Sociology: The Calhoun experiment

[Ellipse]

I just want to share this. Here's an old (1963) but interesting experiment on rats and overpopulation. Unfortunately I can't find a more detail English report.

When John Calhoun of the National Institutes of Health put wild Norway rats into a one-quarter-acre enclosure and fed them well, the normal rate of rat increase should have raised the population to 5,000 in 27 months. Instead it stabilized at about 150 adult rats. The females produced plenty of young, but they did not take care of them properly, and most of them died before maturity.

Social Stress. Anxious to learn how overcrowding does work, Calhoun put rats in four interconnected pens six feet square. Two of the pens were quickly pre-empted by boss male rats that kept harems of females and allowed no other males to mate with them. The harem females made proper nests, bore healthy young and raised them successfully. But in the other two pens, where no single males took charge, social stress was rampant. Some of the males gave the females no rest. Others turned homosexual or hid in corners. The females stopped making proper nests, and their young, born on the bare floor, died and were eaten.

source : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,873834-1,00.html

Wikipedia page of J.B Calhoun : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

 

[Persej]

I don't know if you are still interested in this Ellipse, but here is a nice report about this experiment: _http://www.physicsoflife.pl/dict/calhoun%27s_experiment.html

You also have a link to original study (9 pages) and youtube video.

 

[neonix]

High social velocity mice

The Behavioral Sink (The mouse universes of John B. Calhoun)
by Will Wiles
Cabinet Magazine Summer 2011
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php

Calhoun consistently found that those animals better able to handle high numbers of social interactions fared comparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell. As for the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative, exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, in order to survive.

Later in his career, Calhoun worked to build universes that maximized this kind of creativity and minimized the ill effects of overcrowding. He disagreed with Ehrlich and Vogt that restrictions on reproduction were the only possible response to overpopulation. Man, he argued, was a positive animal, and creativity and design could solve our problems. He advocated overcoming the limitations of the planet, and as part of a multidisciplinary group called the Space Cadets promoted the colonization of space. It was a source of lasting dismay to Calhoun that his research primarily served as encouragement to pessimists and reactionaries, rather than stimulating the kind of hopeful approach to mankind’s problems that he preferred.

More cheerfully, however, the one work of fiction that stems directly from Calhoun’s work, rather than the stew of gloom that it was stirred into, is optimistic, and expands imaginatively on his attempts to spur creative thought in rodents. This is Robert C. O’Brien’s book for children, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, about a colony of super-intelligent and self-reliant rats that have escaped from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Evolution Survival of The Schleps
by Hugh Drummond, M.D.
Mother Jones Magazine, Dec 1980

Says one recombinant DNA researcher: "The potential is there for doing immerse good for mankind, for alleviating the human condition."
- U.S. News and World Report
These were maddened creatures.
- Doris Lessing. Shikasta

There is a monkey on the back of history. The idea that we are in this together keeps coming back despite the best efforts of warlords, bureaucrats and grand inquisitioners. Yes, the old forms and habits of power come back too. They corrupt Christianity and communism alike, but they do not seem able to suppress this ancient, endless, unfulfilled hunger for social equality and solidarity. Most of what we call sickness comes from the incongruity and the isolating structure of hierarchy. Perhaps our next evolutionary leap will be a shift in the human hologram so that the way we organize ourselves will fit the way we really are.

But in fact, the very idea of evolution is a vestige of diseased social structure. "Manifest destiny", "progress", "striving upward", "superiority", "the ascent of Man" - all are used to justify power and imperialism. We tend to look at evolution as some gigantic demolition derby and at ourselves as the winners, walking tall amid the wrecks.

The current enthusiasm for "sociobiological" explanations of aggression, dominance, sexism and racism is the latest attempt by ruling-class scientists to define scientific "truths" in terms of class interest. Since the ruling class in general defines social truth for everyone else, it is no surprise that we have all been trained to be in awe of every hint of superiority. It turns out, however, that the idea of survival of the fittest has undergone a profound mutation during the past decade and a half.

[...]

Among Humo sapiens, however, a turned back is likely to get a knife in it. This is bad enough, but the rationalizations for it are even worse. Dominant individuals and races have always enjoyed the conceit domination is its own justification. The pushers and shakers of the world view evolutionary theory as Nature's baptism of their position. Andrew Carnegie liked to think of himself as the acme of evolution: Darwin's darling. And it is not incidental that the population organizations are so attentive to the Third World. The specter of black, brown and yellow people multiplying is seen as an affront to the whites whose plunder of theme is thought to be genetically ordained.

Our culture has generated a peculiar mind-set: there is a limited amount of security and satisfaction in the world, and your chance of getting some is increased by someone else's not getting any. This conviction is clearly as dumb as lifeboat passengers killing each other off instead of rowing together. But it has invaded every aspect of our thinking.

People in psychotherapy sometimes get upset when they notice their own shiver of satisfaction upon hearing of another person's misfortune. Since all emotions are considered private property, they conclude that the feeling is unique to then; they then feel bad and punish themselves with guilt. All they are really experiencing, however, is the zerosum-game mentality generated by our competitive and individualistic social system.

This mentality affect even the nature and substance of science. Not only will scientists stomp on one another's theories to advance their own, but all their observations are colored by the state of mind. Since this is as true of molecular biology as it is of psychology, most contemporary science is built on basic paradigm of competition, dominance and elitism.

But there are exceptions. One of them is John B. Calhoun, the researcher I once wrote about in these pages who described the effect of crowding upon rodents. He was studying mice crowded into the condition of the "behavior sink" megalopolis he designed at the National Institute of Mental Health's animal farm in Poolesville. Maryland. It appeared that not all the animals seemed to suffer in that situation. In fact, some of theme - those that tended to have the most social contacts per unit of time -survived quite well. These "high-social-velocity" mice managed to get all the best locations for their nest, were most effective in guarding theme, had the largest number of surviving offspring etc. They were the winners.

The low-social-velocity mice were last at the food and water, had tenements for their nests, were rotten parents and so on. They were the schleps of species.

Calhoun's predictions, consistent with natural selection, was that low-society-velocity behavior, not being suited to the environment and reproducing least well, would be genetically selected against and would eventually die out. However, being the kind of scientist that he is (i.e., able to see what he does not expect to see), Calhoun made the surprising observation that generation after generation there was the same ratio of high-velocity to low-velocity mice.

He discovered the reason for this when, one day, he was watching one of his favorite low-velocity mice, a real schlimazel. The pens were built on a thick layer of specially made granular material in which the mice liked to burrow. The usual method of burrowing is for a mouse to use its forelegs as shovers in a sideways-thrusting manner. This was what the mouse was doing when it suddenly stopped. It paused for a moment (probably listening to the mouse version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra") and then did something unusual. Instead of continuing to push aside the granular material, the mouse urinated on it, gathered together a wet clump, lifted it and put it to one side, leaving a neat hole, Calhoun, amazed declared that the schlimazel had been innovative and creative. He concluded that the reason low-velocity animals survive despite all the odds against them is because they are creative.

Think about it: why should the winners find new ways of coping with the environment when they do just fine with the old ways? The shlimazels have no choices; they have to be creative.

Now if you think this is only true of mice, think for a minute about our origins. Try to remember back about 500,000 years. We were in trees, right? And then the trees became scarce. There was savanna growing between them, so it was who got shoved out into the savanna to find their way to another clump of trees - the winners or the losers? Obviously Homo erectus, privileged to evolve into you and me, derived from a bunch of losers who had to make it on solid ground because they were just not pushy and competent enough to get hold of a first-class tree and hang on to it.

[..]

http://forums.inlandtoday.com/archive/index.php/t-11012.html

So if Dr. Freedman's theory is correct, we may be losing some of our more susceptible people, ones who are unable to cope or adjust easily, to a mass influx of technology and a sense of overcrowding through excessive social interaction even when actual physical overpopulation is not present. In some the reaction is violence, and as we have seen in the last 30 years often times on a mass scale. Could this also explain road rage in dense traffic conditions that lead to violence?

http://docshare.tips/from-rodent-utopia-to-urban-hell_57741420b6d87f96328b47cc.html
From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH
Author(s): By Edmund Ramsden
Source: Isis, Vol. 102, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 659-688
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663598

The psychologist Daniel Stokols explained how “animal studies portray crowding as a stress situation,” a situation determined by the physical condition of spatial limitation: “As population density increases, spatial constraints become more acute until, finally, they eventuate in social disorganization and physiological pathology.

http://uncabob.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-behavioral-sink.html

"Controversy exists over the implications of the experiment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman's experiment recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness, and general unpleasantness. He declared to have found no appreciative negative effects in 1975. Researchers argued that "Calhoun’s work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."

http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/overpopulated_mouse_colony_perishes

Posted by The Curator in San Diego on Sat Feb 25, 2006 at 09:13 PM

Calhoun's experiment with rats (not mice) is described fairly well in John Bleibtreu's "The Parable of the Beast". He was wanting to study how their social structure might be dependent on access to the communal burrow, and constructed two types of burrow with different access; however he soon saw that things were going wrong in both, and the experiment was not what he'd planned.

Each burrow contained lines of 4 pens in a row, with openings between so that rats could pass from pen #1 to #4, by passing through #2 and #3 in between. Each pen had food, water and nesting material; but gradually pens #2 and #3 in each row became the centre of social activity, regardless of resources, simply because they were in the middle.

Things went further wrong when it was found that the subdominant rats matured earlier than the dominant males. This meant that the subdominant ones left the end pens early, leaving the dominant males with no-one to fight. These males in the end pens thus became even more aggressive and territorial, so increasing the crowding in the middle pens - even though, as at the start, there was plenty of room, food etc. for all of them.

The crowding in the middle pens induced fighting, aberrant sexual behaviour (meaning anything untypical, not necessarily homosexual), random violence, intrusion on lactating females, various health problems, disrupted behaviour patterns, and neglect of young.

Posted by The Curator in San Diego on Sat Feb 25, 2006 at 09:13 PM

The "mice in the museum" exhibit sounds interesting; perhaps they were trying to reconstruct Calhoun's experiment, or do a variation on it? The whole issue of overcrowding with any social species (such as rats in pens, or humans in slums) is about more than just space.

My comment (neonix): It's all about stress level. Fear is the mind killer.

Posted by intjudo on Sun Feb 26, 2006 at 05:50 PM

When I was 17-18, I had some gerbils that my Sister didn't want anymore. I kept them in a Hartz setup (the one with all the tubes for them to run around in - mine was set on top of another aquarium with a tube leading down - so basically 2 tanks in1) I started with 2 and they bred to 8 I think. After the babies became adults, I expanded their habitat with another of the same setup and connected it to the first one. It really was pretty sweet. They had lots of room. Well one thing lead to another and they doubled to about 16+. They seemed fine until one night, for no reason every single one went cannibalistic and they litterally tore each other to pieces. I never understood why. They had plenty of food and water and I've seen way more gerbils than 16 in one tank at the local pet store.
[...]
Oh, sorry. I need an PS to my first post. There were about 3 left after the massacre - I took them out and put them into a new setup but they wouldn't eat and wouldn't drink. They lasted about 3-4 days afterwards but all eventually just died. They would just sit in corners of the tank in little curled up balls and shake constantly. It really was very sad. After the survivors died, I just threw everything away. All the tanks were covered in blood and cedar chips. I've never owned a rodent since! I stick to reptiles - at least they never do stuff like this.

Posted by Cerebulon in texas on Sun Feb 26, 2006 at 10:10 PM

I wonder about the genetic quality of rodents raised in captivity. They are descended from the ones that weren't smart enough to get away.

My comment (neonix): And I am wonder what type of food was used in Calhoun experiment. Maybe wheat.

 

[Generator]

I don't have time to comment on this right now, but I'm linking an article I found to on a reputable news site by the Australian author Jane Caro that I think is relevant.

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/why-we-are-all-so-angry-20160711-gq3hpy.html

She writes that anger and stress are on the rise due to social exhaustion, essentially that the 'predator's mind' has become the organising principle for our societies. The Jungian 'shadow' has been cast as our real faces:

I am reading a lot of articles at the moment about anger. Pundits are pointing the finger at growing anger and resentment to explain the rise of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Golden Dawn, Marine le Pen, even our own Pauline Hanson. Why else is our public discourse so aggressive and the world of social media a cesspit of belligerence, they ask. Anger and disaffection are being used as a reason why voters are turning away from traditional political parties. Voting for fringe parties, or even to leave the EU, gets described as a 'protest' vote.

The trouble with this theory is that anger is a secondary emotion. It is a response. We get angry as a reaction to something, such as feeling hurt, humiliated or afraid. Men, in particular, are often much more comfortable displaying anger in the face of emotional distress than they are letting anyone see their sadness or vulnerability. The men who spew bile behind a veil of anonymity on social media, often at women, are sad bastards, unable to find the courage or energy to look their own pain in the face. After thirty years of neo-liberalism as the dominant political force we are left with an epidemic of anger, fear and bone-shattering fatigue.

A result that makes sense, when you consider neo-liberalism celebrates (unachievable) rugged individualism and no-quarter-given competition. According to its thin-lipped, hard-hearted philosophy, winners rise to the top and losers deserve their fate. Neo-liberalism's even more spoilt and indulged younger brother - libertarianism - understands even less about human frailty or weakness. Both lack any sense of compassion, gratitude or humility. They are fundamentally ungracious and self-congratulatory. As someone wise once said – those most in favour of any competition are those most likely to win it.

 

[duyunne]

Hi neonix

You bolded 'is about more than just space' from the Curator in San Diego, and I concur, as Calhoun himself pointed out that it isn't necessarily just overcrowding that causes the degeneration or decline, but the lack of meaningful social roles from having living needs provided without much challenge.

In a way, we're forced into dealing with the over abundance of numbers in our society without these meaningful roles. I say this as everything is within reach at the local markets/grocers/malls and in someways even handed to us even when we are unemployed in some countries, where welfare and living wages are accounted for.

Even when we are bestowed employment opportunities, the tasks are exceedingly trivial and tediously repetitious, such as cleaning the same space, cooking the same meals, driving the same routes, entering the same data, etc... Depending on the job, I'd have to say at least half of the work offered to us as a species is intermediary and not wholly complex enough to give us a grand sense of purpose.

Even those who carry coveted employment roles are doomed as intermediaries themselves. Pretty much every role is compartmentalized and automated within their isolated parts.



There is no more hunt, just wage or salary.

Gathering is no longer incremental or variant, it's routine, as our physical/commuting paths to our place of employment, or the local grocers or markets, are monotonously laid out.



Then of course, there is the modern day 'me first' culture of 'reality show, individual survivalism' that has overwhelmed our ability to mirror one another, basically, I believe we are subconsciously blocking our inherent ability to even want to empathize with one another as a result of this paranoid psychosis, driving everyone to want to out wit and win over their neighbors.

Basically, we should be seeing our neighbors as tribespeople, we should want them to prosper as a reflection of ourselves as we basically live together, but it's these walls give us this sense of isolation and individualism that we nurture over these connections.

Edit:
Even when understanding this, I still have no choice but to suspect my neighbor as a possible predator, as we're so far down this path of destruction that it would be foolish of me to nurture someone who would usurp all they could just to get a step a head of the herd.

The only thing that I can imagine as a way through this is to maintain this narrative, to continue to repeat these conditions we're facing collectively, in faith that enough of us might join hands, so to speak.

 

[neonix]

Does Calhoun’s Shocking Experiment Reveal the Condition of Our Society?
by Maciej Budkowski
Imprific.com - Effective Self-Improvement

[..]
In phase C, slower population growth was noticed. The population now doubled every 145 days in contrast to just 55 days in the previous phase. This atypical behavior among the mice of the utopian universe was observed.

In a natural environment (even though the number of litters is lower than in the experiment) most young mice reach maturity. As a consequence, there are more mice than there are available positions within the hierarchy of a particular group. When this happens, those who can’t find a position in the mice society will emigrate.

However, there was no place to emigrate to during the experiment. In the utopian experiment, many young mice were competing for a limited number of social positions. Those who failed to win the mouse race were dominated by other members of society in quite a dramatic manner.

The outcast mice would gather in the less attractive units of the utopian universe and withdraw from social interaction with other mice. Their position became so insignificant that their presence would not even provoke attacks from dominating males.

Nevertheless, their bodies were covered with wounds and scars.

These wounds weren’t the result of fights with other mice to attain a better social position though. They were from internal fights within the outcast group. From time to time one of the males would attack a chosen victim who had lost the ability to run away or fight back. After some time the victim would turn into the aggressor, accelerating spiral of violence by attacking other mice.

Not only were changes observed at the bottom of the social ladder, but also at the very top. The most territorial males were facing great challenges.

Even though certain mice failed in this mouse race, huge numbers of young rodents were still fighting for their own territory. Even the most combative males had difficulty fighting back against so many aggressors. The mouse universe was shrinking, and the intensity of defensive reactions was decreasing.

Due to the trouble in establishing the role of dominant male, peculiar changes in the behavior of female mice was observed.

The lack of guaranteed security made the nursing females more susceptible to potential attacks. Despite the fact that nursing females rarely involved themselves in aggressive situations in a natural environment, they were actually becoming the main aggressors in this experiment. They were often taking over the role of dominant males. This aggression quickly spread to their own young. The nursing females often forced their young to leave home long before they become independent. The litters were attacked and severely wounded by the females also during labour.

By midway in phase C, almost all young were prematurely rejected by their mothers. These rejected mice started an independent life with no experience in social interaction or building relationships. Even when they did try to socially interact, life in a highly populated universe meant their efforts went unnoticed by other mice. The maternal, aggression, or love instincts were not developed at all. Great numbers of females didn’t get pregnant during their entire lifetime.

A new and unusual group of males called the beautiful ones formed.

These mice were never engaging themselves in fighting or sexual approaches towards females; thus, their fur was nicely groomed. Their behavioral repertoire was confined to eating, drinking, sleeping, and grooming. The beautiful ones were also avoiding any potentially risky types of behavior.

At the end of phase C, the typical, organized mice society no longer existed.

[..] The majority of the last half of the population constituted non-reproducing females and attractive, uninterested-in-sex males. Only two groups in reproductive age were left; however, they weren’t able to reproduce. After time the population become extinct.

Dr. Halsey Marsden (1972, as cited in: Calhoun, 1973) carried out a similar experiment in which the mice from phase D were placed in a new and not overpopulated environment. Despite the better living conditions, these mice were not able to create an organized society. They lost the ability to reproduce and didn’t present a significant amount of sexual behaviors. The experiences of these mice within the “utopian society” resulted in the lack of ability to create a normal life outside of it.

What are the typical conclusions from this so-called “utopian” experiment?

TYPICAL CONCLUSIONS

Here is the quick list of the conclusions that can be found in numerous articles and comments to the article:
The disappearance of masculinity in modern world (as seen in “the beautiful ones.”)
Social exclusion makes victims extremely aggressive (similar to the “rejected” mice living in the centre of the utopia.)
The extinction of society resulting from prosperity (as seemed to happen by the end of the whole experiment.)
Aggressive women taking over the role of men when there are no strong men around (as seen in the aggressive female mice.)
The need to provide the new generation with decent workplaces or otherwise the whole generation will go to waste (similar to the disproportion of young and old people within the mice society.)

These are things that first come to mind after reading about this experiment. And these were the first thoughts that came to my mind too.

However, the “utopian experiment” does not actually support these ideas, and potential implications for our own society.

I will let Calhoun explain himself.

CALHOUN’S CONCLUSIONS

According to Calhoun, such phenomena may take place in societies where the older generations live longer than usual and the population growth is still within normal limits. The elderly do not die fast enough, and the younger generations wait impatiently to take over certain social roles. The competition between generations becomes much more severe.

After time, the old and the young start behaving in a way they would never do in the wild. Along with behavioral changes, the organization of society declines.

The rejection of young by their mothers and other adults creates an additional problem. The lack of opportunities to develop adequate affective bonds in childhood has a negative effect later on in life. Rather than intense, long-term relationships with a small family unit, shallow, short, and partial relations with a large number of others in the group, can lead to serious behavioral challenges.

The products of such living conditions are autistic-like individuals only capable of social behaviors necessary to survive. They are not able to do what typical mice do; i.e. engage in courtship, protect territory, take care of the young, create and be part of intragroup and intergroup hierarchy.

This lack of complex behaviors leads to the demise of the population.
Summing up, according to Calhoun, the reason for the above-mentioned result is too few or attractive social roles, and the decay of close and intensive relationships observed in early childhood. Overpopulation is the genesis of these two phenomena. Not the abundance of resources.

[..]
However, here we are dealing with a much more significant question. Can we actually apply the results of the experiment to humans?
[..]

Jonathan Freedman, a scientist who was also interested in the subject matter of Calhoun’s experiment, was studying the negative impact of overpopulation on humans. It turns out there is no negative impact at all. Freedman suggested that it is not the overpopulation but the uncontrolled social interactions that are problematic. Subsequent experiments showed that the lack of privacy leads to a higher stress level and “overpopulation” feeling (Freedman, 1975).

It should also be noted that humans, despite the number of similar biological and behavioral mechanisms, are a bit more complex creatures than mice. Human culture, which separates us from other animals, has an equally significant impact on the way we behave as biology does. If the culture had not had that impact our social interactions would still resemble – very natural and based on biology – behavior of the cavemen.

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL CONCLUSION?

Well, the shocking experiment outlined above does not describe the condition of our own society after all. Nevertheless, we should pay attention to the subsequent discoveries, and make sure we have our own private space to relax and recharge.

 

[neonix]

Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence
by Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams
January 2008

Department of Economic History
London School of Economics

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf

As the pens heaved with animals, one of his assistants described rodent “utopia" as having become “hell" (Marsden 1972).

Dominant males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount any rat they encountered. Mothers neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. In certain sections of the pens, infant mortality rose as high as 96%, the dead cannibalized by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a physical sense but at an immense psychological cost.

Unable to breed, the population plummeted and did not recover. The crowded rodents had lost the ability to co-exist harmoniously, even after the population numbers once again fell to low levels.

The macabre spectacle of crowded psychopathological rats and the available comparisons with human life in the densely-packed inner cities ensured the experiments were quickly adopted as “scientific evidence" of social decay. Referenced far outside of the fields of ecology and mental health, Calhoun’s rats have – or certainly had – come to seem part of the common cultural stock, shorthand for the problems of urban crowding just as Pavlov’s dogs were for respondent conditioning.

Through the effective design of space, he attempted to develop more collaborative and intelligent rodent communities, capable of withstanding greater degrees of density. For Calhoun, contrary to many interpretations, population growth was not inherently bad and humanity was not destined to destroy itself.

Humanity must undergo a conceptual and “compassionate" revolution, or else (like his rodents) descend to stagnation and death. He mapped the development of his rodent populations, of human cultural evolution, and his own career on to one another. Just as subordinate rats and mice struggled to find more creative solutions to the problems of increased density, as opposed to their aggressive and conservative superiors, he, like other creative thinkers, had also struggled professionally.

With his failure to secure the necessary institutional support to complete his project in the 1980’s, Calhoun feared that the pessimistic Orwellian future with which he had been all too readily aligned would become a reality.

The crowd had long been associated with pathology: with mass panic, with the spread of disease, with political radicalism, aggression, and unruly social behavior.

Meanwhile, the crowd itself was directly associated with the problems of population growth, another subject of concern. America in the decades following the Second World War experienced rapid change and growth as technological progress, catalyzed by the war effort and sustained by a buoyant economy, supplied the citizenry with a surfeit of luxuries. Yet with an improved economy came an accelerated birth-rate, coinciding with an increased shift from rural to urban living.

As population density increased it became evermore difficult for an individual to control the frequency of social contact. The result was unwanted interaction, leading to adverse reactions such as hostility and withdrawal, and ultimately, to the type of social and psychological breakdown seen during the latter stages in his crowded pens.

Others agreed, and went further. At the end of the 1960s, popular books by Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris urged that we view our own behavior in exactly the same way as we view the behavior of animals. They combined Calhoun’s work with the growing ethological interest in aggression and territorial behavior (Lorenz 1963). Re-describing humans as “naked apes," Morris insisted our inherited habits could not be “civilized-out," and urged we organize society accordingly (Morris 1967: 39). Much like rats, our “rules" for social interaction “were designed for use in a small, closely knit tribal unit, not in a vast metropolis. In the big city we are constantly intermixing with hundreds of […] strangers. This is something new, and it has to be dealt with" (Morris 1967: 84-85). Like Morris, Ardrey (playwright turned pop-anthropologist) shuttles between animal studies and human social ills, deploying the former to understand the latter. Also like Morris, he singles out the city for special attention: “We face in the urban concentration something new under the sun, something unanticipated. […] we may live in our cities like ants in an ant-hill, as vertebrates we are genetically unprepared for such contingency" (Ardrey 1970: 219).

No small part of this ugly barbarization has been due to sheer physical congestion: a diagnosis now partly confirmed with scientific experiments with rats – for when they are placed in equally congested quarters, they exhibit the same symptoms of stress, alienation, hostility, sexual perversion, parental incompetence, and rabid violence that we now find in the Megalopolis. (1968)

In Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), massive overpopulation result in ultra-violence, compulsory homosexuality, hermetic isolation.

The stacked nesting pens he creates not only look like tower-blocks, they are described as such. The names he gives their behaviors come to sound increasingly resonant with human culture and inner city vice. He uses terms such as the “pied pipers" to describe a group of females that follow objects obsessively; obsessive groomers are “beautiful ones;" there are “social dropouts," “somnambulists" and “autistics" for withdrawn individuals; “probers" or “juvenile delinquents" for the hypersexual and excessively violent; while aggressive females are “Amazons" (Calhoun 1962a, 1973b).

When Calhoun calls the congregation of rats around the same water bottle “bar-flies" or “social drinkers," the analogy with a crowded bar is almost impossible to push out.

The behavioral sink is not a pathological behavior per se, but a sort of para-pathology, which seemingly appears from, and supervenes upon, the behavior of individual animals within the crowded group (Calhoun 1962a, 1962b). The way Calhoun describes it, behavior becomes more and more erratic until, eventually, the behavioral sink emerges like a vortex. Thereafter it acts as an accelerant, exacerbating the effects of the other pathological behaviors: “The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental: a behavioral sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group" (Calhoun 1962a: 144). It is important to note that the behavioral sink was not inevitable, but emerged as a consequence of individual rats becoming so used to contact when eating that they begin to associate the process with the presence of others. By altering the feeding arrangements to reduce social contact, Calhoun found he was able to prevent its development. Without the sink, crowding was less lethal, but remained grotesque: infant mortality in severely overcrowded enclosures levels out at about 80%. With a behavioral sink, that figure skips to 96% (Calhoun 1962a: 148). Crowding pathology, therefore, was not dependent upon the behavioral sink, but it seemed to mark a point at which the rats are overwhelmed by the crowding, leading to a societal state-change.

“The density, the mass, the congestion, the pollution, the noise, and the turmoil are among the characteristics deplored in the modern city" (Gottman 1966: 6). Calhoun’s description of the behavioral sink not only captured the sense of a city as a destructive force, but further, seemed to explain why it was that such a horrific environment seemingly acted almost as an attractor, drawing and holding such large numbers of people. The process was one of “pathological togetherness," individuals conditioned to seek out the presence of others, even to the detriment of the self and society.

While it may or may not be the case that this growing backlash was motivated by the popularity of Calhoun’s rodents, it is certainly the case that the complaints were based not upon a careful reading of the technical papers, but upon the popular image of Calhoun’s work. The runaway success of the initial rat experiments came to overshadow much of the work he had done since. By the 1970s, some twenty years after the very first crowding experiments, and a decade after the Scientific American article, Calhoun had increasingly focused his attention on improving the psychological well-being of the crowded population. But still the popularisations (both the expositions and the entertainments) invariably focused on the negative aspects: the macabre appeal of the behavioural sink being such that it dominated his representation and his reputation.

As Calhoun’s work became increasingly simplified and caricatured, reduced to the simple causal claim – density equals pathology – it began to assume the role of an “modern folk-myth," more useful as a gauge of society’s fears than as a source of information for planning purposes (Porteus 1977: 176). As such, Calhoun was also seen to hold a dark and pessimistic vision of humanity’s future in a crowded world. His work was not only flawed, it was dangerous. In the words of Fischer and Baldassare (1977: 531): “A red-eyed, sharp-fanged obsession about urban life stalks contemporary thought." Calhoun’s work had precipitated an unwelcome assault on urban living, an assault that needed to be repelled. To this end, Freedman concluded Crowding and Behavior with a chapter entitled “In Praise of Cities" where he extolled the benefits of high density living. Fischer (1975), meanwhile, was a leading exponent of a revised “subcultural theory," which proposed that areas of high density allowed for the development of deviant subcultures which, while often exhibiting pathological behavior, simultaneously fostered community, innovation and creativity.

Even though Calhoun’s use of inbred strains ensured that his rats and mice were genetically alike, not only was social hierarchy inevitable, but it became increasingly destructive with increased density: those at the top of the social hierarchy resorting to violence, those at the bottom, to withdrawal. In explaining this, he was drawn to the language of Orwell: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL – BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS" (Calhoun 1977: 30).

In other ecological studies, social hierarchy helped maintain population stability, the weaker animals were pushed to the edge of an ecological range, restricted in access to mates and suffering greater degrees of morbidity and mortality (Wynne-Edwards 1965).

When growth passed a certain threshold, a population supplied with adequate resources did not decline to a point of lower density; it became extinct. Behavioral norms and social roles that once held a society together now undermined it: violence became more acute, withdrawal more severe. In other words, we’d go mad long before we’d starve; we’d kill one another long before hunger killed us. Malthus seemed moot.

Calhoun adopted Heinz von Foerster’s “doomsday" predictions (1971a: 370). Based upon an extrapolation of mankind’s ever-increasing rates of reproduction, von Foerster, one of the founders of cybernetics, had “calculated" that population growth would become infinite on Friday 13 October 2026. To avoid this eventuality we could, following the advice of the Zero Population Growth movement and von Foerster himself, introduce legislation to restrict fertility to replacement level, two children per couple. For many, this was the logical conclusion to be taken from Calhoun’s research: as population density would inevitably result in social breakdown, the solution was to “uncrowd" (a process involving an equally chilling range of oppressive policies) (Worchel 1978: 217). But Calhoun thought this sort of restriction undesirable and unnecessary. He challenged directly the “dismal theorem" of Paul R. Ehrlich in which each additional human was perceived as having a negative impact on the environment (Calhoun 1971b). Man was a “positive animal," for whom the pressures of density had driven innovation and social complexity, leading to a division of labour and new social roles. Thus, as physical space declined, man was forced to extend his “conceptual space" –the network of ideas, technologies – enabling more efficient use of resources while ensuring that each individual maintained a limited number of meaningful social interactions consistent with their biological makeup (Calhoun 1969).

Calhoun again found Orwell a useful point of reference. The innovations, technological and cultural, stimulated by population growth would allow for a further “communication-electronic revolution." Calhoun initially predicted this revolution to take place in 1988, the point where existing communication networks would prove ineffective in the face of increasing physical and conceptual density. He then altered this date to 1984 in “deference" to Orwell’s premonition of the dangers inherent in these new powers of control (Calhoun 1971a: 373). Like Orwell, however, Calhoun was not suggesting that the alternative futures of stagnation or extinction were inevitable. 1984 was a warning of a possible future, but there was an alternative, one that harnessed the positive potential of population growth while ensuring future survival. In seeking such a solution, Calhoun returned to his rats and mice.

In his early experiments in the outdoor pens, Calhoun had witnessed a creative act by his rats that he likened to the discovery of the wheel by man: when building a new burrow they did not simply dig out the dirt as they went, as any normal rat would do, instead they packed it into a large ball which they then rolled out (Calhoun 1973b). This innovation had not come from the socially dominant animals but from a highly disorganized and predominantly homosexual group of subordinates, partially withdrawn from the larger social organization. As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour (Calhoun 1977: 30). Inspired by this example, in his laboratory at NIMH, Calhoun attempted to design rodent universes that would both stimulate, resulting in “creative deviants," and ameliorate: removing the worst excesses of crowding pathology.

Through a variety of methods, such as operant conditioning and determining which of the mice and rats could eat, sleep, live, with whom, he sought to design ever more intelligent and collaborative rodent communities, capable of withstanding ever greater degrees of density. Here, then, was the hopeful agenda: if the wrong environment would drive us to destruction, perhaps the correct environment would be our remedy.

Meanwhile, Calhoun dedicated himself to a different kind of design: the design of social, intellectual, and information networks.

It had been 1968, Calhoun recalled, when he first realized that the “portent of change" he saw “could not be clarified without building an incipient ‘World Brain.’" The direct referent here is H. G. Wells’ visionary story which imagines all human knowledge made accessible through aggregation in a pre-digital “supercomputer." Calhoun, too, spoke of “externalizing" the mind. The human brain has, he writes in 1991, “become inadequate to deal with the complexity and diversity of life." The information glut meant it was increasingly likely that useful facts and insights would be lost among the noise, never reaching the communities who might use them. Calhoun suggested organizing scientists into a global, intercommunicating network composed of independent but interconnected groups and sub-groups. Only then could the necessary conceptual growth to avoid a catastrophic sink be achieved. He claimed it was “toward a concern with science as a world system which must be understood if the human race is to survive."He saw these attempts to defer social pathology as the centerpiece and real import of his work. Here was the profit, the positive signal from the noise of the behavioral sink.

It was in through this growth in conceptual space – enabled by the design of new buildings, new technologies, new social and intellectual networks – that humanity was presented with a more desirable future: what Calhoun called “Dawnsday" in opposition to von Foerster’s “Doomsday." All of mankind might become part of a single “world brain," consisting of numerous and diverse subsystems, each interlinked to, aware of, and dependent upon, the other. Although Calhoun’s intent was ameliorative, by employing the same apocalyptic rhetoric as the doomsayers such as Ehrlich and the ZPG movement, Calhoun’s already speculative predictions came to seem merely fantastical. It surely didn’t help that he explained his ideas by analogy with science fiction. Calhoun referred his readers to physicist-turned-author Leo Szilard’s “Calling All Stars," where the distant planet Cybernetica is populated by 100 interlinked computer “minds" whose connectedness results in rapid cognitive progress.

Drawing from Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions, Calhoun self-consciously presented his work as “meta" as opposed to “normal science" (1971a: 331). It was crucial that the insights of those (such as himself) existing on “a frontier of science, a zone of tension and change between traditional systems of thought," be subsumed within the broader whole. The creative solutions that emerged among those on the periphery needed to travel across hierarchies, disciplines, and, in this case, species.

Therefore, Calhoun’s rat and mouse universes not only provided a vision of the future destruction of humanity, but pointed to the potential for further evolution.

Discussion: Managing the reputation
Popular presentations have little room for nuance, and the “sound-bite" version of Calhoun’s work was that crowding caused madness, period. We’ve seen that Calhoun felt his work not only identified the symptoms and diagnosed the disease of modern society, but that it also pointed the way towards a cure. Yet his later experiments, concerned with trying to improve the lot of the crowded, receive far less attention – both from the popularisers, and (with the notable exception of the architects) from the professional and specialist communities on which he had initially made such an impact. It is a simplified version that aides Calhoun’s original success, but the tax on this is that it is only the simplified version that people are willing to acknowledge.

However, in the cacophonous furore surrounding the grim spectacle of the “behavioural sink," Calhoun finds that his ameliorative message is drowned out – everyone wants to hear the diagnosis, no one wants to hear the cure. Popular culture picks up Calhoun’s message, but it only selectively. When comic books, novels and films allude to Calhoun’s work, they do so almost exclusively with regard to the negative message. The sensationalist reporting he receives (in which, as mentioned, he was at least partially complicit) comes to define his public image and in turn the image that fellow scientists have of him. He is tainted, stigmatised almost, by the behavioural sink. It is a reputation he struggles to slough off.

 

[neonix]

How to protect fast-growing cities from failing
by Robert Muggah
TEDGlobal 2014 · 14:48 · Filmed Oct 2014

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_muggah_how_to_protect_fast_growing_cities_from_failing

11:31 We've got to bring those fragile cities into the conversation. One way to do this might be to start twinning our fragile cities with our healthier and wealthier ones, kickstarting a process of learning and collaboration and sharing of practices, of what works and what doesn't.

 

[neonix]

What The Mice Utopia Experiment might tell us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKY2Sx2a4rM

John B. Calhoun Film 7.1 (edited version) (NIMH, 1970-1972)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U

 

[neonix]

The Attachment Theory: How Childhood Affects Life
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjOowWxOXCg

The attachment theory argues that a strong emotional and physical bond to one primary caregiver in our first years of life is critical to our development. If our bonding is strong and we are securely attached, then we feel safe to explore the world. If our bond is weak, we feel insecurely attached. We are afraid to leave or explore a rather scary-looking world. Because we are not sure if we can return. Often we then don't understand our own feelings.