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Escaping the Laboratory: the rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun
Introduction
In 1947, John B. Calhoun’s neighbor agreed to let him build a rat enclosure on disused woodland behind his house in Towson, Maryland. Calhoun would later reflect that his neighbor probably expected a few hutches, perhaps a small run. What Calhoun built was quarter acre pen, what he called a “garden of eden,” and, as the population expanded from a few individuals to many, a “rat city.” Calhoun calculated that the habitat was sufficient to accommodate as many as 5000 rats. Instead, the population levelled off at 150, and throughout the two years Calhoun kept watch, never exceeded 200. That the predicated maximum was never reached ought to come as no surprise: 5000 rats would be tight indeed. (1) Be that as it may, a population of only 150 seemed surprisingly low. What had happened?
Employed in the Laboratory of Psychology of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1954, and later as Chief of the Unit for Research on Behavioral Systems in the Laboratory of Brain, Evolution and Behavior until 1986, Calhoun repeated the experiment in specially constructed “rodent universes.” Using a variety of strains of rats and mice, he once more provided his populations with food, bedding, and shelter. With no predators and with exposure to disease kept at a minimum, Calhoun described his experimental universes as “rat utopia,” “mouse paradise.” With all their visible needs met, the animals bred rapidly. The only restriction Calhoun imposed on his population was of space–and as the population grew, this became increasingly problematic. As the pens heaved with animals, one of his assistants described rodent “utopia” as having become “hell.” (2)
Males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some males 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 can nibalized by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a physical sense but at an immense psychological cost. They were the majority in the late phases of growth, existing as a vacant, huddled mass in the centre of the pens. 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. At a certain density, they had ceased to act like rats and mice, and the change was permanent.
Calhoun published the results of his early experiments with the rats at NIMH in a 1962 edition of Scientific American. That paper, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” went on to be one of the most widely cited in psychology. (3) It has since been included as one of “Forty Studies that Changed Psychology,” joining papers by such figures as Freud, Pavlov, Milgram, Rorschach, Skinner, and Watson. (4) Like Pavlov’s dogs, Calhoun’s rats came to assume a near-iconic status as emblematic animals, exemplary of the ways in which behavioral experimentation at once marks and violates the human-animal distinction. The macabre spectacle of crowded psychopathological rats and the available comparisons with human life in the densely-packed inner cities ensured that 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. Along with their public popularity, the experiments played a critical role in the development of disciplines and research fields, so much so that sociologist and human ecologist Amos Hawley would remark that the extent of their influence was itself a “curious phenomenon.” (5)
Calhoun’s approach–notably his blurring of the human-animal boundary–impacted upon the concerns of a generation; subsequent years would see his work used as an explanation for social problems in increasingly crowded urban environments: rioting, violent crime, sexual deviancy. What made the NIMH experiments uniquely influential, as we shall see, was not only Calhoun’s decision to focus on behavioral rather than physical pathology (vice as opposed to misery–the more common of Malthusian concerns), but also his careful use of language. The transition from lab notes to Scientific American to the pages of newspapers, novels, film, and comic books, required relatively little translation. Constructing a typology of pathological crowding behaviors, he gives the groups names immediately resonant with human types. Most successful of all, the tendency to congregate in dense huddled knots of squalor and violence he called the “behavioral sink.” The mobility of Calhoun’s findings was also aided by his preferred experimental organism: the rat, a creature synonymous with urban and indeed moral degeneration.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Escaping+t…0197666893
Sorry about the frame rate, it’s the only video I could find on the experiment…
2013-02-20 04:20:56
Source: http://yeoldefalseflag.com/thread-escaping-the-laboratory-the-rodent-experiments-of-john-b-calhoun
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