It is important to note that behavioral sink could be avoided by altering feeding arrangements to reduce social contact. This publication was met by a receptive audience and the period that followed would see a surge of movies, books, and even comics that would depict an apocalyptic view of the future as a result of over-population, undoubtedly influenced by Calhoun’s findings. Essentially, it would exacerbate all kinds of pathology present in a group, thus making crowding lethal. In other words, the behavioral sink would emerge from erratic behavior and then act as an accelerant of other pathological behaviors. In 1962, Calhoun wrote about his research in an article for the Scientific American called “Population Density and Social Pathology.” In this article, he coined the term “behavior sink” to describe the breakdown of social functions and population collapse that stemmed from overcrowding in his rodent enclosures.Ĭalhoun described this behavioral sink as a kind of para-pathology that appears from, and succeeds upon, the behavior of individual animals within a group.
At first, the mice would meet, mate, and breed abundantly.All the experiments would lead to the same sequence of events: He continued studying rats throughout the 1950s, building more complex enclosures for the rats to examine how they would behave in an environment where they never lacked food and water, and that was predator-free. Ultimately, this caused a psychological breakdown and the rat society would collapse and they would become extinct. That lead to unwanted interaction, which made them hostile and withdrawn. So, as the rat population increased, it became difficult for individuals to control how often they had social contact. This confirmed Calhoun’s central contention that there is a limit to the number of meaningful interactions individuals can cope with before stress enters the picture. During the study, the rats subdivided themselves into small groups of up to 12 individuals.Ĭalhoun noted that 12 was the maximum number of rats that could live in harmony anything beyond that would lead to stress and psychological effects causing the group to break. The rat population was expected to reach 5,000 over the course of the experiment however, the population never grew beyond 200 and it stabilized at 150. The colony of Norway rats was enclosed in a 10,000 square-foot outdoor pen, where they were supplied with unlimited water and food.
That year, he started a 28-month study of a colony of Norway rats at Johns Hopkins University.
His experimental research started in 1947.
#Mouse experiment utopia series
He was focused on the problem of crowding, which led him to conduct a series of experiments and studies using rats and mice as subjects. But why? And what does that mean for humans? Well, that is exactly the point of this article today.Ĭalhoun dedicated his entire career to the study of population density and its effects on behavior. In essence, he created a perfect society of mice to study their behavior and see if they would thrive. For this study, he built a mice utopia purposefully designed to provide the mice with everything they needed and satisfy their every whim. Calhoun, an American ethologist, and behavioral researcher, created the Universe 25 Project.
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