that finding the head of one in a UK pond might have been rather a surprise for 42-year-old sales executive Mark Oakland, who was part of a group of volunteers trying to clean up the pond. Oakland said, I just shifted a tree branch with my foot when I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface. I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me. Pond warden Tony Brown, who was leading the volunteer squad in Hampshire, said, we made a very thorough search of the rest of the bottom of the pond and there

Starting point is 00:24:20 were definitely no alien remnants lurking. We've all agreed it best to keep the pond's exact location under wraps. The last thing we want are sci-fi fans descending on the pond frantically searching for other Dalek parts. He said that they'd learned that the BBC often took the Daleks out on location for filming and they'd gone to Hampshire on at least one occasion in the 1980s. He said, who knows, this might be the remains of one of the originals from the old TV series. I'm told they were built to last. I wonder if they just like misplaced it or... Yeah, I don't know how it ended up in the pond. I mean, why would you leave that behind? It was probably valuable, you know, to them. Yeah, you would have to imagine that somehow ended up in the pond and they didn't want to

Starting point is 00:24:58 go in after it. I don't know. Or just couldn't find it again. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate getting your feedback, comments, and updates. And an extra thank you to everyone who has sent pronunciation tips, which really is a big help for me. If you have anything you'd like to send to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation and I have to work out what's going on asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Sam Dick. A certain occupation has an almost 9% on the job mortality

Starting point is 00:25:40 rate. Despite this, not only have the authorities not prohibited such employment, but there are plenty of people who devote significant amounts of time and money to get the job. What kind of job is this, and why do people want it if they know the risks? Do other occupations have an even higher mortality rate? Higher than this? Higher than 9%. Yes. So maybe it's a relatively safe job, even though... No, actually, no, this is relatively risky. It's relatively high, okay. I'm trying to think if it's something like,

Starting point is 00:26:15 is there an occupation that people go into wanting to die? They're like, I don't know. They're older and they want to... I see what you mean. Give them, do something special at the very end of their lives and they know they're older and they want to i see what you mean give them do something special at the very end of their lives and they know they're going to die soon and so they sacrifice themselves yeah or if you're dying of cancer or something there's some occupation you can get that's poetic but that's not it um okay is this an occupation that most people would think of as being risky

Starting point is 00:26:42 would you call it risky? I would. As Sam says, statistically, it's risky, but I don't think most people would think of it in that way. So it's not something I would immediately think of like a firefighter, for example, where you would think, or a soldier. I mean, you know, there are certain occupations where you would expect there to maybe be a higher mortality rate. Yeah. So it's not something – so it's something that I might be very surprised to find out that there's a high mortality rate for this profession. No, I don't think you would be surprised if you thought about it.

Starting point is 00:27:12 Huh. Would you say it's a high-stress profession? Yeah, I would. Would you say it's the stress that's leading to people's deaths? No, no. Would you say that they're dying in accidents? No. From, I want to say natural causes,

Starting point is 00:27:30 but I mean like fires or like they're doing something like involving rescue. Yeah, dangerous. Like if they're fighting fires or they're underwater or something. No. No, but it's high stress. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:49 Are they airplane pilots? No. Okay. I mean, I don't know. They have a certain number of airplane crashes. And when you say they're dying, they are becoming dead. They are ceasing to live. Yes. They're not coloring fabric. They're not dying quietly on the inside. No, they're dying. They're no longer alive. Are they humans? Yes. Are they any particular age group? They tend to be older. I'll say that. Oh, they tend to be older. Would you say it's one gender more than the other? Yes. Is it women? No.

Starting point is 00:28:28 It's men. Older men. Older men. So this is a profession? An occupation. An occupation. I don't think you'd call this a profession quite. Okay, an occupation.

Starting point is 00:28:42 Oh, oh, President of the United States. A lot of them have died in office. Before I say yes, what led you to that answer so fast? I was trying to think older men, high-stress position, but it's not the position itself that's probably killing them. Yeah. It's President of the United States. Wow. Four out of 45 have been assassinated.

Starting point is 00:29:04 Oh. It's President of the United States. Wow. Up to four out of 45 have been assassinated. Oh. Most countries have had the old, odd assassinated president or prime minister, but the U.S.'s rate is unusually high, even though the last successful attempt was over 50 years ago. This is Sam writing this. Part of the reason is that the U.S. tends to keep its presidents in office longer than

Starting point is 00:29:16 most countries. Sam adds that the small African country of Guinea-Bissau has had five presidents, one of whom was assassinated, giving it a presidential mortality rate of 20%. He writes, as far as I can tell, this is the highest rate in the world, though it's a pretty small sample size, and there were still plenty of people running for the position in the last election. For comparison, more normal occupations with the highest mortality rates in the U.S. tend to be around 0.1% mortality.

Starting point is 00:29:38 Oh, wow. Though since this is an annual mortality, not an all-time rate, it's not really a fair comparison. Yeah, because if you're president for eight years or four years, yeah. But still, you don't think about that. Yeah, and for some reason I was thinking, when you first said it, I was thinking, well, maybe they die in office, but you're right. It's almost all that they're assassinated. They rarely die of natural causes in office, at least not anymore.

Starting point is 00:30:00 Yeah. So thank you, Sam. Very interesting. Thank you, Sam. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast would not still be here today if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners. If you would like to join them in supporting our show, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 exceptional esoterica. Browse the Futility Closet store for penguin-adorned merch.

Starting point is 00:30:40 Learn about the two Futility Closet books, or see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email either us or Sasha at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All of our fabulous music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 249-The Robbers Cave Experiment

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