The Search for Survivors

Surviving hardship outdoors has become a popular televised
amusement, but for a psychologist who screens the contestants for reality
TV shows, staying alive in the wilderness was more than just a
game...

When Richard Levak, Ph.D., saw the helicopters circle again, he
knew he had to catch the eyes of the rescue squad. He had spent the last
two days lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains enduring subfreezing
temperatures, with only a crudely built lean-to shelter and no food. The
temperatures were in the 50s when he left for the slopes; he wasn't
wearing a hat, coat or even long johns. A third night of exposure could
kill him.

"Helicopters descended but they were nowhere near me, and then they
left," Levak says. "I just kept thinking, 'God, I have no idea, will they
come again or not?'"

Levak, a psychologist, feared that if he died, his family's anger
at his carelessness would make the grieving process more difficult. He
began to search for a rock soft enough to scratch out a farewell to his
loved ones.

Some 7,000 miles away, contestants on the reality show Survivor
were undergoing an experience that bore a superficial resemblance to what
Levak was suffering. In one contrived competition, the contestants were
required to find a way to flag down a passing search plane. Though the
contest had been given the trappings of hardship -- the participants were
even called "castaways" -- a camera crew, directors, producers and
doctors all watched on the sidelines, as the "competition" was turned
into a television spectacle.

The reality of the experiences of 16 TV castaways versus one man
fighting for his life could hardly be more different -- but they had one
point of intersection: Levak was the psychologist who had screened the
Survivor contestants. Just months before, Levak had tested potential
contestants, measuring how well they would hold up under the trying
circumstances of life on the physical edge, without proper sleep, shelter
or food.

Now the question was, how well would Levak hold up? Although he has
spent a lot of time outdoors, surviving alone in the wilderness is not a
specialty of his, either personally or professionally. Levak began his
practice as a psychologist in the early 1980s by advising companies by
performing team-building workshops. Instead of simply diagnosing
individual pathology, he used tests, including the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, to focus on how people function within a
team.

"The purpose was to help people get the best out of who they are
versus looking at what's wrong with them," Levak says. "I enjoyed
understanding how people were likely to interact with one another, given
the personality makeup. If you're a highly energetic, big-picture
thinking, extroverted, outdoor type, how are you going to get along if
you are managing a highly introverted, detail-oriented, even-energy,
somewhat-prone-to-worry individual?"

In spite of Levak's interests, when his colleague, Gene Ondrusek,
Ph.D., approached Levak to work on Survivor, he was hesitant. The job
seemed fraught with potential ethical dilemmas: If you are assessing
contestants for a show as a paid consultant, where does your allegiance
lie? Ondrusek decided that he and Levak would tell the contestants that
they were sharing the test results with the producers during the
screening process, but when they went on location, the psychologists
would be working only to protect the contestants. After his ethical
concerns were laid to rest, Levak was genuinely excited to be a part of
the show. "I was fascinated by the idea of being involved in a social
psych experiment and being able to see people's personality profiles and
how they operated."

Levak has learned that forecasting the delicate interplay of human
psyches is at best an alchemical endeavor. "The question is how can you
put interesting people together, rather than putting people together
where there's prurient value," Levak says. "And that's a very, very tight
line."

After the success of Survivor, Levak now screens the contestants on
most of the reality TV shows on CBS. "We're looking for character types,"
he explains. "There are people who blend with the walls; people who stand
out because they're obnoxious, passionate or they're a unique example of
a particular type of person." At the same time, nobody wins if a
contestant has a complete mental breakdown on television, so Levak is
looking for self-destructive tendencies. "You want to avoid fragile
people who've been traumatized and have not dealt with the trauma, where
this trauma may be restimulated. We exclude people who have unresolved
issues that might catch an edge through the stress of some of these
reality shows."

But when Levak was trapped on the mountain, the stakes weren't just
good television versus bad -- they were life and death.

Levak was worried that the closely hovering helicopters wouldn't
see him. So he gathered sticks and bark and made a giant circle to
attract the helicopters if they returned. But after waiting for two days
without being seen, he changed plans and decided to retrace his path,
though his tracks had been erased in the melting snow.

As he made his way deep into a dense forest he heard a sound. "I
start to hear helicopters in the distance, over by where I was," he
recalls. "They're over there and I'm not there!" He returned to his
shelter, and the helicopters finally saw him. He had survived 50 hours in
the cold without food.

His experience has changed and personalized his work screening
contestants. "I'm mindful of the interaction of psychology with
deprivation. I'm far more empathic because I know that feeling cold, wet,
hungry and alone really affects your thinking," Levak adds. "Survivor is
tougher than it seems. It requires a lot of denial. These people are
supernormal in terms of resilience and self-confidence."