The Behavioral Sink

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ISSUE 42 FORGETTING SUMMER 2011The Behavioral SinkWILL WILES

Cabinet and the author regret that a previous version of this articleomitted its sources. To readers who are interested in learning moreabout Calhoun's research, we highly recommend "Escaping theLaboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B Calhoun and TheirCultural Influence" by Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, LSEDepartment of Economic History, 2008, to which this article isindebted.

How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed thespecifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practicalutopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as thisparticular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of itsrodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form ofa tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they wereprevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall hadsixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Fourhorizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nestingboxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteenmice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. TheUniverse was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators,the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony.Heaven.

Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days ofupheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they startedto reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increasedexponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, asthe mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mousecivilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But itsdownfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitabledestruction.

Calhoun’s concern was the problem of abundance: overpopulation. As thename Universe 25 suggests, it was not the first time Calhoun had built aworld for rodents. He had been building utopian environments for rats andmice since the 1940s, with thoroughly consistent results. Heaven alwaysturned into hell. They were a warning, made in a postwar society already

rife with alarm over the soaring population of the United States and theworld. Pioneering ecologists such as William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn werecautioning that the growing population was putting pressure on food andother natural resources as early as 1948, and both published bestsellers on

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other natural resources as early as 1948, and both published bestsellers onthe subject. The issue made the cover of Time magazine in January 1960.In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, an alarmist worksuggesting that the overcrowded world was about to be swept by famineand resource wars. After Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show withJohnny Carson in 1970, his book became a phenomenal success. By 1972,the issue reached its mainstream peak with the report of the RockefellerCommission on US Population, which recommended that population growthbe slowed or even reversed.



Mouse utopia/dystopia, as designed by John B. Calhoun (middle and bottom). Allimages from Animal Populations: Nature’s Checks and Balances, 1983.

But Calhoun’s work was different. Vogt, Ehrlich, and the others were neo-Malthusians, arguing that population growth would cause our demise byexhausting our natural resources, leading to starvation and conflict. Butthere was no scarcity of food and water in Calhoun’s universe. The onlything that was in short supply was space. This was, after all, “heaven”—a

title Calhoun deliberately used with pitch-black irony. The point was thatcrowding itself could destroy a society before famine even got a chance. InCalhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice.

So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growthslowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantlyrubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink,and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowdedevery day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. Withmore and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult andstressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal



stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normalsocial discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it theability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregatedin large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawaloccasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. Thevictims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own innests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young.Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lonefemales retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Othermales, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex andnever fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissisticintrospection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence becameendemic. Mouse society had collapsed.



Mouse utopia/dystopia, as designed by John B. Calhoun. All images from AnimalPopulations: Nature’s Checks and Balances, 1983.

On day 560, a little more than eighteen months into the experiment, thepopulation peaked at 2,200 mice and its growth ceased. A few micesurvived past weaning until day six hundred, after which there were fewpregnancies and no surviving young. As the population had ceased toregenerate itself, its path to extinction was clear. There would be norecovery, not even after numbers had dwindled back to those of the headyearly days of the Universe. The mice had lost the capacity to rebuild theirnumbers—many of the mice that could still conceive, such as the “beautifulones” and their secluded singleton female counterparts, had lost the socialability to do so. In a way, the creatures had ceased to be mice long beforetheir death—a “first death,” as Calhoun put it, ruining their spirit and theirsociety as thoroughly as the later “second death” of the physical body.

Calhoun had built his career on this basic experiment and its consistentresults ever since erecting his first “rat city” on a quarter-acre of landadjacent to his home in Towson, Maryland, in 1947. The population of thatfirst pen had peaked at 200 and stabilized at 150, when Calhoun hadestimated that it could rise to as many as 5,000—something was evidentlyamiss. In 1954, Calhoun was employed by the National Institute of MentalHealth in Rockville, Maryland, where he would remain for three decades. Hebuilt a ten-by-fourteen-foot “universe” for a small population of rats,divided by electrified barriers into four rooms connected by narrow ramps.Food and water were plentiful, but space was tight, capable of supporting amaximum of forty-eight rats. The population reached eighty before



maximum of forty-eight rats. The population reached eighty beforesuccumbing to the same catastrophes that would afflict Universe 25:explosive violence, hypersexual activity followed by asexuality, and self-destruction.

In 1962, Calhoun published a paper called “Population Density and SocialPathology” in Scientific American, laying out his conclusion: overpopulationmeant social collapse followed by extinction. The more he repeated theexperiment, the more the outcome came to seem inevitable, fixed with therigor of a scientific equation. By the time he wrote about the decline andfall of Universe 25 in 1972, he even laid out its fate in equation form:

Mortality, bodily death = the second deathDrastic reduction of mortality= death of the second death= death squared

= (death)2

(Death)2 leads to dissolution of social organization= death of the establishmentDeath of the establishment leads to spiritual death= loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival= the first deathTherefore:

(Death)2 = the first death

This formula might apply to rats and mice—but could the same happen tohumankind? For Calhoun, there was little question about it. No matter howsophisticated we considered ourselves to be, once the number ofindividuals capable of filling roles greatly exceeded the number of roles,

only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. ... Individualsborn under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to beincapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will becomefragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for lifein a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have beenblocked.



Cover of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, 1968. Brunner’s title comes from thenotion that the world’s population in 1968 could fit (if everyone were standing

tightly together) on the Isle of Man, while the projected population in 2010 wouldfit on the larger island of Zanzibar. Courtesy Grant Thiessen/BookIT.

If its growth continued unchecked, human society would succumb tonihilism and collapse, meaning the death of the species. Calhoun’s death-squared formula was for social pessimists what the laws ofthermodynamics are for physicists. It was a sandwich board with “The EndIs Nigh” written on one side, and “QED” on the other. Indeed, the plight ofCalhoun’s rats and mice is one we easily identify with—we put ourselves inthe place of the mice, mentally inhabit the mouse universe, and cannothelp but see ways in which it is like our own crowding world.

This is precisely what Calhoun intended, in the design of his experimentsand the language he used to describe them. Universe 25 resembles theutopian, modernist urban fantasies of architects such as LudwigHilberseimer. Calhoun referred to the dwelling places within his Universesas “tower blocks” and “walk-up apartments.” As well as the preening“beautiful ones,” he refers to “juvenile delinquents” and “dropouts.” Thishandy use of anthropomorphism is unusual in a scientist—we are beinginvited to draw parallels with human society.

And that lesson found a ready audience. “Population Density and SocialPathology” was, for an academic paper, a smash hit, being cited up to 150times a year. Particularly effective was Calhoun’s name for the point past



times a year. Particularly effective was Calhoun’s name for the point pastwhich the slide into breakdown becomes irretrievable: the “behavioralsink.” “The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental,” Calhounnoted drily. The “sink,” a para-pathology of shared hopelessness, drew inpathological behavior and exacerbated its effects. Once the event horizonof the behavioral sink was passed, the end was certain. Pathologicalbehavior would escalate beyond any possibility of control. The writer TomWolfe alighted on the phrase and deployed it in his lament for the decliningNew York City, “O Rotten Gotham! Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,”anthologized in The Pump House Gang in 1968. “It got to be easy to look atNew Yorkers as animals,” Wolfe wrote, “especially looking down from someplace like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon. Thefloor was filled with the poor white humans, running around, dodging,blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pen full of starlings or rats orsomething.” The behavioral sink meshed neatly with Wolfe’s pessimismabout the modern city, and his grim view of modernist housing projects asbreeding grounds for degeneration and atavism.

Wolfe wasn’t alone. The warnings inherent in Calhoun’s research fell onfertile ground in the 1960s, with social policy grappling helplessly with theproblems of the inner cities: violence, rape, drugs, family breakdown. Arich literature of overpopulation emerged from the stew, and when we lookat Calhoun’s rodent universes today, we can see in them aspects of thatliterature. In the 1973 film Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison’s 1966novel Make Room! Make Room!, the population of a grotesquely crowdedNew York is mired in passivity and dependent on food handouts which, it

emerges, are derived from human corpses. In Stand on Zanzibar, JohnBrunner’s 1972 novel of a hyperactive, overpopulated world, society isplagued by “muckers,” individuals who suddenly and for no obvious reasonrun amok, killing and wounding others. When we hear of the death throesof Universe 25—the cannibalism, withdrawal, and random violence—theseare the works that come to mind. The ultraviolence-dispensing, gang-raping, purposeless “droogs” of Antony Burgess’s novel A ClockworkOrange, which appeared in the same year as Calhoun’s Scientific Americanpaper, are the very image of some of the uglier products of mouse utopia.



Poster for Soylent Green, 1973. The film depicts a futuristic society in whichoverpopulation is so catastrophic and food in such short supply that the populacesurvives on rations of the titular food product, which turns out to be made from

processed human flesh.

Calhoun’s research remains a touchstone for a particular kind of pessimisticworldview. And, in the way that writers like Wolfe and the historian LewisMumford deployed reference to it, it can be seen as bleakly reactionary, awarning against cosmopolitanism or welfare dependence, which might sapthe spirit and put us on the skids to the behavioral sink. As such, it foundfans among conservative Christians; Calhoun even met the pope in 1974.But in fact the full span of Calhoun’s research had a more positive slant.The misery of the rodent universes was not uniform—it had contours, andsome did better than others. Calhoun consistently found that those animalsbetter able to handle high numbers of social interactions faredcomparatively well. “High social velocity” mice were the winners in hell. Asfor the losers, Calhoun found they sometimes became more creative,exhibiting an un-mouse-like drive to innovate. They were forced to, inorder to survive.

Later in his career, Calhoun worked to build universes that maximized thiskind of creativity and minimized the ill effects of overcrowding. Hedisagreed with Ehrlich and Vogt that restrictions on reproduction were theonly possible response to overpopulation. Man, he argued, was a positiveanimal, and creativity and design could solve our problems. He advocatedovercoming the limitations of the planet, and as part of a multidisciplinarygroup called the Space Cadets promoted the colonization of space. It was asource of lasting dismay to Calhoun that his research primarily served asencouragement to pessimists and reactionaries, rather than stimulating thekind of hopeful approach to mankind’s problems that he preferred. Morecheerfully, however, the one work of fiction that stems directly from



© 2011 Cabinet Magazine

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

Sources:Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams, "Escaping the Laboratory: The RodentExperiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence," The Journal ofSocial History, vol. 42, no. 3 (2009). Available as a working paper athttp://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/.

John B. Calhoun, "Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of aMouse Population," in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 66(January 1973), pp. 80–88. Available athttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264.

John B. Calhoun, "Population Density and Social Pathology," Scientific

American, vol. 206, no. 2 (February 1962), pp. 139–150. Available athttp://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1963-02809-001.

Will Wiles is a London-based author and journalist. He is deputy editor ofIcon, a monthly architecture and design magazine. His debut novel, Care ofWooden Floors, will be published by HarperPress in February 2012.

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The Behavioral Sink