Mice experiments suggest possible forms of societal breakdown

I've recently ran across discussion of an interesting series of old experiments on mice and rats to determine the effects of crowding on the animals, John Calhoun's "Universe 25" related experiments.  It's interesting in an abstract sense to me, to hear how that was set up and worked out, but it could also be interesting to consider related to current societal problems and changes.

The idea was to set up a living space, with many separate zones, and give rats or mice freely available food, and to see how unrestricted breeding played out.  It was initially described as a rat or mouse utopia, but of course problems with population levels was expected.  They didn't necessarily expect the form of that.

Populations leveled off well below the maximum space-related living capacity.  Stress related to high levels of social contact was a problem and limitation, and very strange forms of behavioral changes resulted in the mice.  Some became overly aggressive, others very passive, and others reacted in unconventional ways, behaving oddly.  Some "alpha" male rats set up isolated areas for them to live with a large number of females.  It was all a bit dystopian. 

The connection to human experience is a stretch, which is why the work was eventually somewhat discredited.  People never would experience a direct equivalent, and to the degree that they ever could long term stress impact could easily play out differently with people.  Still, I wonder to what extent similar patterns come up in environments like prisons.  And I wonder if social media exposure isn't mimicking some of the same constant social contact stress that the mice and rats experienced, with some vaguely related similar outcomes:  hyper-aggressiveness in some, passivity and dropping out of normal social behaviors by others, a failure of some people to find romantic partners, variances in child raising related to what was witnessed among the rodents, ending up with breeding ceasing at one point, with the whole colony dying out.

I wrote a more detailed summary of the study findings (many repeated studies, really; over 100 cases or "universes" worth of trials), and speculated about those connections in this blog post:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co … ments.html