Confessions of a Cat-holic (38)

"Behavioral sink" was a term invented by the ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which could result from self-destructive psychology. He concluded that the rats first thrived but later drove themselves into extinction not as a result of external factors such as plague, predators, viral infections, wars, or famine. It was their mind, their mentality that they needed to do better than the other rats in a community which was sufficient to support over 4000 rats, a capacity that was more than double of the number of rodents at its peak level.

What Calhoun and his researchers created was undeniably a "rat utopia" – enclosed spaces in which rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth. In his February 1, 1962 report in an article titled "Population Density and Social Pathology" in Scientific American on the rat tutopia experiment, Calhoun described the behavior as follows: Many rats, male and females, showed inactive behaviors and staleness. Some exerted aggressive behaviors when bothered and they just wanted to be left alone. Many female rats were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations. In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.

No small part of this ugly barbarization had 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 exhibited the same symptoms of stress, alienation, hostility, sexual perversion, parental incompetence, and rabid violence that we often found in the Megalopolis. Calhoun himself saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. He characterized the social breakdown as a "spiritual death", with reference to bodily death as the "second death" mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation 2:11.

Controversy existed over the implications of the experiment. Calhoun's work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study had become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general. 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 appreciable 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."

What I meant to say was that there were plenty of fish in the sea. I came from one of the oldest and most crowded parts of Hong Kong but I didn't think the earth was full or that we needed to surpass others in order to make a living in Hong Kong, despite contrary beliefs among my peers.