When and why do men run away in battle? A proposed scientific experiment.

Jhin now I'm here to talk to you about the problem which has proven exasperatingly difficult to solve for generations as far as I know of historians and military analysts and I'm going to propose a solution to it in this video which has been sponsored by - Dollar Shave Club yes the Dollar Shave Club more of that later now the problem is what two problems you might say we don't know when in a battle men choose to run away nor exactly why what is it that causes them to at that point choose to run away so when and why do men run away in battle obviously we have some idea about the why but sometimes men will fight absolutely to the last sometimes though the bullets are flying all over the shop there are shells bursting all around and man will sit tight in their trenches and fire and fight absolutely to the last because they know that if they get out of the trench then in this storm of Steel they're almost certain to die whereas if they stay where they are then at least they can do some good by shooting for their fellows around them and maybe they'll be able to surrender so they sit tight and end up fighting absolutely to the lust if casualties have been the sole decider of when to run away they would have run away ages ago a lot of war games and use a measure of how many losses a unit has taken as the indicator of when it should run away but in reality sometimes units fight absolutely to the last man and other times large units run away before a single shot has even been fired so why is that then well we can look at the historical record looking at the archaeological record not going to help a lot so the historical record there's almost nothing there people running away tend not to win battles and people who aren't winning battles tend not to write the history of those battles and the people who write the history of the winners they don't know why the enemy ran away they're just really glad that they did if you ask someone who was right there right in the thick of it you'll say well I we went for words and screaming and we shoved our bennett's through the smoke and I was coughing I went by the time the smoke cleared they'd all run away so we cheered a lot hooray I don't know why they weren't ran away I didn't even see half of them running away so even the people doing the winning don't actually know even the people who are right there to really know and if you try to interview soldiers who did the running away you won't get very good useful answers now in historical times of course there were very few people with clipboards trying to stop routing units as they went past excuse me the kunai interview about why why exactly oh that never happened because it would work and even today even long after a fight in the calmness of someone's front room you might ask her an ex-soldier so why did you run away then and when and it's a bit like saying why are you a coward were you a coward and not only do they often not know but even if they do have some inkling they very often won't tell you so the data is extremely poor the data are extremely poor so how can we get some information on on the answer to these questions what you got of course military exercises you could say they're running military exercises all the time you could you could run one as a scientific experiment you could observe military exercise isn't there you go there's your answer no it doesn't work yes modern armies do run military exercises quite commonly there are some laser tag equivalents but troops on those exercises don't behave the way that troops in real fights do they imagine though you are you're in a trench and then the enemy you are told it's going to approach from over there and you've got everything zeroed in you've got all the heavy machine guns zeroed in you've got more - zeroed in your in your a trench position you've got your gun you're ready ok and then what happens is the enemy shows up over there now what do you do next well you're a you're a Scotty on an exercise and you laser gun that see how well you can do ok so you say all right to our left bad swing the gun round how they get there they're sneaky get this time because I didn't get one last time there's one got one yes oh whoa okay okay wait yeah yeah you got me yeah yeah all right yeah yeah oh yeah you too sorry Sarge yeah hey well I got on this time baby broke me duck yeah yeah it comes true yeah yeah yeah right that's how they behave what do you do doc Webber a month's pay if they die in the exercise or or something like that no that that wouldn't be fair would be practicable um in reality if you are in a trench and you've been told that's where the enemy is coming from and you're confident because you know that everything has been zeroed in and that you've been given orders that are appropriate to this and then the enemy turns up over there what goes through your head you think well the unit to our left is already routed has it what how did the enemy got there something has already gone really really wrong and why would the enemy why would our guys route to the left there they must know something we don't like the strength of the enemy maybe this is an incredibly strong enemy force and that enemy force presumably knows what it's doing and it's coming forwards and it's got an inflating position which is advantageous for us and I don't want to be here and my orders aren't appropriate you run so that's what happens in a real fight but on exercise soldiers behave completely differently yeah military exercises don't solve this problem alas but but maybe maybe I can propose a solution to this problem and I will do so but once I have told you about my sponsor which is the Dollar Shave Club now the Dollar Shave Club is it's a service they they send you men's grooming products through the post and you get little parcels now I must admit that I have not been using a service like this possibly you can tell but I can say that my whole life I have used a not wildly 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flowing out of me body cleanser which is calming amber and lavender calming amber calming amber is amber even a smell does amber smell or some other thing and while Brazil II there's they have quite a wide range of products presumably if you want their panic-inducing amber you can get that too so there you go now if you go to www.hsn.com or US dollars if you're American and some near equivalent if you're from one of the other countries that they serve which is Australia Britain and Canada but no British forces supposed to overseas yet I'm afraid sorry chaps but they're working on it anyway so you can there's an offer and yes in in time I will of course give this a go but not right now because if you don't mind I'm in the middle of a video so oh yes so military experiment now and I had one idea which was based along the lines of paying people to act differently now in psychology one thing you need to be able to offer an experimental subject is an incentive emotive and sometimes because of the nature of the experiment you you have to make it quite a substantial motive and and if they're you're bringing in just members of the public what is the universal motivating thing these days well it's money so if you want people to play some game that takes them two hours that's how long the experiment lasts and you say and if you do really well in the game we'll give you 20 pence it's not really worth it I'm playing a game for two hours I'd rather just have fun playing the game the 20 pence is neither here nor there and so you haven't really influenced their behavior with the this this there's this bait to this lure of the 20 pence and so you don't get the results that perhaps would be been scientifically more useful now so then you okay let's offer them really substantial amounts of money and then we'll actually get them taking everything seriously giving us the more useful results but there's a problem there of course when you go to your funding body and you say we've got we've come up with a really neat as a scientific experiment to do and we're gonna need a very large amount of money and the people deciding all this money for and we're gonna give it away to the people playing the games or doing whatever it is all the city tasks because it'll motivate them yeah good luck with getting very large metal and it has happened there have been psychology experiments in which quite large amounts of money even paid out to the test subjects but you can see there's a definite problem there oh well I thought maybe maybe who crowdfunded so I make some videos I organize a crowdfunding thing the people putting money into the crowdfunding thing I get to feel it good and then they end up end up seeing the video which answers the question or at least attempts to answer the question that they were curious about as well and I could work but I can also see all sorts of problems then yeah I wasn't really I wasn't really happy with that so maybe there was another solution and I was on a train on the way to Glasgow to give a speech and the answer came to why I say the answer an answer now there will be some of you who will say our way I mean he's just trying to make a video - some half-baked idea but I don't know no it's not a half-baked idea I've taken it further than that I've given some thought and he's moderately serious about this so I would this is this is a 2/3 baked idea but I'm not there yet anyway what if I thought we get a load of reenact a partner straightaway reenactors and Hema people they yeah they've done a little fighting but there's a problem you see they are a bit like the Scotties in the army they're actually quite like a scrap now why why is someone gone to a reenactment event with all the military Kipnis saw on this shield and the helmet and all the rest of it and there's been some wild practicing and then he fights because he likes fighting which you know it's all very well when you look upon it as a hobby but if you look upon it from the from the standpoint of science give you a very useful result so there you are you really like fighting and you go [ __ ] Bosh Bosh Bosh mission the guy to your right dies but there you go bish bish bish you see him often bish bish oh he's now dead [ __ ] Bosh [ __ ] oh dear Huff my guy seem to be down now [ __ ] Bosh [ __ ] oh I'm the last man standing well here we go out with the blaze of glory oh they got me inevitably I still good scrap right get up let's do it again totally unrealistic doesn't tell you anything at all so you've got to offer people a really good reason to run away rather than fight to the end so you get a load of reenactors who already know how to swing a sword or whatever I'm gonna in my mind's eye I'm doing this with medieval weapons or ancient rather than firearms it's a more accurate system in that you know when you've been hit very definitely and you don't need a huge amount of high tech so but maybe we could extend this if we get a hold of the equipment paddle wouldn't it be great if we get the mo D involved and then anyway okay sorry I'm getting ahead of myself so you get all your reactors to turn up at a place and you're going to fight not one fight but lots of fights a 50 fights something like that and the money right here's the thing here's the idea maybe it's stupid but maybe it could work maybe the people who are taking the day are the test subjects are actually doing the fighting maybe they are the people who also provide the money yeah but it would have to be a really substantial amount of money now if you say 20 quid and you can buy in a lot of people say are for a weekend of fighting yeah 20 quid I'll pay that I'll just enjoy the fighting and then you don't get the science so it'd have to be a lot of money although there are some people who are very very rich and you pick a single amount of money for them it might not seem so much but okay let's just say I know nothing this is the amount of money this is just an example amount of money let's say it's something like 5,000 pound buying okay you want to play this game of poker it's a 5000 pound up front if you to sit at the table so people have paid their 5,000 pounds in advance because you can't of people welshing it after as well so I did actually have the money by they've got to know that they could lose that amount of money but you then jig the experiment such that they are incredibly unlikely next to impossible actually to lose that money as long as they behave sanely so let's just keep it simple - you have force a and force B and they just slam into each other fight fight fight fight at some point one lot will start losing and at some point people will start running away they won't fight to the end because you get rewards for being on the winning side taking prisoners those things but you also get fines for running away dying being taken prisoner and the like so dying obviously is gotta be really bad the cost for dying has got to be huge but it's gotta be even though you it's bad to run away or it's bad to be taken prisoner they've got to be substantially less bad than dying so there's you're on the winning side you're on the losing side you wait you you live you die you ran away you were taken prisoner those are six of the main results but of course there are combinations of these so it could be that you're on the winning side great but you died not so great or you ran away but you actually ran away and then your site went on to win oops but you don't get the glory of the win but then again at least you're not dead so it was perhaps all worth running away for you now you then fight that fight you observe it you have loads of cameras looking at it particular from above so that you begin we can judge very definitely when we replay all the all the footage exactly who was the first guy to run and what could he see from there and so we have as much analyzable data as possible and I was thinking that you could have an area that there's some distance away and if you can run to that area once you're in okay you're now deemed to have run away but until you get there the enemy it's it's fair game for him to to try to capture your kill you on the way so what point do guys to tend to run away now imagine that you have fought a fight and you died so the second fight you died again the third fight you died and you're on the losing side again and then again and then again you actually doesn't mean you've died for the first 25 fights of the 50 you better change behavior aren't you you're gonna start hanging around the back cuz you just don't want to die anymore because if you die in every single fight you might be down 5,000 pounds but what are the chances that you do die in every single fight almost nil what are the chances that you lose every single fight again it's so close to nil that it's not worth mentioning because part of the structure of the organization of the day or days would be that if this side wins then this side gets to pick a few of the fighters from this side because after every single fight we have a have an evening up mechanism so that it's incredibly unlikely that anyone wins or loses much more or much less than half the time this experiment has got nothing to do with finding out whether this team is better than that team but that's that's useless to science it's when do men in a team like this decide to run away and what are the circumstances when they do so if you've got someone who's incredibly rich and one of those ostentatiously rich Gates who just wants everyone to know how rich he is who then just charges in charges and every single fight to die ostentatiously in front of everyone hey everyone I can afford it look at me I'm so wacky yeah I can't imagine we'll get many of those and if there are a very large number of people taking part then if there is a large number there's no is it our large number is a large number because our number is singular never mind linguistics there's a bit of a problem there but it's nerds another video and subject maybe anyway if you've got lots of people taking part the chances of having a large number of complete ostentatiously rich gets is very low so I don't see that as being a big problem so you're incredibly unlikely to win or lose much far away from half the time so you'll be gaining money and losing money and overall everyone will end up quits some people if they do spectacularly well might end up significantly ahead and some people though the chances are that the if you're tremendously good then you might be able to take out loads of the enemy and actually they won't be able to get you because you're so friendly good and so you'll never die and yet you your side will win perhaps more often than not you'd have to be pretty amazing and if they're a large number of people the chances that one person can bias things much that way actually be the cause of the entire science of winning or losing is very small but let's just imagine that you do that the people that you kill very unlikely to be the same people every time so the the the burden of of the fines of having died or been scared off or whatever they're going to be shared out so it's very very very unlikely that anyone is going to be much in the red and you'd have to be spectacularly excellent to be significantly into the black but everyone has to behave rationally because if they just recklessly fight to the last or if they just precipitate route off to route so they're always on the losing side then they will lose a substantial amount of money so you need a lot of people who are prepared to put up a lot of money and be reasonably sensible as long as they're reasonably sensible no one should lose much money and I it should I hope advanced the cause of science oh but wait I said that I would try this didn't I right right supposed to do that then yeah back in a tick it worked he wagged it work do you work anyway I don't know there's a mirror over there I'll have to check the mirror hang on hold on let's go to the mirror oh yeah oh yeah hang on I'm doing it again I'm gonna do it again see more products well does this one do oh is that is that better I don't know is that better oh wow there you go don't shave club a [Music] the man you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 502,831

Keywords: science, battle, experiment, run, flee, rout, retreat, surrender, morale, break, war, men, soldiers, troops, money, motive, funding, incentive, motivation, warfare, test, participation, shave

Id: h5VVtPkEtn4

Length: 27min 42sec (1662 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019