Column Chronicles: The Frog Experiment

The Frog Experiment

Frank Cotolo
April 23, 2015

There is a famous anecdote about a frog that many people recite when trying to make others understand the concept of changes in areas of life where adapting is difficult. Here is the anecdote as originally recited:

Place a frog into a pot of boiling water will jump out. Put the frog in cold water and gradually heat up the water and the increased heat will sooth the frog. It will adjust to the gradual changes in heat intensity until there comes a point when the frog's metabolism cannot cope with the temperature and the frog will die.

A group of scientists used the anecdote recently to study how people adapted to subtle changes. The scientists gathered a group of 100 random people, aged 18 through 76 and placed them in a room that easily held 1,000 people. The people were told to stay in the room until someone came and told them why they were in the room.

Professor Peter Holdtooth, who led the study, said, "The people got to know one another after the third hour of being in the room for no reason. Then we altered the atmosphere by sending in a man who told them to move to another room. The new room held only 100 people."

The 100-people room, Holdtooth said, found the people becoming uncomfortable after the third hour. Then another man came in and brought the 100 people into a room that comfortably held only 50 people.

"This is when things became unsettling," Holdtooth said. "People were forced to get to know one another more intimately since half of them had to sit on the other half in order not to be squeezed into the space."

The scientists continued to take the 100 people and put them into smaller rooms after three hours until the people were literally stacked on one another.

"That was when their behavior went from unsettling to violent," Holdtooth said. "Before the first hour was over we heard rumbling and then screaming and then all hell broke loose. We opened the door when the first hour was over and the people practically fell out of the room. Their faces were flushed, their hair was askew and their clothing was a mess."

Professor Holdtooth and the other five scientists could not immediately work on their findings because the 100 people chased them seven city blocks, "at least," said Renton Somebird, another in the study team.

"We lost Miles Quality [the third member of the study team] when he tripped during the chase and the mob trampled him to death. But we are sure that Miles would have condoned his own death considering the results that we eventually discovered."

Holdtooth said, "We were convinced when we studied all the data - after, of course, we were out of danger from the mob chasing us [the 100 people were taken for observation at a local hospital - author ] - that people can die from subtle changes in their environment when shared with other people."

Somebird said, "It's as if each of us is a frog in cold water waiting to die if the environment is subtly changed."

The four scientists surviving the "Frog Experiment," as it has been titled, are expecting major awards for their study. As well, a high-powered attorney is handling the 100 lawsuits filed against each of them by the people involved in the study. Furthermore, the scientists plan to finance the building of a statue of Miles Quality in a park nearby the area where he was trampled.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.