Behavioral sink - RationalWiki
The experiment was stopped when conditions of the rodents became too extreme even for the ethical standards of the time. A second experiment was made in the 1970s with a 101-inch square cage and using mice, reaching a population about 2200 mice.
[5] He liked to call his cages "universes".
[8] Its first study’s result were published in 1962 in
Scientific American titled:
Population Density and Social Pathology. Calhoun feared that some of these behaviors may happened in
human society among highly crowded areas like most big cities leading to civilization and societal collapse.
As mentioned before some people happily extrapolate Calhoun's findings to modern society. Among them is
Stefan Molyneux, but the experiments are also popular topics of MGTOWS and
Incels. Some of the alleged parallels are:
- Isolated females that reject male are radical feminists.
- The "beautiful ones" are metrosexual versions of MGTOWS, Volcels, and everyone who seems uninterested in female companionship (and are the counterpart of the radical feminists).
- The isolating ones are also compare to the Hikikomori
phenomenon.
- Sporadic acts of violence caused by sexually frustrated males are like our modern mass shootings.
- The mistreatment and neglect of the offspring runs parallel to modern bad parenting and high divorce rates.
- Overt homosexual behavior in modern society
- Applying the unscientific glossary that they use in humans to the rats like "alpha male" and "beta male" (which is anti-scientific in itself) or homologous to some of the rodents' behavior with their current narrative (white knights, nice guys, etc.).
Among some of the problems that these groups show while interpreting Calhoun's finding are:
- Cherry picking: the rodents show lots of behavior that humans do not show, nor even in their narratives, yet they pick the ones that have some parallel as evidence that the same thing is happening.
- Correlation does not imply causation: Calhoun's experiments had no control group, several factors may have caused the effects observed like inbreeding and confinement, which human societies don't have.
- Anthropomorphism: humans and rodents are very different and some of the rodents' behavior has been observed in some other situations without crowding. There's a humanization of the rats to some degree applying them human characteristics and reasoning behind their actions.