The citation accompanying the award said that Dr. Loh Seng Tsai's experiments had proved the innately cooperative nature of animals and thus had lent support to the Confucian ideals of world peace and union. Before his work, animals were believed to be inherently hostile to other species.
Dr. Tsai taught graduate courses in psychology at National Taiwan University, Provincial Taiwan Normal University, and National Chengchi University during the 1962-63 school year. He was on leave of absence from Tulane University in New Orleans, and came to Taiwan under the auspices of the Fulbright program.
One of the great names in experimental psychology, Dr. Tsai urged that other Chinese scholars teaching in the United States come to Taiwan for a semester or two. In that way, he added, students could receive the best of instruction and higher education could make more rapid strides.
Dr. Tsai was born in Chaochow, Kwangtung province, in 1901. Even as a youngster, he deplored the failure of Chinese philosophy to emphasize intelligence, which was not one of the Confucian virtues. He reasoned that because the most highly intelligent persons constituted a minority, they incurred the distrust of the majority. Sometimes the intelligent were compelled to feign stupidity in order to survive. The solution, he thought, was to make the majority intelligent. If all men were brothers in intelligence, they could achieve understanding, trust, and cooperation.
Minister of Education pins gold medal on Dr. Tsai. (File photo)
That led to his dream of inventing the intelligence pill for which he himself had no need. Entering the field of psychology which was new and daringly experimental in the West as well as in China, he received a bachelor's degree from Nanking University in 1949 and his master's from Futan in 1926. He took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1931.
Research on Vitamins
From 1929 to 1931 he was assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago Medical School. Vitamins had just been discovered, and many scientists were trying to determine their functions. Dr. Tsai pioneered in research regarding their effect on human intelligence. He discovered the B-complex was uniquely essential to the development of learning, retention, and problem-solving abilities. He found that a deficiency of vitamin B during gestation and lactation would retard intellectual growth. These discoveries were later confirmed by others.
When friends ask him about his intelligence pills, he says he is sure vitamin B will be one component.
Dr. Tsai returned to China in 1931 as a research fellow and acting director of the National Research Institute of Psychology, Academia Sinica, which ranks at the top in Chinese research.
He immediately called the attention of his countrymen to the importance of nutrition in intelligence and health. He assaulted the Chinese concept of rice as the mainstay of nutrition.
He pronounced the method of cooking rice as in an outrage to the vitamin content. He pointed out that vitamin B is contained in the husk and germ of rice, which are removed in the processes of hulling, washing and steaming. He urged Chinese to eat roughly hulled rice and more beef and told those of the south to eat more wheat products.
Test for Flying
Experimenting with rats running in mazes, he found they learned to select a route affording either minimum effort or maximum reward. His wife, Aimee, whom he married in Peiping in 1932, has joked that he applied his newly discovered psychological principles to win her.
When war broke out in 1937, he was the dean of the College of Arts, University of Nanking, which was later evacuated to Chengtu, Szechuan. He lectured on military psychology at the Military Academy and aviation psychology at the Air Force Staff College. He established the Air Force's first psychological laboratory and developed a test to choose those who would become good fliers.
After 1945, Dr. Tsai resumed his efforts to improve Chinese education. Poring over novels, correspondence, diaries, documents, and newspaper and magazine articles, he found that 2,000 characters made up 97 per cent of ordinary reading material. He arranged characters in order of importance to literacy. The list has been widely used in compilation of textbooks.
In 1947, he went to the United. States and since has taught at Brown, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Tulane. His most famous experiments were conducted at the New Orleans university.
Dr. Tsai long had been distressed by the Darwinian theory of evolution and its implications of struggle and the survival of the fittest. Prince Peter Kropotkin published his Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution in 1914 and Prof. W. C. Allec his Cooperation Among Animals. Both cited some instances of wildlife cooperation but failed to refute Darwin.
Dr. Tsai theorized that animals killed to survive because the circumstances compelled them to do so. In human society, where intelligence creates more favorable conditions, cooperation tempers competition. He thought that if favorable conditions were created, violent competition could be eliminated.
He set out to show, by experiment, that Darwinism was only true in a primitive world. His subjects were cats and rats, animal kingdom's fiercest,' most determined enemies.
Unique Apparatus
In every language, there are stories of how this enmity came about. According to Chinese legend, the cat was sent from the heavens to a Tang dynasty emperor to catch mice which were rampaging through the household. At first the cat caught the mice but did not kill them. Soon the mice escaped. The emperor was infuriated. He told the cat there would be no return to heaven until the mice had been wiped out. Ever since, cats have killed all the mice they can catch.
However, in Dr. Tsai's experiment, cats and rats came to eat, sleep, and play together.
The test apparatus was composed of three sections, separated by electrically controlled screened gates. The first section was the entrance area, where the cat and rat, who had been used to living together, were placed prior to the test. When the gate was opened, the animals entered the second section-or reaction chamber - where cooperation was to take place. To get to the third section - or goal chamber - where a dish of food awaited, both cat and rat had to step on floor buttons at the same time.
In Dr. Tsai's first experiment, three pet kittens about a month old and three young rats were placed in the same cage. They sniffed at each other, but showed no signs of fear or aggression. They lived together peacefully for nearly two years.
Two-Second Reaction
Cats and rats then were placed in the cooperation apparatus. One of the cats was playing with his rodent partner's tail and they accidentally pressed the two buttons simultaneously, opening the gate. The cat then learned to play with the rat's tail in expectation that tail manipulation would provide access to the food. One of the rats was more ingenious than playful. He attracted the cat's attention with his tail. When the cat's paw was on a button, the rat scurried to press his own.
At first, the cat-rat teams averaged two or three successful trials a day. After a few weeks, they required only two seconds from the time they left the entrance to the attainment of the goal. Cooperation was accidental in the beginning but then became deliberate.
Dr. Tsai's cat and rat eat from the same dish. (File photo)
The second experiment employed four alley cats more than two months old. The cats made friends with the rats, despite the lack of experience in living together. One of the rats even sought protection from a cat and often stood under the cat's belly, eating from the same dish. The alley cats were more serious, businesslike, and self-reliant than their domestic predecessors. They quickly exhibited ingenuity in the reaction chamber. They would lie down, watch until the rat got into position, and then reach out and tap their button.
Other times, cats planted both front paws on the button, and arched their backs, ready to leap into the goal chamber for the food. If a rat wandered toward the cat's button, the cat pushed him back toward his own.
One of the rats caught his tail in the door and became a little cautious. The alley cat, anxious to get going, came back to the entrance and motioned with his paw, as if to say, "Come on, come on."
In the third experiment, an extra button was installed in front of the gate to the reaction chamber. Only one member of a team was let into the chamber. The other was left behind at the entrance. Seeing that his partner was confined and that he could not obtain the food alone, the cat ignored the old buttons and learned to press the new one and admit his partner.
Rat-Killing Cat
With poorer vision, the rat tended to go to the old buttons, but when the cat did not appear, the rat returned to the entrance door to press the new button.
The fourth experiment utilized an eight-month-old cat with an outstanding record of rat-killing. Even in laboratory life, she demonstrated her ferocity by killing five rats. Once out of her cage, she would kill the first rat she could catch. She also killed rats in experimental sessions.
The apparatus was reconstructed so that it had duplicate sections, at first separated by glass and then by wire mesh. Cat and rat were kept apart from entrance through the reaction chamber and to the goal. Even this safety device was only partly successful. When both animals stepped on the buttons and the door went down, the cat thrust her paw through the slit. Once she seriously wounded a hooded rat.
After about 700 trials on 28 occasions distributed over three and a half months, the cat finally cooperated with the hooded rat without an act of aggression. It took about 550 trials before the main partition was removed. The rat-killing cat ate peacefully out of the same dish as the rat. After another 150 trials, the last partition in the reaction chamber was removed.
No Fighting Instinct
The cat was also trained to release the rat from the entrance compartment by pressing a one-inch button on the right side of the reaction chamber midway between the two doors.
Dr. Tsai helped "natural enemies" become good friends through educational cooperation and without resorting to punishment. He believes this disproves the dictum that an instinct of pugnacity makes fighting (or wars) inevitable. No such fighting instinct was found. Instead, the tendency is toward cooperation and trust.
"The world today is in need of a new philosophy of life," Tsai says. He offers his philosophy of survival through cooperation to help educate the world for peace.
With cooperation proven possible under favorable conditions, Dr. Tsai set out to see whether men could improve on their intelligence, regardless of heredity.
Again he turned to his rats.
In one experiment, a piece of cheese was put atop a platform that a rat could not reach. The rat located the cheese by smell, and found a basket fastened to a chain. He hauled in the chain, brought the basket to him and climbed into it. Then he swung across to the cheese shelf and collected his reward.
Cat and rat enter second section of apparatus after cooperating to lift gate. (File photo)
In another experiment, a rat faced the tricky problem of obtaining cheese placed on a high shelf. The rat used a ladder to reach a lower shelf, hauled it up after him, checking once to see how it was coming, then used it to climb to the top shelf.
In a third experiment, cheese was placed on a platform beyond the rat's reach, but this time there was no ladder. Instead, there was a toy cart with steps. The rat pushed the cart into position, climbed up the steps, and jumped to the platform.
Work for Money
In a fourth test, cheese was placed in a tube beyond the rat's reach. A stick was inserted in one end of the tube. By pushing on it, the rat could get the cheese. The rat pushed, then ran to the other end of the tube to get his reward. But the cheese was still in the tube, and the rat pushed the stick still further. This time the cheese came out.
Dr. Tsai also trained rats to work for money and then to spend it. The rodents hauled on a chain, tipped over a can, and spilled out a coin. The rats carried the coin to a saucer and exchanged it for cheese.
The April 7 (1952) issue of Life said of the experiments: "Dr. Loh Seng Tsai's experiments, fascinating in themselves, have a more serious purpose than simply to teach rats extraordinary tricks. He hopes to prove that his lowly subjects are capable of reasoning, a quality which most psychologists believe to be confined to man and apes. To refute the prevailing notion that everything a rat does results from a combination of instinct and accidental trial-and-error learning, Tsai first taught his rats to cooperate with cats, their natural enemies. Then he set up an experiment in which the animals learned to pull up a bucket paw over paw-an action which is not in the rat's natural repertoire—to get water which they could not reach otherwise.
"But since the goal in this case was in sight, and the action required to reach it a brief one, Tsai went on to design tests involving several separate acts of which only the last led directly to the reward. The surprising ease with which the rats learned to solve these complicated problems proves that behavior is not limited to fixed, instinctive pattern and strongly suggests that they share with man the ability to think."
Abstract Understanding
Dr. Tsai went on to determine whether rats could comprehend abstract ideas. Dr. Tsai placed food behind doors marked with two images, such as faces, cats, and circles. In a few months, the rats were leaping at doors marked with two images, even those they had not seen before.
The Chinese psychologist suggests that if rats can be taught to reason, men can certainly raise their level of intelligence through education. When Dr. Tsai returns to New Orleans, he will continue his experiments along this line.
A good friend of the late Dr. Hu Shih, China's greatest modern philosopher, Dr. Tsai was influenced by Dr. Hu's pragmatism. Chinese have been great theoreticians, but few have proved their theories by experiment. Dr. Tsai's obsession with experimentation stands for the very spirit that Dr. Hu espoused. His name will go down in history for what he has already discovered and proved. As for the future, who knows? Even those intelligence pills may not be necessary. Intelligence, Dr. Tsai's findings imply, is largely a matter of learning under favorable conditions.