From Rodent Utopia To Urban Hell

From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH
Author(s): By Edmund Ramsden

Source: Isis, Vol. 102, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 659-688
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell

Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of
NIMH
By Edmund Ramsden*
ABSTRACT
In a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, the animal ecologist
John B. Calhoun offered rats everything they needed, except space. The resulting population explosion was followed by a series of social pathologiesviolence, sexual
deviance, and withdrawal. This essay examines the influence of Calhouns experiments
among psychologists and sociologists concerned with the effects of the built environment
on health and behavior. Some saw evidence of the danger of the crowd in Calhouns rat
cities and fastened on a method of analysis that could be transferred to the study of urban
man. Others, however, cautioned against drawing analogies between rodents and humans.
The ensuing dispute saw social scientists involved in a careful negotiation over the
structure and meaning of Calhouns experimental systems and, with it, over the significance of the crowd in the laboratory, institution, and city.
HEN, IN 1972, THE SOCIOLOGIST AMOS HAWLEY reflected on the study of the
city, he noted that not since the interwar era had one heard so much about density.
Seeking to explain this surge of interest in space and numbers, he turned his attention to
a curious phenomenon. In the late 1950s a series of experiments had been instigated at
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) by the ecologist John B. Calhoun. They
were designed to explore the detrimental effects of crowding among rats and mice. In a
1962 number of Scientific American, Calhoun documented in graphic detail the range of
deviant behaviors that emergedviolence, cannibalism, withdrawal, and homosexual-
* Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, United
Kingdom.
The majority of the research for this essay was carried out as part of a project on the history of stress at the
Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, supported by the Wellcome Trust, and also as part of an
ESRC/Leverhulme Trust project, The Nature of Evidence: How Well Do Facts Travel? at the Department
of Economic History, London School of Economics. I would like to thank Sabina Leonelli, Rob Kirk, Jon
Adams, Mary Morgan, Claude Fischer, Paul Paulus, Andy Pickering, and the referees and editor of Isis for their
extremely helpful comments. I would also like to thank the staff of the University of Wyoming and the National
Library of MedicineJohn Rees in particularfor help in negotiating the Calhoun Papers.
Isis, 2011, 102:659 688
2011 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2011/10204-0003$10.00
659

660
FROM RODENT UTOPIA TO URBAN HELL
ity. This publication rapidly became one of the most widely referenced in psychology,
urban sociology, and the design professions and has since been anthologized as one of
Forty Studies That Changed Psychology.1
Crowding was a problem to which Calhoun dedicated his entire professional life as a
scientist, in ways that traversed boundaries between scientific disciplines and social
worlds. This essay will first explore the development of Calhouns program of research
from the attempt to control rodent populations in the city of Baltimore, to his model rat
cities in the laboratory, to their representation through publications such as his article in
Scientific American. I will focus on the two most important elements that he identifies: his
experimental subjects or, more precisely, his experimental societies of rats and
miceand his experimental environment or, better, his experimental architecture.
With his explicit focus on the technical and the material, his crowding studies are most
fruitfully analyzed historically as experimental systems, as defined by Hans-Jrg Rheinberger. Here the focus of the history of science is extended to encompass the technical
objects of the experimental process that contain, articulate, and continually redefine the
scientific object or epistemic thing, such as crowding pathology.2 While there has
been much historical attention given to the model organism as technical object, we are also
encouraged to examine the equally important model environment in which the organisms
are, in turn, contained, restricted, and determined.3
When historians have discussed the technical objects of the laboratory, the emphasis has
been on sanitation, standardization, order, and control. Yet, as Rheinberger argues, the key
to a successful experimental system is its ability to generate novelty, and thus new
epistemic things, through its technical objects.4 The value of a model organism stems not
1 Amos H. Hawley, Population Density and the City, Demography, 1972, 9:521529, on p. 522; John B.
Calhoun, Population Density and Social Pathology, Scientific American, 1962, 306:139 148; and Roger R.
Hock, Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations in the History of Psychological Thought, 5th ed.
(New York: Prentice Hall, 2004). By the end of the 1970s Calhouns paper had been cited 258 times (Science
Citation Index) and had become standard reading for courses in psychology, architecture, and urban studies, with
over one million reprints requested from Scientific American: Calhoun, Employees Contribution to the
Performance Assessment of His Scientific Service, 4 Dec. 1979, John B. Calhoun Papers, National Library of
Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland (hereafter cited as Calhoun Papers, NLM).
2 John B. Calhoun, Environment, Culture, and Heredity as Interacting Variables in the Determination of
Behavior, Social Organization, and Physiology, May 1956, John B. Calhoun Papers, University of Wyoming,
Laramie (hereafter cited as Calhoun Papers, Wyoming), Box 50a, Misc Docs 1956; Calhoun, Experimental
Socio-Physical Environments, URBS Doc 249, 3 Dec. 1975, Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 8b; and
Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 238, 29. See also Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics
and the Experimental Life (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994). The collection of Calhouns papers held at the
University of Wyoming has since moved to the National Library of Medicine, where it has been integrated as
a parallel collection, Accession 2. I have continued to use the Wyoming designation because I am not familiar
with the new box numbers.
3 For an analysis of the processes of standardization see Karen Raders important book Making Mice:
Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900 1955 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
2004). For work that addresses the combined uses of model organisms as materials, artifacts, and sample systems
see Rachel Ankeny, Wormy Logic: Model Organisms as Case-Based Reasoning, in Science without Laws:
Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives, ed. Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton
Wise (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 46 58; and Sabina Leonelli, Growing Weed, Producing
Knowledge: An Epistemic History of Arabidopsis thaliana, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2007,
29:193224. Among the few analyses of the importance of attempts to standardize laboratory conditions of rat
colonies see Bonnie Tocher Clause, The Wistar Rat as a Right Choice: Establishing Mammalian Standards and
the Ideal of a Standardized Mammal, Journal of the History of Biology, 1993, 26:329 349; and Robert Kirk,
Between the Clinic and the Laboratory: Ethology and Pharmacology in the Work of Michael Robin Alexander
Chance, c. 1946 1964, Medical History, 2009, 53:513536.
4 Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (cit. n. 2). Calhoun drew from Thomas Kuhn when

EDMUND RAMSDEN
661
only from its use as a technical artifact representing nature but as a sample selected from
natures very own workshop.5 As such, it is an active and unpredictable material,
generating as many questions as answers. Calhoun was explicit in his recognition of the
animal as a source of novelty, particularly when allowed to interact with others. He even
wrote of the need to allow the animals to speak to him. They spoke through the
expression of a range of pathological behaviors that he controlled through the design of
the pens. For Calhoun, it was not just the animals that were active in an experimental
system, but the spaces in which they existed. Space organized and determined communication, hierarchy, and behavior. As one of Calhouns most prominent allies declared:
space speaks.6 Thus, while Calhoun used standardized laboratory animals and machinery, in his experimental systems neither the rodent societies nor the laboratory spaces they
inhabited were stable. They were unpredictable, ever changing, open ended, resulting in
a continuous shift and interchange between technical and scientific object.7 As he describes in his copious research notes and memoranda, by continuously tinkering with the
designplacing a partition here, a water bottle there, or by choosing an alternative
foodstuffCalhoun was able to generate and ameliorate a range of often unexpected
behaviors. Calhoun perceived his systems to have direct relevance to human behavior and
the design of urban environments; they were, quite literally, machines for making the
futurenot only in the laboratory, but in the social world.8
By placing his model organisms in a model urban space, complete with tower blocks,
cafeterias, and congested stairwells, he would generate behaviors seemingly synonymous
with those of urban man; the combination of abstraction, precision, vivid language, and
graphic illustration used in his publications further heightened their appeal. Calhouns
success in generating renewed interest among social scientists in the problem of the crowd
is notable, particularly when we consider their troubled historical relations with radical
behaviorismin work based on studies of dogs, rats, and pigeonsand with hereditary
determinism and eugenicswhich many believed to have reemerged with the greylag
geese and fire ants of ethology and sociobiology.9 As the psychotherapist Carl Rogers
declared when drawing attention to the problems of population and urbanization: Imagine me involving a rat study! It was for this reason that Hawley found the interest in
describing his own methods as metascientific, even artistic; see John B. Calhoun, Metascientific Research, 20
June 1973, Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 7a, Folder 97: 5/6.
5 Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and
Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), p. 51, quoted in Leonelli, Growing Weed, Producing
Knowledge (cit. n. 3), p. 196. See also Robert E. Kohler, Drosophila: A Life in the Laboratory, J. Hist. Biol.,
1993, 26:281310.
6 Calhoun, Experimental Socio-Physical Environments (cit. n. 2); and Edward Hall, The Silent Language
(New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 146.
7 Indeed, Calhouns description of his experiments as complex systems reflects his interest in cybernetics.
Cybernetics, Andrew Pickering argues, is a science of the unknowable, always open ended in response to an
ever-changing world that we can never hope to understand fully; see Andrew Pickering, Sketches of Another
Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940 2000, unpublished MS, 2009.
8 Franc
ois Jacob (1988), quoted in Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (cit. n. 2), p. 28.
9 While there has been an intense historical interest in the perceived implications of the crowd for democratic
society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the problems of population growth more
generally, the rich history of its relationship to behavior, mental health, and emotional well-being in the late
twentieth century has escaped scholarly attention. With a revived focus on density in the 1960s and 1970s, the
crowd became more than a conduit for infection, poverty, and political upheaval; it became a subject of
experimental science, and, with it, science truly entered into what Gustave Le Bon had once described as the
era of crowds. See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895; New York: Viking, 1960).

662
Calhouns work so curious: This from people who have so studiously held their work
aloof from any comparison with findings of biological researches is rather ironic.10
After exploring why Calhouns experiments captured the scientific and public imagination, the essay will turn to the studies of human crowding that his work inspired. We
will focus our attention on two subfields of sociology and social psychology: human
ecology and environmental psychology. For these promulgators of an earlier spatial turn
in the social and behavioral sciences, the materialities of numbers, space, and place were
crucial, yet too often overlooked, components of social systems. Calhouns work provided
an opportunity to reorient these fields to take account of the effects of the physical
environment on behavior. While scientists first merely looked to identify the various
pathologies of Calhouns crowded rats in the human city, they increasingly sought to
generate and ameliorate these pathologies in the social laboratory. Thus, they began to
adapt not just his ideas and theories, but elements of his experimental systems, to the
human species. There emerged an interdisciplinary experimental culture that shared a
material style of research focused on the crowd.11 Scientists were not simply legitimating
visions of moral and social order through reference to animal behavior; they were
beginning to think with animals and the material spaces they inhabitedidentifying new
opportunities for managing individuals and populations in, and through, the design of the
physical environment.12
Through exploring the uptake of Calhouns systems, we will see how the objects of his
laboratory his model animals and model environmentsnot only shaped theories of the
crowd but continuously determined experimental approaches and applications in the
human world. Calhouns objects mediated between life inside and outside the laboratory.
However, while Rheinbergers approach has emphasized the importance of practice, this
does not mean that social interests and intellectual commitments do not have an important
role in the design of experimental systems. What Paolo Palladino describes as the
inevitable co-constitution of theories and tools is particularly apparent in the transfer
and mediation of systems from one place to another.13 For those adapting Calhouns
10 Carl R. Rogers, Some Social Issues Which Concern Me, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1972,
12:45 60, on p. 48; and Hawley, Population Density and the City (cit. n. 1), p. 522. Andrew Euston, director
in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, also described Calhoun as the guru of the young
environmental designers. See John B. Calhoun, Write-up and Figures for Design News Article, Calhoun
Papers, NLM, Box 63; and V. W. Wigotsky, Engineering and the Urban Crisis, Pt: 3: Urban Congestion,
Design News, 15 Sept. 1970, pp. 48 60.
11 Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, Experimental SystemsCultures of Experimentation, in Concepts, Theories, and
Rationality in the Biological Sciences, ed. Gereon Wolters, James G. Lennox, and Peter McLaughlin (Pittsburgh:
Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp. 107122, on p. 118. Rheinberger defines experimental cultures as clusters of
ensembles of experimental systems that establish communities cutting across traditional disciplines and
determine the possible circulation channels of epistemic things.
12 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), differentiates between thinking about and with animals; in the latter
case the animal becomes an active participant. Yet what is the role of the environment in which the animal
exists? There has, on the one hand, been much attention paid to the transfer of experimental systems from animal
to human in the laboratories of the virologist, biochemist, physiologist, and molecular geneticist, and, on the
other, an immense historical literature on the transfer of ideas and theories from the animal world to human
societies, from social Darwinism to ethology and sociobiology. Yet there has been little analysis of the transfer
of experimental systems from the study of animal behavior to the control of human behavior by social scientists
in the twentieth century. The crossing of boundaries between, say, the study of territorial behavior in the
zoological garden and in the mental hospital focused attention not only on the similarities between man and other
animals but on the similarities of the environments in which they were contained.
13 Paolo Palladino demands that historians pay more attention to the mediating role of the material objects of
the laboratory. See Paolo Palladino, Review: Bringing the World into the Laboratory, or the (Ir)resistible Rise

EDMUND RAMSDEN
663
systems to human populations, both research practicalities and theoretical inclinations

resulted in some objects being privileged over others, redefining the relation between the
technical and the epistemic.
Environmental psychologists differentiated between densitya physical measure of
numbers per square unit area, as defined by the ecologistand crowdinga subjective
experience of too little space and too many people, an object of interest to the psychologist. In doing so, they established a boundary between the human and the nonhuman
animal. Yet, as density was further refined as concept and measure, it was retained as a
variable of considerable import, and Calhouns experiments continued to be perceived as
complementary studies of interactive social systems determined by the design of material
spaces. Psychologists focused their attention on the intricacies of Calhouns model
environments, which, crucially, existed not only as technical conditions but as scientific
objects. The design of the built environment was the target of experimental inquiry: space
was active, determining social interactions, relationships, life. They saw in the rodent pens
analogues of the various institutions that made up the urban world in which people were
constrained in large numbers. Hospitals, dormitories, and prisons were comparable urban
laboratorieswhat Robert Kohler describes as placeless placesallowing for similar
processes of precision, abstraction, manipulation, replication, and innovation.14 In making
such connections and distinctions, social scientists continued to draw significant scientific
and social capital from Calhouns systems while simultaneously promoting a more
optimistic alternative: through the better design of physical spaces to control social
interactionwhether in rodent laboratories or in human homes, prisons, schools, or
hospitalsit was possible not only to create, but also to ameliorate, crowding pathology.
While psychologists focused on the model environment, others focused on Calhouns
model organism. This approach was particularly prominent among sociologists concerned
that, with the growing obsession over physical variables, the social factors and individual
actions that determined the desirability of urban places were being overlooked. They
carried out their own studies of human beings to test a simplified version of Calhouns
systems: the physical elements of density and crowding (the stimulus of individuals per
square unit area) became standardized and stabilized as a technical object, leading
directly, and inevitably, to social pathology (a behavioral response). By examining this
relationship, and continuously failing to generate pathology through their own research
practices, they could counter a growing and unwanted design or architectural determinism
among psychologists. Yet by stabilizing the crowd as a mere physical entity of limited
significance, they were also able to emphasize the fundamental differences between
rodents and people as organisms and thus to address an even greater danger: an emergent
biological determinism that they believed inherent in ethological thinking. Through their
intelligence, adaptability, and capacity to make the world around them, humans were
capable of coping with crowding. As these sociologists developed their critique of
crowding studies, Calhouns perceived assumption that men were like rats became a point
of attack, a means of tainting and stigmatizing the obsession with the crowd as dangerous
in itself. Calhouns initial and considerable influence among social scientists had made
of Drosophila melanogaster, British Journal for the History of Science, 1996, 29:217221, on p. 218; see also
Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura, The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992).
14 Robert E. Kohler, Labscapes: Naturalizing the Laboratory, History of Science, 2002, 40:473501; see also
Thomas F. Gieryn, City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban Studies, Social Studies of
Science, 2006, 36:538.

664
him a target; critics sought to denigrate crowding studies as driven by biological and
behavioral reductionism and, as such, by a conservative, even reactionary, ideology.
DECLARING WAR ON THE NORWAY RAT
In 1942, a project to reduce the rat population of Baltimore was instigated at Johns
Hopkins Universitythe disease and losses to stores of food inflicted by rodents being
deemed more than usually problematic in a time of war.15 The Rodent Control Projects
first director, Curt P. Richter, was renowned as an expert on the internal, spontaneous, and
biologically determined rhythms of the rodent body. For Richter, physiologically motivated behavior ensured the internal stability of the organism in the face of environmental
change. He had identified a wisdom of the body in the rats selection of necessary
nutrients: adrenalectomy prompted an increased intake of sodium chloride; removal of the
parathyroid glands led to an increased intake of calcium. Having studied how homeostatic
behavioral mechanisms ensured survival, he was now using them to poison the rodent
body more effectively, and thus war was declared on the Norway rat.16
In spite of Richters successes, a rat population devastated by poisoning would quickly
recover as a result of migration and high rates of fertility. Attention soon shifted from
chemical to ecological control controlling rats through controlling spaceand, with it,
from the individual cages of Richters psychobiology laboratory to the urban laboratories of the ecologists John T. Emlen, Jr., and David E. Davis at the School of Hygiene
and Public Health. Ecologists found that the number of rats could be reduced significantly
by removing harborage, garbage, and access to water. In the view of Davis, who directed
the renamed Rodent Ecology Project from 1946, rat populations were made up of
aggressive individuals in competition, their hierarchy established through fighting. Reduced resources led to increased violence, social pressure, and social strife, as
described by Daviss one-time student John J. Christian.17
Here ecologists were contributing to a long-running debate in animal ecology over the
existence of homeostatic regulatory mechanisms internal to a population that ensured that
a species did not outstrip the resources required for subsistence. It was Christian who first
suggested that stress might be the mechanism that served to regulate population density.
Christian was drawing from the work of the physiologist Hans Selye, who had applied
acute, nonspecific nocuous agents to rodent bodies extreme cold, surgical injury, injections of sublethal doses of various drugs. All produced a typical general adaptation
syndrome: the adrenal glands released hormones that maintained the homeostatic conditions of the body. Yet with prolonged stress metabolic changes became diseases of
adaptation. As Christian showed, they increased mortality through hypertension, ulcers,
and kidney and heart disease, while lowering reproduction by inhibiting gonadal function,
lactation, and estrus. By altering the physical parameters in which a population existed,
15 Christine Keiner, Wartime Rat Control, Rodent Ecology, and the Rise and Fall of Chemical Rodenticides,
Endeavour, 2005, 29:119 125. The project was first supported through the Office of Scientific Research and
Development and the City of Baltimore and later by the Rockefeller Foundation.
16 Rats in War and Peace, Rockefeller Foundation, Confidential Monthly Report, Trustees, 1 Feb. 1948, No.
100, Rockefeller Archive Center, New York (hereafter cited as RAC). For an overview of Richters research on
the rat see Elliott M. Blass, ed., The Psychobiology of Curt Richter (Baltimore: York, 1976). Richters
continuous references to the wisdom of the body reflect the influence of the physiologists Claude Bernard and
Walter Cannon.
17 John J. Christian, Physiological and Pathological Correlates of Population Density, Journal of the Royal
Society of Medicine, 1964, 57:169 174, on p. 169.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
665
scientists, city planners, and public health officials enrolled the agency of the rat to limit
rodent numbers.18
Crucial to understanding the organization and behavior of the rat were the experiments
of John B. Calhoun. Born in Elkton, Tennessee, on 11 May 1917, Calhoun describes
having had continuously to subsidize his study of nature through trapping and collecting
initially for the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, from which he graduated in 1939.
In the Rodent Ecology Project, he was able to combine his considerable skills in the field
with the theoretical perspective gained from his Ph.D. supervisor, Orlando Park, at
Northwestern, and Warder C. Allee of Chicago, which privileged sociality, community,
and cooperation among animals, and the methodology of the population biologist Raymond Pearl and his one-time student Thomas Park, who studied animals in enclosed
environments.19 As a research assistant with the project from 1946 to 1949, Calhoun
constructed a quarter-acre pena Garden of Edenin the woodland behind his house
in Towson, Maryland. In it he placed five pairs of wild Norway rats that had been captured
on (the suitably named) Parsons Island, a 150-acre tract in Chesapeake Bay. Believing that
he had created an ideal environment for rats, where the animals did not want for food,
water, or nesting materials and were safe from predation and free of disease, he described
the setup as a rodent utopia. The one thing they did lack, however, was space. As the
community grew into a rat city, this became increasingly problematic. Dominant rats
were able to secure territories in the corners of the pen, where they lived relatively normal
lives with a harem of females. Crowding elsewhere prevented the emergence of
dominance hierarchies, ensuring that the rats lives were marked by constant violence,
struggle, and disruption. Thus, it was Calhouns rat city that allowed ecologists to observe
directly, and for the first time, the potential of hierarchy, territoriality, and competition for
reducing rat numbers.20 (See Figure 1.)
Calhouns experimental systems proved most successfulnumerous scientists visited
his rat city, and many more would request precise details, such as the number and type of
animals to be used and the size, shape, and structure of his pens.21 Indeed, Calhouns
method of crowding rodents in an enclosed space continued to be used by Christian and
Davis long after the termination of the Rodent Ecology Project in 1952. They were joined
18 John J. Christian, The Adreno-Pituitary System and Population Cycles in Mammals, Journal of Mammalogy, 1950, 31:247259; Hans Selye, A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents, Nature, 1936,
138:32; and David E. Davis, The Characteristics of Global Rat Populations, American Journal of Public
Health, 1951, 41:158 163.
19 As a student of Park until 1943, Calhoun became involved with Allees circle of ecologists; see John B.
Calhoun, Concerning the Development of a Point of View, Dec. 1962, Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 50a,
Misc Docs 1961 62. For Parks and Pearls relevant studies see Thomas Park, Studies in Population Physiology: The Relation of Numbers to Initial Population Growth in the Flour Beetle Tribolium Confusum Duval,
Ecology, 1932, 13:172181; and Raymond Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth (Baltimore: Williams &
Wilkins, 1925).
20 The Fitness of the Environment, Rodent Ecology Project Report, 1950, p. 7, Rockefeller Foundation
Archives, 1.2, Series 200, Box 58, Folder 478, RAC; John B. Calhoun, A Method for Self-Control of Population
Growth among Mammals Living in the Wild, Science, 1949, 109:333335; and Calhoun, The Social Aspects
of Population Dynamics, J. Mammal., 1952, 33:139 159.
21 Some notable visitors to his rat city included a committee of leading figures from the National Institutes
of Health, who helped Calhoun secure permanent employment at the NIMH; see John B. Calhoun to Gene
Gressley, 15 July 1983, Calhoun Papers, NLM, Accession 2, Box 100. There are numerous requests for details
of his experiments, in response to which he provided extensive descriptions, diagrams, and even manuals of the
experimental system, as well as numerous suggestions of hypotheses to test. See, e.g., Bervette Williams
(graduate student in psychology, University of Idaho) to Calhoun, 16 Apr. 1962, and Calhoun to Williams, 19
Apr. 1962: Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 50a. There are even a number of requests from schools, seeking to
demonstrate to their students the problems of excessive fertility and population growth.

666
Figure 1. Calhouns first rat city. John B. Calhoun Papers, National Library of Medicine,
Accession 2, Box 28. Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
by a new generation of crowding researchers in ecology, who were similarly seeking to

isolate the density-dependent mechanisms regulating population growth in a range of
species: lemmings, snowshoe hares, voles, mice, deer, crabs, stickleback fish, cats, and
even primates.22 However, Christian and Davis increasingly black-boxed crowding processes and behaviorsa common feature, Rheinberger argues, of successful systems that
transform epistemic things into technical conditions. Their animals were simply crowded;
their published papers merely documented the number of rodent bodies in a confined
space before turning to detail the various physiological pathologies that resulted from
stresstheir scientific object.23 Calhoun, in contrast, continued to analyze and graphically
represent the behavior of the organism and the structure of society, while carefully
detailing the experimental architecture in which the animals were contained. In Cal22 For a review of this growing community of ecologists focused on the crowd see Dennis Chitty, Do
Lemmings Commit Suicide? Beautiful Hypotheses and Ugly Facts (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); and
Charles H. Southwick, The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals, Ohio Journal of
Science, 1971, 71:6572. Probably the most famous study after Calhouns was that of crowding among Sika deer
in Chesapeake Bay; see J. J. Christian, Vagh Flyger, and David E. Davis, Factors in Mass Mortality of a Herd
of Sika Deer (Cervus nippon), Chesapeake Science, 1960, 1:79 95. Also influential was V. C. WynneEdwardss theory that social hierarchy served as a density control mechanism; see V. C. Wynne-Edwards,
Self-Regulating Systems in Population Density, Science, 1965, 147:15431548.
23 See, e.g., John J. Christian, James A. Lloyd, and David E. Davis, The Role of Endocrines in the
Self-Regulation of Mammalian Populations, Recent Progress in Hormone Research, 1965, 21:501578. See
also Norman C. Negus and Edwin Gould, Endocrines, Behavior, and Population, Science, 1965, 149:376, for
a criticism of Christian and Davis for failing actually to study animal behavior. My closer analysis of the
different experimental approaches of Calhoun, Christian, Davis, and Richter and their implications for the study
of stress is forthcoming in the journal History of the Human Sciences.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
667
houns systems, the problem of crowding of animal behavior in relation to space and
numberswas more than the technical means of analysis; it was the object of research.
After moving to the NIMH psychology laboratories in 1954 (following a series of
short-term posts), Calhoun continued his experiments, placing various numbers of
Osborne-Mendel rats in various pens in a converted barn. He hoped to establish the level
of density the rats could tolerate and the point at which their society was tipped into
anarchymoving from rat city to rat slum. In one particularly famous experiment, he
divided this 10- x 14-foot rodent universe into four parts, connected by ramps, and again
ensured an always replete cafeteria . . . no epidemic disease, no famine.24 He allowed the
population to grow, this time to eighty adults. Once again, dominant rats, so-called
despots, aristocrats, or king-pins, established territories in which there was only one
entrance, living in relative comfort with eight to ten females in the high-rise apartments
provided. For the other sixty, crowded conditions were further exacerbated by a process
Calhoun described as a behavioral sink. Because they were given hard food pellets, the
animals spent long periods of time in the presence of others while eating. There emerged
a pathological togetherness, animals becoming conditioned to seek each other out: The
unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental: a behavioral sink does act to
aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group. These forms included
violence: Calhoun described males going berserk, attacking females, juveniles, and less
active males. Among the subordinates, one group became homosexual, another hypersexual, while a further suffered such extreme withdrawal that they moved through the
community like somnambulists.25 With males failing to protect nesting sites, the role was
taken up by females, who then generalized this pattern of violence to their young. (See
Figure 2.)
Calhoun then studied the patterns of withdrawal in greater detail through long-running
experiments in mouse paradise. Here a large group of BALB/c males took to huddling
in a vacant mass on the floor. Fundamentally de-stressed, asexual, and nonaggressive,
these animals were nicknamed beautiful ones. Well fed and well groomed, they looked
like healthy mice. But this was because they failed to remain mice, no longer competing
for status, territory, or females. They had ensured their physical survival, but at an
immense psychological cost. So devastating was this form of withdrawal that Calhoun
dubbed it the ultimate pathology. In the words of his research assistant: Utopia had
become hell.26 (See Figure 3.)
FROM RAT SLUM TO INHUMAN CITY
We can identify some critical differences in the descriptions of crowding experiments

offered by Calhoun and contemporary ecologists. Christian and Daviss analysis of rodent
social structure and behavior extended as far as positing an aggregation of competing
24 John B. Calhoun, speaking at Conference on Social and Physical Environmental Variables as Determinants
of Mental Health, 22 May 1959, Washington D.C., Transcripts, p. 93, Calhoun Papers, NLM, Box 64 (rat
slum); and Calhoun, What Sort of Box? ManEnvironment Systems, 1973, 3:330, on p. 22.
25 Calhoun, Population Density and Social Pathology (cit. n. 1), pp. 144, 146.
26 John B. Calhoun, Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population, Proceedings
of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1973, 66:80 89; Calhoun, Plight of the IK and Kaiadilt Is Seen as a Chilling
Possible End for Man, Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 1972, pp. 26 33, on p. 29; and Halsey Marsden,
Crowding and Population Density, in Environment and the Social Sciences: Perspectives and Applications, ed.
Joachim F. Wohlwill and Daniel Carson (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1972), pp.
514, on p. 9.

668
Figure 2. Overview of the rat pen. John B. Calhoun, Population Density and Social Pathology,
Scientific American, 1962, 306:139 148, on pp. 140 141.
individuals, their aggression heightened by restricted resources. Calhoun was documenting a far greater range of social pathologies emerging from the structure of physical
spaces. Further, while Calhoun had joined Christian and Davis in emphasizing caution in
extrapolating to human populations, this was belied by his language.27 By the 1970s he
had added further anthropomorphic terms to his list of behavioral anomalies: pied pipers
described a group of females that followed objects obsessively; the withdrawn were
social dropouts, bar-flies, and autistics; the hypersexual and excessively violent
were juvenile delinquents; and aggressive females were Amazons. The rats treatment
of their young was akin to child abuse and battery: Calhoun described the shift from
disciplining pups through mild spankings to their murder in acts of berserk violence.28 His apartment buildings and city blocksvividly represented through written
descriptions, drawings, and photographsfunctioned as anthropomorphic spaces, serving
to make their occupants seem more human. Against those who would characterize his
rodent environments as unnatural, Calhoun argued that he was not addressing population processes among free-ranging animals so much as simulating mankinds future in
vast, sprawling, unnatural urban environments. (See Figure 4.)
Calhoun not only shared Allees interest in the role of density in the development (and
destruction) of cooperative animal communities. He also shared his concern to bridge the
27 Calhoun, Population Density and Social Pathology (cit. n. 1), p. 148. For one of Daviss occasional
attempts to see human (gang) behavior in animal terms see Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology,
Community, and American Social Thought, 1900 1950 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), p. 108.
28 Calhoun, What Sort of Box? (cit. n. 24); John B. Calhoun, Looking Forward: Feedforward from the
Beautiful Ones: A Developing Book, 18 Sept. 1990, Calhoun Papers, NLM, Box 105; and Calhoun, Disruption
of Behavioral States as a Cause of Aggression, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1972, 20:183260, on p.
246.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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Figure 3. Calhoun in mouse Universe 25, later to be described as the dead city. John B.
Calhoun Papers, National Library of Medicine, Accession 1, Box 40. Image courtesy of the National
Library of Medicine.
biological and social sciences, Allee having attempted (with limited success) to build
connections between animal ecologists and the human ecologists of the Chicago School
of sociology.29 For both schools, population density was a source of adaptation, evolution,
and complexity and yet also posed a significant threat to social and psychological
organization.30 For the sociologist Robert Park, density contributed to a division of labor
and led to a rational and advanced public; for his mentor Georg Simmel and colleague
Louis Wirth, the overload of interactions in the city encouraged social distance, anomie,
loneliness, and even mental breakdown. Following his employment at the NIMH, Calhoun
29 For an analysis of the cooperative ideals promulgated by Allee see Mitman, State of Nature (cit. n. 27).
Emmanuel Gaziano has argued that relations between animal and human ecology remained superficial, their
borrowings largely metaphorical; see Emmanuel Gaziano, Ecological Metaphors as Scientific Boundary Work:
Innovation and Authority in Interwar Sociology and Biology, American Journal of Sociology, 1996, 101:874
907. Calhouns choice of the title for his book from the Rodent Ecology Project, The Ecology and Sociology of
the Norway Rat (Bethesda, Md.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1963), is both a tribute to Allee
and a reflection of his belief in the need for synthesis between the social and the biological sciences.
30 Differentiating between the adaptive functions of crowding and its pathological consequences, Allee
distinguished between crowding, which could have beneficial results, and overcrowding, which had
harmful effects: W. C. Allee, Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 1931), p. 144.

670
Figure 4. A diagram of one of Calhouns octagonal universes. Note the apartments built into
high-rise structures along the side of the pen. John B. Calhoun Papers, National Library of
Medicine, Accession 1, Box 40. Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
saw himself less as a student of natural ecological systems and more as a contributor to
the debate over the well-being of urban man, even describing himself as having rejected,
though not lost sight of, my father, the discipline of animal ecology.31
Calhouns experience as a student of ecology, combined with his continued reading in
the social sciences and humanities, led him to conclude that many social animals,
including man, had become biologically adapted for life in a group of no more than twelve
adults. Just as Simmel had argued, Calhoun noted, individual responses to encounters
seemed to become less intense or shallower as the size of the group increases.32 While
this behavior allowed individuals the resources to maintain their more intense and
fulfilling relationships, as encounters become more meaningless and rejection more
frequent there was a danger that aggression and withdrawal would be extended into the
more intimate aspects of social life, becoming a self-generating process. Calhoun held
31 Robert Park, The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1972); Georg
Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt Wolff
(New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 409 424; Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life, Amer. J. Sociol., 1938,
4:124; and John B. Calhoun, The Population Crisis Leading to the Compassionate Revolution and Environmental Design, World Journal of Psychosynthesis, 1972, 4:2128, on p. 27.
32 John B. Calhoun, Social Welfare as a Variable in Population Dynamics, in Cold Spring Harbor Symposia
on Quantitative Biology, 1957, 22:339 356, on p. 353. For the conclusion regarding the group size of twelve
adults see Calhoun, Control of Population: Numbers, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1971,
184:148 155. It should not be forgotten that Calhoun was a skilled field ecologist and would be largely
responsible for the North American Census for Small Mammals. Like other ecologists and ethologists, he
believed it essential to understand the behavior of an animal in its natural environment, and he helped to improve
methods of trapping and observation. His understanding of domesticated rat and mouse behavior was further
honed at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, Maine, from 1949 to 1951; see Calhoun,
A Comparative Study of the Social Behavior of Two Inbred Strains of House Mice, Ecological Monographs,
1956, 26:81103.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
671
that this process could be measured on a scale of social velocity. This scale was based
on the degree of time an individualwhether a rat, a mouse, or a manspent in places
where interaction was likely: those with the highest social velocity scores were the
dominant males and the best mothers; those with the lowest scores were so damaged by
rejection that they lived in social isolation, even a state of catatonic schizophrenia.33
Yet, as was consistent with sociological theory, not all elements of population density
were bad. In Calhouns rodent universes, social pressure and psychological disorganization resulted in adaptive and creative acts. In his view, even the development of
homosexuality represents a form of creativity. By forming another class outside the
dominance hierarchy, subordinate males could avoid sanctions from dominants while
maintaining a relatively high social velocity. He was particularly taken by a group of
homosexual males who, when digging their burrows, did not adopt the standard
approach of carrying out small wads of dirt but instead packed it into a large ball that they
then rolled out. Disorganization had resulted in increased efficiency. Among rats, limited
as they were, this adaptation would not be taken up by dominants; among human beings,
however, such creative breakthroughs could result in real social advances. This was what
social scientists would describe as a dynamic density, leading to new social roles, new
technological advances, and intellectual breakthroughs:
If man is unique, its the result of his ability to develop new ideas; yet perhaps these can only
arise in a social milieu that represses him somewhat, leading to deviant behavior and a
disorganization which allow him to re-organize in new ways after the social pressure has been
withdrawn. . . . Human beings thus face a predicament: If we try to make everybody totally
happy, well destroy mankind. So the criterion for mental health might include some happiness
and frustration.34
In Calhouns view, humankind had helped relieve some of the frustrations engendered
by a decrease in physical space by constructing a new kind of spacea conceptual
spaceinvolving new social roles and methods of communication that allowed for the
maintenance of gratifying social relations. Yet while humans had escaped the ecological
laws that bound a population directly to its environment, there was a point of no return,
where physical and conceptual space would be overwhelmed, self-destruction inevitable.
Man needed to build on the benefits of high density, designing more efficient physical and
social structures. With such adaptations would emerge a new sense of responsibility and
compassion, leading to a decline in fertility without the need for implementing coercive
and conservative restrictions limiting couples to two children, as advocated by the zero
population growth movement.
33 See John B. Calhoun, The Social Use of Space, in Physiological Mammalogy, ed. William V. Mayer and
Richard G. Van Gelder (New York: Academic, 1963), pp. 1187; Calhoun, Crowding and Social Velocity, in
New Dimensions in Psychiatry, Vol. 2, ed. Silvano Arietti and Gerard Chrzanowski (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan
Press, 1977), pp. 28 45; and Calhoun, Social Welfare as a Variable in Population Dynamics, p. 353. Calhoun
believed that the technique and concept of social velocity could be directly applied to human studies with very
little alteration; see Calhoun to Jules Masserman, 19 June 1973, Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 8b.
34 John B. Calhoun, Determinants of Social Organization Exemplified in a Single Population of Domesticated
Rats, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1961, 23:437 442, on p. 440; and Maya Pines, How
the Social Organization of Animal Communities Can Lead to a Population Crisis Which Destroys Them, in
National Institute of Mental Health: Mental Health Program Reports, Vol. 5, ed. Julius Segal (Washington,
D.C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1971), pp. 158 173, on pp. 162163 (describing the
homosexual males digging strategy; Calhoun is quoted on p. 163). There is a copy of the report in the Calhoun
Papers, NLM.

672
Figure 5. One of Calhouns culture-inducing environments. Note the increased number of

partitions and the drinking device (labeled C) that encourages cooperative behavior. John B.
Calhoun Papers, National Library of Medicine, Accession 1, Box 40. Image courtesy of the National
Library of Medicine.
Calhoun transferred this interest in amelioration to the rodent laboratory; he was now
directing his own Unit for Research on Behavioral Systems at the NIMH. Here the
technical objects of his laboratory were further unpacked. When he altered the foodstuff
from hard to soft pellets, he found that he reduced the time a rat spent in the presence of
others, thereby preventing the emergence of the behavioral sink. He introduced more
partitions, allowing for increased privacy, and created smaller subcommunities by determining which animals lived, slept, and ate together, thereby preventing the emergence of
the ultimate pathology. (See Figure 5.)
Calhouns laboratory was increasingly reminiscent of that of the behaviorist.35 He
experimented with operant conditioning, forcing rats to cooperate with one another to
receive water, which he then interpreted in terms of the emergence of trust and ethical
behavior. Beginning in 1984, each of his animals had a metal coil (passive resonator)
implanted in its skin, so that its every movement could be detected, recorded, and
35 As he explained to Niko Tinbergen at Oxford, he intended to unite Skinnerian and ethological perspectives by imposing culture on a rat population; see Calhoun to Niko Tinbergen, 3 Oct. 1974, Calhoun Papers,
Wyoming, Box 2b, Green File. For an analysis of the tensions that existed between ethologists and psychologists
see Richard Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology
(Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005).

EDMUND RAMSDEN
673
controlled as it passed through electronic portals in the pen.36 Through this rather
Orwellian modification Calhoun was attempting to develop ever more advanced rodent
communities that were able to withstand increased population density. Many saw his work
as the inspiration for Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a childrens novel in which a
group of rats and mice escape an experiment that endows them with high intelligence and
go on to build their own (ecologically sustainable) community.37 Calhoun encouraged
such a connection. As pessimistic as his simulation of mankinds future may have seemed,
it was one he sought to temper with optimism. His interest in providing solutions would,
however, be lost on the public imagination, as his experiments came to stand for all that
was wrong with the crowd.
FROM RODENT LABORATORY TO HUMAN ZOO
The power of Calhouns representations of urban animals in urban spaces can be seen
from the breadth of interest in his researchfrom social and biological scientists, medical,
planning, and design professionals, writers, filmmakers, and religious and political leaders. We may find Calhouns language overly dramatic, yet it was often surpassed by those
referring to his studies. The British biologist A. S. Parkes described Calhouns rats in
terms of unmaternal mothers, homosexuals and zombies; the writer-cum-ethologist
Robert Ardrey saw an essentially criminal class, roaming in gangs; the psychologist
Jonathan Freedman portrayed apathetic street fighters, marauders and recluses. For
Carl Rogers, The resemblance to human behavior is frightening. In humans we see poor
family relationships, the lack of caring, the complete alienation, the magnetic attraction of
overcrowding, the lack of involvement which is so great that it permits people to watch
a long drawn out murder without so much as calling the policeperhaps all city dwellers
are inhabitants of a behavioral sink, cannibalism and all.38
The murder was that of Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964. It had been the subject of
intense public debate because of the failure of any of the thirty-eight witnesses to contact
the police, let alone intervene. The attention given to the murder reflected a growing
concern over the well-being of the American city, with its social and sexual deviance,
growing drug culture, increasingly visible gay community, and free love movement.
The violence that had erupted during demonstrations against the Vietnam War was
dwarfed by a rising tide of urban rioting, the most famous being the five-day Watts riot
36 Calhoun, Disruption of Behavioral States as a Cause of Aggression (cit. n. 28), p. 246; and Annual
Report of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior, NIMH, October 1, 1983September 30, 1984,
Calhoun Papers, NLM, Box 46, Folder NIMH/1984.
37 Calhoun encouraged the drawing of links between population problems and Orwells dystopia. He also
believed that, at the level of architectural design, not all aspects of Big Brother were bad. See John B. Calhoun,
Looking Backward from The Beautiful Ones, in Discovery Processes in Modern Biology, ed. W. R. Klemm
(Huntington, N.Y.: Krieger, 1977), pp. 25 65. For the novel see Robert C. OBrien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats
of NIMH (New York: Atheneum, 1971); on the connection with Calhouns work see Wray Herbert, The (Real)
Secret of NIMH, Science News, 1982, 122:9293.
38 A. S. Parkes, Human Fertility and Population Growth, in Population and Food Supply: Essays on Human
Needs and Agricultural Prospects, ed. Sir Joseph Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), pp.
1127, on p. 18; Robert Ardrey, The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order
and Disorder (London: Atheneum, 1970), p. 217; Jonathan L. Freedman, Crowding and Behavior (San
Francisco: Freeman, 1975), p. 17; and Rogers, Some Social Issues Which Concern Me (cit. n. 10), p. 49. For
a more detailed analysis of Calhouns influence see Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun and Their Cultural Influence, Journal of Social History,
2009, 42:761792.

674
in 1965 that left thirty-four people dead and more than a thousand injured. Given the
apparent violence and apathy of the urban resident, we can see why the lesson offered by
the behavior of Calhouns rats and mice was so appealing. One might see criminality and
delinquency among his young males, the breakdown of the family among his unmaternal
mothers, a drop-out drug culture among his beautiful ones. Calhouns influence was far
from curious. Within the rodent universe, the ills of the city were explained by the very
variable that gave it definitionits population; the problem of the city was, in a sense, the
city itself.
Particularly significant to this success was Calhouns experimental subject. As Richard
Burkhardt has explored in his historical study of ethology, the choice of animal is a
powerful means of transmitting a message.39 Konrad Lorenz promoted the idea that
aggression was an instinct present in all animals, describing an accidental experiment in
which he placed two doves in a cage. Expecting that they would mate, he returned to find
that one, a female ringdove, had nearly pecked its suitor, a male turtledove, to death. For
Lorenz, the message was clear: the dove had not evolved innate inhibitions to violence, as
had animals with more powerful weapons of destruction such as the wolf or the lion. In
using the dove, the symbol of peace, he was drawing on shared cultural capital: if the dove
was capable of such destruction, what of man?
The message conveyed by the rat was no less powerful. Drawing on Lorenzs work,
Anthony Storr argued that, apart from the rodent, man was the only vertebrate that
habitually destroys members of its own species. Rats have also been associated with
vice, sexuality, and fertility, with thieving, rapacity, disease, defilement, and dirt; at times
they have seemed to represent evil itself. They are also synonymous with the city: not
only do they thrive in areas most dense and degraded, such as the ghetto and the slum; they
are also associated with the day-to-day stresses of the elite, with the rat racethe
modern colloquial term for an urban working life regarded as an unremitting struggle for
wealth, status. Even their positive qualitiesadaptability and intelligence have destructive consequences. Like man, they increase their numbers to plague-like proportions.
In the words of Jonathan Burt: Because the rat is so bound up with ideas of mass and
number it seems to be a totemic animal for the modern world.40 Considering this long
association between the rat, pathology, population, and the city, it is perhaps unsurprising
that so many referenced Calhouns work, rather than the numerous other studies of voles,
mice, deer, or snowshoe hares.
Lorenzs dove experiment had revealed another innate pattern of behavior shared and
expressed by animals the need for territory and space. With increased density, territorial
boundaries were more likely to be transgressed and the social behaviors that maintained
them overwhelmed. Paul Leyhausen described how, when cats were crowded together in
a cage, the community turns into a spiteful mob. Yet, as Leyhausen argued, it was
Calhoun who had made the really important contributions in this field, moving beyond
violence to address neglect, indifference, apathy. Calhoun reinforced and extended ethological concerns with the problems of modernity, and his work was used to great effect in
39 Richard Burkhardt, Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts: Working Paper
in the Nature of Evidence: How Well Do Facts Travel? (London: London School of Economics, 2008), pp.
1516.
40 Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (New York: Atheneum, 1968), quoted in Burkhardt, Dilemmas in the
Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts, p. 17; Jonathan Burt, Rat (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp.
10 (evil itself ), 149 (totemic animal); and Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939),
which is identified by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first literary reference to rat race.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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the popularizations of Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris: Each kind of animal has
evolved to exist in a certain amount of living space. In both the animal and the human zoo
this space is severely curtailed and the consequences can be serious.41
As attractive as the crowd was in its simplicity as a cause, how did one provide a
solution? Many were drawn to the habitat of Calhouns rats. The Kerner Commission,
established to examine the causes of urban rioting, identified, among many variables,
crowded ghetto living conditions, worsened by summer heat. The failure of government
to approve a rat extermination program, let alone improve housing, only reinforced
concern at its apparent disregard for those that suffered from urban blight. Indeed, for
David Davis, rodent control had long suggested a solution. The most effective method of
rat-proofing was to eradicate slum housing:
The beauty of this ecological method of control is that it improves the housing and living
conditions of the human population, in addition to reducing the rat population . . . replacing
dilapidated unsanitary structures with clean, modern, substantial ones. . . . When whole blocks
of tenements were razed on Manhattans East Side to make room for Stuyvesant Town, the rat
population was reduced by many thousands. The same may be said of the numerous other
replacements of slums with modern apartment developments.42
Stuyvesant Town, a large private modernist residential development in Manhattan, admitted its first residents in 1947. By the early 1950s, it was proving a successful (if
controversial) venture, bringing order to a once impoverished area. With the construction
of Stuyvesants large apartment complexes, unwanted residentsrodent and human
were driven out.43 Members of the Rodent Ecology Project saw how their research
addressed problems of human ecology directlythat the methods of wildlife management
applied to the city would remedy more than just the vermin problem.44
For Calhoun, however, Stuyvesant Town was an anathema. In the ensuing debate
between the projects champion, Robert Moses, and one of its most famed critics, Lewis
Mumford, Calhoun expressed sympathy for the latter.45 Yet Calhoun also noted that
Mumford lacked the empirical data he needed to promote smaller cities with spacious
41 Konrad Lorenz and Paul Leyhausen, Motivation of Human and Animal Behavior: An Ethological View
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), p. 131 (spiteful mob); Leyhausen, The Sane CommunityA
Density Problem? Discovery, 1960, 21:2733; Leyhausen, The Cat Who Walks by Himself, in Leaders in the
Study of Animal Behavior: Autobiographical Perspectives, ed. D. A. Dewsbury (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ.
Press, 1985), pp. 225256, on p. 248 (really important contributions); and Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 39.
42 United States Riot Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission (New York: Bantam, 1968),
p. 325; and D. E. Davis, in Fitness of the Environment (cit. n. 20), p. 12. Regarding governmental failure to
approve a rat extermination program see Special Report: Years of Frustration Led to Violence, Evening Star
(Washington, D.C.), 11 Aug. 1967; and The Rats Come Every Night . . ., Washington Post, 25 July 1967. See
further materials relating to this, and Calhouns and Daviss active criticism of government failures in rodent
control, in Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 15A.
43 In the eyes of some, this removal extended not only to the significant criminal fraternity that once
dominated the area, but to the poor and nonwhite inhabitants who were also excluded. For a critique of the
selection of residents on the basis of desirability, and of the high density of the project itself, see Lewis
Mumford, Prefabricated Blight (1948), in From the Ground Up (New York: Harvest, 1956), pp. 199 243.
44 D. E. Davis, The Role of Intraspecific Competition in Game Management, Transactions of the North
American Wildlife Conference, 1949, 14:225231. For an excellent analysis of the Rodent Ecology Projects role
in urban renewal see Dawn Biehler, In the Crevices of the City: Public Health, Urban Housing, and the
Creatures We Call Pests, 1900 2000 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. WisconsinMadison, 2007).
45 For Calhoun, human values were more important than mere engineering efficiency; see Calhoun to J. P.
Scott, 15 Dec. 1948, Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 11a. See also Experimental Socio-Physical Environments (cit. n. 2), where Calhoun discusses the sterile cells of Pruitt-Igoe.

676
green parks as opposed to a high-density megalopolis. This Calhoun would provide

through his rat cities. By the early 1970s, when it seemed clear that urban problems were
only exacerbated by the construction of modern public housing projects, many turned to
Calhouns experiments. Referring to the infamous Pruitt-Igoe development in St. Louis,
the sociologist A. R. Gillis described how social conditions in the project deteriorated to
a level close to Calhouns (1962) description of a behavioral sink. The level of
disorganization and conflict was sufficient to produce the Spinks brothers, outstanding in
their boxing skills and motor offences.46
Others focused on the problem of rodent numbers, seeing the effects of population
growth in the animals aberrant behavior. The scientist and planner Richard Meier, noting
the consequences of overcrowding witnessed among animals, suggested that the last
great plague of the cities can be productively viewed as an epidemic of violence. An
associate of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Meier was a leader in
assessing and publicizing the detrimental impact of population growth on the well-being
of individuals and society. Calhouns rats made regular appearances in the propaganda
materials of the birth control movement: the association between excessive fertility and
family breakdown was there for all to see in the crowded rodent pens. Reducing the level
of unwanted pregnancies among poor and black mothers, birth control advocates argued,
was a significant preventative health and welfare measure.47
NEGOTIATING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN RODENTS AND MAN
In an era that saw the rapid rise of the environmentalist and population control movements, Calhouns results justified the belief that population growth was dangerous, the city
a perversion of nature. Yet, considering the importance attributed to the crowd, where was
the research among human beings? Demands that the social scientist focus attention on the
problems of numbers and space were becoming more frequent and were increasingly
justified through reference to animal studies. The psychologist Wayne Bartz declared:
Personally, I feel like an impotent observer standing on the deck of the Titanic as it sails
toward destruction. . . . I suspect that the population biologists are correct in their
pessimistic predictions; the human community is not going to be willing to recognize the
enormity of the problem until it is too late.48
Bartzs concerns were shared by an emerging community of environmental psychologists in the 1960s. Irwin Altman described its members as either older, peripheral social
psychologists or recent Ph.D.s. They were united by a perception of a social psychology
in crisis, its methodology geared toward generating precise, basic, and general properties of human behavior. As a result, they were failing to contribute to the resolution of real,
46 A. R. Gillis, Strangers Next Door: An Analysis of Density, Diversity, and Scale in Public Housing
Projects, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 1983, 8:120, on pp. 3 4. Robert Mitchell argued that it was the
association between density and pathology that had led to the acceptance that the Pruitt-Igoe buildings should
be torn down and replaced with low-density and low-rise housing; see Robert Mitchell, Misconceptions
about Man-Made Space: In Partial Defense of High-Density Housing, Family Coordinator, 1974, 23:5156,
esp. p. 51.
47 Richard Meier, Violence: The Last Urban Epidemic, American Behavioral Scientist, 1968, 11:3537, on
p. 36. When promoting family planning, Mary Steichen Calderone of the Sex Information and Education Council
argued, Calhoun in his rat population studies has demonstrated all kinds of abnormal behavior patterns that
follow crowding: Mary Steichen Calderone, Human Cost Accounting, in The Complete Book of Birth Control
(North Hollywood, Calif.: American Art Agency, 1965), pp. 59, on p. 9.
48 Wayne R. Bartz, While Psychologists Doze On, American Psychologist, 1970, 25:500 503, on p. 502.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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lived problems at a time of great social and political turbulence. They focused their
attention on the problem of the crowd, attracted to the possibility of a simple, physical, and
objectively measurable variable with significant consequences that demanded a policy
response.49 With the challenge set by Calhoun, there was an opportunity for the resolution
of real world issues ecological destruction, population growth, mental health problems
in the cityand, in the process, for innovative research and disciplinary development
focused on physical phenomena.
Similarly, the sociologist William Michelson declared that these rat experiments gave
some clue as to the social concomitants of the physical pathologies observed in previous
behavioral sinks. . . . With these findings as incentive, one might well imagine a groundswell of activity among human ecologists to apply this perspective to human life. There
was now an opportunity of reinvigorating and reorienting the field of human ecology,
correcting the failures of the interwar pioneers who, with their near-exclusive focus on the
social, had left the study of these crucial phenomena behind them in the dust.50
The first studies, beginning in the late 1960s, applied and reinvigorated more traditional
methods: statistical data collected through censuses and surveys in such cities as Hong
Kong, Honolulu, New York, and, of course, Chicago. The influence of Calhoun was
explicit, a group of urban sociologists declaring: We . . . take the animal studies as a
serious model for human populations.51 They began to correlate measures of urban
density with social pathologies seen to match those exhibited by Calhouns rats: aggression was to be measured by crime and delinquency, withdrawal by admissions to mental
hospitals, sexual deviance not only by sexual assault but also by divorce, and, most
controversially, the breakdown in maternal behavior by the need for welfare measures,
such as a familys acceptance of Aid for Dependent Children.52
Such sociological approaches were soon joined by those of the psychologist. Edward
Pohlman suggested: Animal studies of population density (e.g., Calhoun, 1962) provide
possibilities for experimental approaches. These possibilities were first realized by the
psychologist Jonathan Freedman in the late 1960s at the behest of Paul Ehrlich, his
colleague at Stanford and a leading population control activist. With a number of
collaborators, Freedman employed high school and university students to carry out a series
49 Irwin Altman, Crowding: Historical and Contemporary Trends in Crowding Research, in Human Responses to Crowding, ed. A. Baum and Y. M. Epstein (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2004), pp. 329. The field of
environmental psychology benefited immensely from its emphasis on the dangers of crowding, the subject
dominating textbooks and journals such as Environment and Behavior. Environmental psychology became
established as a subdiscipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a number of psychology departments
offering programs, the founding of organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association, and
the American Psychological Association officially recognizing it as one of its divisions. See Joachim F.
Wohlwill, The Emerging Discipline of Environmental Psychology, Amer. Psychol., 1970, 25:303312, on p.
304, which noted that congestion and crowding had received by far the most concentrated attention.
50 William Michelson, A Parsonian Scheme for the Study of Man and Environment; or, What Human
Ecology Left Behind in the Dust, Sociological Inquiry, 1968, 38:197208, on p. 199.
51 See Omar R. Galle, W. R. Gove, and J. M. McPherson, Population Density and Pathology: What Are the
Relations for Man? Science, 1972, 176:23 60, on p. 23; R. C. Schmitt, Implications of Density in Hong
Kong, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 1963, 29:210 217; Schmitt, Density, Health, and Social
Disorganization, ibid., 1966, 32:38 40; and H. H. Winsborough, The Social Consequences of High Population Density, Law and Contemporary Problems, 1965, 10:120 126.
52 Galle et al., Population Density and Pathology; and A. R. Gillis, Population Density and Social
Pathology: The Case of Building Type, Social Allowance, and Juvenile Delinquency, Social Forces, 1974,
53:306 314. For a powerful critical appraisal see Harvey Choldin, Urban Density and Pathology, Annual
Review of Sociology, 1978, 4:91113.

678
of tasks in different-sized rooms, while keeping the size of the group constant.53 He sought
to measure objectively the effect of varying degrees of density on behavior and to
document increased instances of aggression and competitiveness.
The results were inconsistent, however. Some studies did reveal positive correlations
between density and pathology, such as in R. C. Schmitts study of Honolulu. Yet
Schmitts study of Hong Kong did not.54 There was even evidence that the more crowded
a city, the lower its rates of morbidity and the higher its fertilitythe opposite of what had
been predicted by the so-called rodent model.55 In Freedmans laboratory there were few
instances of stress, aggression, and withdrawal and none of people going berserk. As a
consequence, some began to express doubts as to how well the pathologies of Calhouns
rats translated to the behavior of urban man. Others reflected further on the concepts of
density and crowding.
The psychologist Daniel Stokols explained how animal studies portray crowding as a
stress situation, a situation determined by the physical condition of spatial limitation: As
population density increases, spatial constraints become more acute until, finally, they
eventuate in social disorganization and physiological pathology. Nevertheless, in the
human situation, it had become clear that spatial restriction serves as a necessary
antecedent of, but not always a sufficient condition for, the arousal of crowding stress.
Stokols suggested that it was necessary to differentiate between densitya physical
measure involving the limitation of spaceand crowdingan individuals perception of
having too little space. With this focus on perception, some observed that making a direct
link between rats and man was now difficult: We know very little about what constitutes
crowding in the eyes or noses or whiskers of rodents. Density was a technical object,
crowding the epistemic thing of interest to the psychologista truly individual, psychological, and experiential phenomenon, and a negative one at that. While density was a
stressor situation, crowding was a stress syndrome mediated by a range of other social
and psychological variables that were often unique to human beings.56 The role of the
psychologist was now to explore this process of mediation.
A wider range of variables were now included: an individuals life history, gender, age,
class, social interests and roles, and relations to others present. However, three approaches
dominated. Stanley Milgram at CUNY revived the theory of stimulus overload developed by Simmel and Wirth: with the complexity and excess of environmental inputs in the
city, according to this theory, individuals cannot process all the information and interact
meaningfully with all social contacts. As a result, they are forced to withdraw. To do so
selectively, and thus successfully, is costly, resulting in superficial relationships and norms
legitimizing noninvolvement. To fail to do so is even more costly, resulting in indiscrim53 Edward Pohlman, Birth Control: Independent and Dependent Variable for Psychological Research, Amer.
Psychol., 1966, 21:967970, on p. 969. For an overview of Freedmans studies see Freedman, Crowding and
Behavior (cit. n. 38).
54 Schmitt, Implications of Density in Hong Kong (cit. n. 51); and Schmitt, Density, Health, and Social
Disorganization (cit. n. 51). In contrast to Schmitt, Robert Mitchell did find some instances of pathology in
Hong Kong: Reminiscent of Calhouns findings . . . unrelated families in dwelling units on a higher floor in a
multi-story building . . . are especially likely to manifest high levels of hostility. See Mitchell, Misconceptions
about Man-Made Space (cit. n. 46), p. 54.
55 Choldin, Urban Density and Pathology (cit. n. 52), p. 95.
56 Daniel Stokols, A Social-Psychological Model of Human Crowding, J. Amer. Inst. Planners, 1972,
38:72 84, on pp. 74 (social disorganization and physiological pathology), 75 (contrasting stressor situation
and stress syndrome); and Mark Nathan Cohen, Roy S. Malpass, and Harold G. Klein, Introduction, in
Biosocial Mechanisms of Population Regulation, ed. Cohen, Malpass, and Klein (New Haven, Conn./London:
Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. ixxxiii, on p-xiii.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
679
inate aggression, withdrawal, and stress-related illness. The second approach focused on
mans inherent need for personal space and privacy and, while drawing on ethological
concepts of territoriality, emphasized the role of various personal and cultural factors.
Finally, a so-called behavioral constraint model proposed that crowding is a situation in
which the presence of others places restrictions on an individuals range of personal
freedoms and choices.57 What united these perspectives was the notion of control. The
more power an individual had over the social and physical environment, the less likely he
or she was to experience crowding stress.
Environmental psychologists were contributing to new approaches in the understanding
of stress. Led in the late 1960s by Richard Lazarus, a key figure in the so-called cognitive
turn in psychology, the focus was shifting from the stress state to the process of
coping: researchers were trying to understand how various stressors are negotiated by
the individual in specific environments. Lazarus interpreted this shift in the context of a
move away from simplistic animal models: Thus, from Calhouns work . . . [we] begin
with a simple S-R model, namely, that crowding is an environmental stressor producing
disruption of the social fabric and a high rate of mortality. . . . As we shift to the human
context, we begin to realize that psychosocial mediation determines when moderate to
high population density will be reacted to as crowding and so can be thought of as an
environmental stressor.58
For those seeking to emphasize this shift, it was still common to begin with a discussion
(albeit a brief one) of Calhouns researcha dramatic means of securing the readers
attention. With the distinction drawn between density and crowding, however, it was now
possible to view crowding under a new light. Unlike earlier models that assumed a
general behavioral malaise to follow directly from increased density, this distinction
brought hope:
A second function of the distinction between density and crowding was to lift somewhat the
doom created by the realization that the population was expanding but that space was not. . . .
Since they arent making more land, the only way to reduce crowding would be to reduce the
number of people. . . . However, if crowding is only the distant cousin rather than the Siamese
twin of density, it may be possible to reduce the experience of crowding without increasing
space.59
TURNING TO THE MODEL ENVIRONMENT
With the development of the crowding construct, a boundary between rats and man was
reinforced. Nevertheless, social scientists were concerned not to lose sight of the key
environmental variables identified in Calhouns work. Just because crowding was a
57 Stanley Milgram, The Experience of Living in Cities, Science, 1970, 167:14611468 (stimulus overload
approach); Irwin Altman, The Environment and Social Behavior (Monterey, Calif.: Brooks-Cole, 1975) (second
approach); and Harold M. Proshansky, William M. Ittelson, and Leanne G. Rivlin, Freedom of Choice and
Behavior in a Physical Setting, in Environmental Psychology: Man and His Physical Setting, ed. Proshansky
et al. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 173182 (behavioral constraint model).
58 Richard S. Lazarus, Psychological Stress and the Coping Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); and
Lazarus and Judith Blackfield Cohen, Environmental Stress, in Human Behavior and Environment: Advances
in Theory and Research, Vol. 2, ed. Irwin Altman and Joachim F. Wohlwill (New York/London: Plenum, 1977),
pp. 89 127, on p. 117. For an analysis of this shift from physiological to social-psychological stress see Cary
L. Cooper and Philip Dewe, Stress: A Brief History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
59 Stephen Worchel, Reducing Crowding without Increasing Space: Some Applications of an Attributional
Theory of Crowding, Journal of Population, 1978, 1:216 230, on p. 217.

680
subjective state, this did not mean that they should ignore density as the material and
objective condition.60 Going too far in emphasizing personal factors could direct
attention away from significant physical factors that resulted in common experiences
across individuals and groups. Density may not have been the Siamese twin of crowding, but it was not as far removed as a distant cousin. To understand its relevance,
however, it was necessary to refine it as a concept and measure: What, exactly, did density
consist of?
Environmental psychologists and human ecologists now made a further differentiation:
physical density was the amount of space per person, social density the numbers of
individuals in a given space. The latter was deemed more significant, as overwhelming
social density resulted in unwanted interactions whose effects were particularly damaging
in so-called primary environments where individuals spent the majority of their lives
and in which personal encounters took place.61 The focus of crowding studies was
changing, moving away from simplistic studies of census and laboratory to the household,
the prison, the hospital. It was in these places, these pseudo-laboratories or quasiexperiments, where researchers found people crowded for long periods of time, often
against their will.62 Here density was a real, lived problem, and its component parts could
be controlled and analyzed by the researcher, just as in Calhouns pens.
In 1973 Andrew Baum and Stuart Valins began a series of influential studies of the
college dormitory. Combining perusal of institutional records, interviews, observation,
and physical examination, they revealed a consistent and disturbing picture of the
dynamics of corridor dormitory life. In the corridor environment, thirty-four individuals
shared washroom and lounge areas. Because of the uncontrolled space of the corridor and
high social density, individuals would continually collide.63 As a consequence of this
unwanted and uncontrollable interaction, students perceived the environment as crowded
and exhibited increased stress levels. While they did not go berserk, conditions did
affect health and academic success. This was in contrast to the experience of students
housed in an alternative suite-style dorm, who were divided up into subcommunities of
four to six. As a consequence of being able to control the number and nature of their
60 Andrew Baum and Stuart Valins, Architectural Mediation of Residential Density and Control: Crowding
and the Regulation of Social Contact, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 12, ed. Leonard
Berkowitz (New York: Academic, 1979), pp. 131175, on p. 137. See also Amos Rapoport, Toward a
Redefinition of Density, Environment and Behavior, 1975, 7:133158.
61 This was in contrast to the secondary spaces and neutral encounters in the public realm. See Daniel
Stokols, The Experience of Crowding in Primary and Secondary Environments, Environ. Behav., 1976,
8:49 86; and Stokols, Walter Ohlig, and Susan Resnick, Perception of Residential Crowding, Classroom
Experiences, and Student Health, Human Ecology, 1978, 6:233252. Sociologists also shifted their focus away
from residential and areal densitymeasured by number of individuals per square mileto crowding at the
personal level, measured by persons per room. Galle et al. argued that it was in the home that density resulted
in greater interpersonal press. See Galle et al., Population Density and Pathology (cit. n. 51), p. 26; see also
Schmitt, Density, Health, and Social Disorganization (cit. n. 51), p. 39.
62 See Harold M. Proshansky, Environmental Psychology and the Real World, Amer. Psychol., 1976,
31:303310. The earliest of such studies (again stimulated by Calhouns experiments) focused on the school,
revealing increased levels of aggression and withdrawal with increased density. See Corinne Hutt and M. Jane
Vaizey, Differential Effects of Group Density on Social Behaviour, Nature, 1966, 209:13711372; see also
J. D. Fisher, P. A. Bell, and A. Baum, Environmental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1984).
63 For the dormitory studies see Andrew Baum and Stuart Valins, Architecture and Social Behavior:
Psychological Studies of Social Density (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1977); Baum and Valins, Architectural
Mediation of Residential Density and Control (cit. n. 60), pp. 165 (quotation), 153; and Valins and Baum,
Residential Group Size, Social Interaction, and Crowding, Environ. Behav., 1973, 5:421 439. Physical
measures included palmar sweating, electrodermal activity, blood pressure, and urinary catecholamines.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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interactions, these students did not experience crowding and had generally good relations
with their peers. Interestingly, the physical density of the two environments was almost
identical.
A study of the prison environment soon followed, directed by Paul Paulus at the
University of Texas at Arlington. Here researchers found crowded conditions that were
intense, prolonged, inescapable, and realistic. Working closely with Baum, now at the
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, they found correlations between
crowding and increased suicides, psychiatric commitments, disciplinary infractions,
violent deaths, and deaths due to natural causes. As numbers (social density) were again
more important than space (physical density), they recommended more single cells, even
at the cost of reducing the amount of space per person, so as to avoid moving individuals
into dormitories to meet simplistic space-per-person standards.64
Thanks to the distinction between physical and social density, crowding was retained as
a scientific object of immense significance to human health. Solutions were also provided
through the control of environmental conditions: While we may not be able to control
population growth at zero level or we may not be able to eliminate high-density situations,
we may be able to . . . minimize psychological and physiological costs. Baum and Paulus
were realizing the aims of environmental psychology, becoming increasingly engaged in
policy issues surrounding the effects of the built environment. Recommendations for
dormitory design were taken up by colleges, and new standards of housing and public
health were introduced following a series of well-publicized legal cases involving prison
overcrowding.65
These researchers were also united in giving credit to Calhoun as a source of inspiration, Paulus describing the work of environmental psychologists as having been stimulated by Calhouns (1962) widely publicized studies with rodents showing a variety of
deleterious effects of crowding.66 Yet they did more than this. Unlike the authors of
earlier statistical and laboratory studies, they recognized that Calhouns object of concern
was not simply the effects of density in a physical sense, as number of individuals per
square unit area. He was concerned with degrees of social interaction and social
velocitywhich were open to manipulation.67 Those who had interpreted Calhouns
systems as a simplistic matter of a stressor stimulus leading directly to a stress
response, devoid of mediatory factors, were mistaken: space, as both a real physical
entity and a social product, mediated between density and pathology. Baum and
64 G. McCain, V. Cox, and P. Paulus, The Relationship between Illness Complaints and Degree of Crowding
in a Prison Environment, Environ. Behav., 1976, 8:283290, on pp. 289 (quotation), 288 (recommendation);
and Paulus and McCain, Crowding in Jails, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1983, 4:89 107, on p. 89.
See also Paulus, Prison Crowding: A Psychological Perspective (New York: Springer, 1988).
65 Steven Zlutnick and Irwin Altman, Crowding and Human Behavior, in Environment and the Social
Sciences, ed. Wohlwill and Carson (cit. n. 26), pp. 44 58, on p. 56; and Paulus, Prison Crowding, p. 6. With
regard to the college dormitory, the benefits of lower density could have been realized simply by reducing the
occupancy of each room from two to one. However, such a strategy would have been costly, sacrificing twenty
residential places. But bisecting the corridor with doors and providing further lounge areas cost only $4,000. See
A. Baum and G. E. Davis, Reducing the Stress of High-Density Living: An Architectural Intervention, Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980, 38:471 481, esp. p. 480.
66 Paulus, Prison Crowding, p. 7. Calhoun became involved in legal action on behalf of inmates of the District
of Columbia jail and was even invited to serve as an expert witness: Calhoun to Garvin McCain, 8 Dec. 1971,
Calhoun Papers, Wyoming, Box 2a.
67 Baum and Valins observed that most contact occurred in the hallways of the corridor dormitories, resulting
in the withdrawal of individuals to their bedrooms. In the suites, individuals exhibited higher levels of social
velocity, continuing to use the lounge areas where interaction was more likely. See Baum and Valins,
Architectural Mediation of Residential Density and Control (cit. n. 60), p. 158.

682
Paulus often collaborated with psychologists who had experience working with
laboratory animals and thus were better placed to interpret the intricacies of Calhouns
complex systems.68 By focusing attention on the details of Calhouns model environments, as scientific as well as technical objects, they saw constructive solutions to the
crowding problem. While adopting his theories about the unique power of mans
intellectual skills and conceptual space in coping with density, they also recognized, more importantly, that not all of Calhouns rats had suffered from crowding
stress. Those that had some control over space and interactionthe despots and their
haremsled relatively normal lives, in direct contrast to their subordinates.69 Psychologists had, like Calhoun, divided their experimental universes into compartments, reducing
frustration and increasing gratifying social encounters. In both the rodent laboratory and
human society, the key was control; the method was more effective design of physical
spaces to limit unwanted interaction.
Calhoun had acted as an advisor for Baums research and had encouraged this perspective. Baum, in turn, encouraged others to think of Calhouns experiments in this light.
In a textbook on environmental psychology, Baum and his colleagues not only asked of
the student: Can you think of any areas in the human environment that would qualify as
behavioral sinks? but also, Can you think of a similar means of eliminating the human
behavioral sinks you thought of earlier?70 For Calhoun: no single area of intellectual
effort can exert a greater influence on human welfare than that contributing to better
design of the built environment. And, considering mans unique ability to build, design,
and control, the future was marked by hope rather than darkness.71
SAVING SCIENCE AND THE CITY FROM THE CROWD
Psychologists had shifted attention away from the psychological laboratory and the
statistical measurement of neighborhoods and cities. It was in the nations prisons,
hospitals, homes, and schools where the effects of social density were most keenly
feltsituations of real world crowding, consistent with those experienced by Calhouns
rats and mice. It was in the institution that change was most easily effected through design
and results assessed and circulated; what Kohler describes as a hybrid space, the
institution allowed for a synthesis of the objectivity of the laboratory with the reality of
the field. However, as these psychologists made clear, their gaze had never shifted from
the citythe site where Calhouns work had the most immediate impact, where it had first
captured the imagination of scientists and the public. Valins and Baum reflected: the
corridor-design dormitories represent overloaded social environments, very much like
68 Stuart Valins had worked with laboratory rats as a postgraduate, and Pauluss collaborator, Garvin McCain,
continued to do so; see Garvin McCain and Michael Lobb, Population Density and Nonaggressive Competition, Animal Learning and Behavior, 1978, 6:98 105.
69 For work that adopted Calhouns theories about human resources for coping with density see Stokols,
Experience of Crowding in Primary and Secondary Environments (cit. n. 61), p. 71; Andrew Baum and Stuart
Valins, Crowding, in Handbook of Environmental Psychology, ed. Daniel Stokols and Irwin Altman (New
York: Wiley, 1987), pp. 533570, on p. 539; and Gary W. Evans and W. H. Eichelman, Preliminary Models
of Conceptual Linkages among Proxemic Variables, Environ. Behav., 1976, 8:87116, esp. p. 111.
70 Fisher et al., Environmental Psychology (cit. n. 62), p. 197. They also described how Baum and Valinss
approach to college dormitory behavior drew directly from Calhouns studies of gratifying and frustrating
interactions between rats and mice: ibid., p. 201.
71 Prod #211The Great Balancing Act: Interview, Dr. John C [sic] Calhoun 8/26/83, by Dennis S. Johnson,
Encyclopedia Britannica, Calhoun Papers, NLM.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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cities.72 Yet the city was also the site where extrapolations from Calhouns work
encountered most resistance.
With the city in mind, Freedman described how he had expected to find that crowding
in the laboratory would be very stressful and produce tension. In contrast to such a
familiar naive assumption, the researchers had instead found themselves startled by
their results. Freedman quickly turned these results to his advantage, developing a
density-intensity model in which crowding intensified existing emotional states, both
negative and positive. While population growth was a problem, the city could provide a
solution: concentration protected the environment from suburban sprawl, generated social
and technological advances, and increased efficiency. He concluded his influential book
on the crowd with an optimistic chapter, In Praise of Cities, in which he declared that
ethologists are wrong about crowding: As the population of the world increases, there
will not be an increase in aggressiveness and antisocial behavior and a general breakdown
in society. Homo sapiens is not doomed to extinction because of population density; the
race will not destroy itself simply because it will be crowded.73
Others went further, criticizing the very fixation of social scientists on the problem of
the crowd: Foremost, this is because research on animals reported dramatic behavioral
problems and illnesses among caged, crowded populations.74 In the view of the urban
sociologist Mark Baldassare, the theories and methods of the social sciences had been
abandoned in favor of a simplistic model: crowding leads to stress, which leads inevitably to pathology. The argument was one of crude analogy: the crowded human was
like a crowded rat. For Baldassare and his fellow sociologists: loose analogies drawn
from animal behavior will simply not do. Unfortunately, Calhouns rats are pulling a
fast-moving bandwagon. Many scientists have jumped on this bandwagon, and, with few
exceptions . . . , left proper theoretical and scientific procedure behind.75
While they credited exceptions (such as Stokols) for providing much needed theoretical
sophistication, they were concerned that the crowding construct continued to define a
fundamentally pathological state. Baldassare, like Freedman, did not avail himself of the
distinction between density and crowding. As Freedman argued, retaining crowding as a
simple, physical variable, as amount of space per person, was more basic and more
interesting. Once people feel crowded, virtually by definition this is a negative state, and,
presumably, they will respond in ways people always respond to negative states. As far as
I can tell, there is nothing that distinguishes this negative emotional state from others, and,
therefore, it is not of special interest to the environmental psychologist.76
As Rheinberger argues, the technical conditions of an experimental practice determine
72 Paulus, Prison Crowding (cit. n. 64), p. 2; Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the
LabField Border in Biology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2002), p. 11; and Valins and Baum, Residential
Group Size, Social Interaction, and Crowding (cit. n. 63), p. 429.
73 Freedman, Crowding and Behavior (cit. n. 38), pp. 78 79, 107. For example, he employed subjects to watch
films under different conditions of density and found that crowding increased applause and laughter. See J. L.
Freedman, J. Birsky, and A. Cavoukian, Environmental Determinants of Behavioral Contagion, Basic Appl.
Soc. Psychol., 1980, 1:155161.
74 Mark Baldassare, Residential Crowding in Urban America (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1979), p. 191.
Many others agreed. In their studies in Toronto, Alan Booth and John Cowell argued that research on human
crowding had suffered from being guided by studies of animals; see Alan Booth and John Cowell, Crowding
and Health, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 1976, 17:204 220, on p. 208.
75 Baldassare, Residential Crowding in Urban America, p. 192; and C. S. Fischer, Baldassare, and R. Ofshe,
Crowding Studies and Urban Life: A Critical Review, J. Amer. Inst. Planners, 1975, 41:406 418, on pp. 412,
415.
76 Jonathan L. Freedman, Current Status of Work on Crowding and Suggestions for Housing Design, in

684
the possible range of representations. By paying individuals to accomplish tasks in

relatively crowded rooms for short periods of time, Freedman had generated data that
questioned the positive correlation between density and pathology. This made his research
attractive to Baldassare and his collaborators, in spite of its positivistic navete, and they
drew on Freedmans results to challenge the obsession with the crowd per se. By using
similarly simplistic definitions of crowding and density in their own household studies,
they were able to declare the ill-effects of high density to be trivial.77
Baldassare was challenging what he considered to be the twin threats to sociological
explanations of urban living design determinism and ethological determinism both of
which reflected the unwanted influence of animal experiments. The claim by psychologists
and designers that physical spaces had the power both to create and to ameliorate
crowding stress was, declared Baldassare, overstated. Spaces were not active agents in
determining social behaviors and attitudes. Rather, places were imbued with significant
meaning only through the ideas, lives, and actions of the people that inhabited them.
Social networks and communities were more significant than the physical environment, as
the sociologist Claude Fischer argued: the small, social worlds within which people live
are so resilient and powerful as to be largely impervious to factors like size and density. . .
there are no psychological consequences of urbanization.78 By failing to identify densitydependent pathology, they sought to stabilize crowding as a technical objecta straightforward physical entity producing predictable results of limited significance.
With this stabilization, the explanation for the differing behaviors among animals and
man now shifted to the experimental subject. Given that there were few instances of
humans going berserk, it seemed that man reacted differently to crowding than did the
rat or mouse. Where pathologies did exist, they were trivial and determined by more
significant social variables, such as power differentials, poverty, and discrimination.
Crowding was one of many physical variables that humans adapted to in their day-to-day
lives, often with positive consequences. The human being was not, as the ethologists
would have it, a passive victim of density, but a conscious, rational, active, social animal,
well adapted to life in the crowd.
While Fischer and Baldassare sought to promote a sociological understanding of urban
life at the expense of the ecological and psychological picture, what they shared with
Freedman was a concern to counter those determined, in the words of Jane Jacobs, to do
the city in. Reclaiming the positive elements of the sociology of Park and Simmel,
Baldassare argued that selective withdrawal in public spaces allowed for the maintenance
of close, fulfilling relationships that were often more meaningful in the city based as
they were on shared interests and concerns. Criticism of crowding research was combined
with a new sub-cultural theory. For Fischer, higher rates of deviance and disorganization were not the direct result of crowding but, rather, of the congregation of large
numbers of people, critical masses that allowed for the development of deviant subcultures. While these cultures might often seem to express immoral behaviors, such as
Residential Crowding and Design, ed. John R. Aiello and Andrew Baum (New York: Plenum, 1979), pp.
167174, on p. 168.
77 Fischer et al., Crowding Studies and Urban Life (cit. n. 75), p. 415. Freedman confined his subjects to a
room for only a short period of time often for only one hour, four hours at the most. They were few in number,
often only four or five people, and were willing, paid participants.
78 Baldassare, Residential Crowding in Urban America (cit. n. 74), pp. 30, 31; and Claude S. Fischer,
Sociological Comments on Psychological Approaches to Urban Life, in Advances in Environmental Psychology, Vol. 1: The Urban Environment, ed. A. Baum, J. M. Singer, and S. Valins (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1978),
pp. 131143, on p. 142.

EDMUND RAMSDEN
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sexual deviancy, drug use, and violence, they also contributed creativity, community, and
solidarity. As the evil of urbanism was balanced by the good, it was necessary to live
with the irony that the blessings of urban life perhaps cannot be achieved without also
accepting some of its curses.79
As we have seen, Calhoun would not have objected. He accepted that human beings, as
both biological and cultural animals, had continuously adapted to density, exhibiting and
spurring innovation, creativity, new social roles, and technological advances. However,
this more complicated message was generally ignored; most of those critical of the
influence of animal ecology and ethology focused solely on his more popular paper in
Scientific American. In their criticisms, the arguments of Calhoun were combined with
those of more radical ethologists whose animal studies were increasingly conceived as a
considerable threat to social scientific understanding of human behavior and institutions.80
For Fischer, the Territorial Animal of Ardrey and Lorenz lay behind Calhouns extrapolations from rat pens to cities.81 He declared, with Baldassare: A red-eyed, sharpfanged obsession about urban life stalks contemporary thought.82 This was an obsession
that needed to be repelled, based as it was on an inherently pessimistic biological view
that density is inevitably a problem and that the only solution to crowding is to uncrowd.
Similarly, for those critical of policies targeting the high fertility of poor and minority
groups, Calhouns influence was a point of attack. David Kleinman described how
Freedman had shown that population had little to do with humanitys ills. Concern with
density was largely a reflection of the well articulated disquietude of elites. This concern
often is a boon to many political leaders who then attribute the lack of progress in
improving social welfare to fertility behavior.83
Calhouns influence, they argued, was turning attention away from the real problem of
the city, the real object of investigation for the social scientist: power differentials between
social and racial groups. For Baldassare, space was a resource; those with power over
it were able to conduct desired activities with less interference, while less power would
lead to more interruptions and the inability to conduct preferred activities.84 The role of
the social scientist was to aid in the empowerment of the urban poor, not blame them for
their high fertility or collude in the tweaking of architectural design to ameliorate the
symptoms of their subordination. That not all of Calhouns rats suffered from crowding
79 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Cape, 1961), p. 27; Claude S. Fischer,
Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism, Amer. J. Sociol., 1975, 80:1319 1341, on pp. 1320, 1337; and
Fischer and Mark Baldassare, How Far from the Madding Crowd? New Society, 1975, 32:531533, on p. 533.
While drawing from a more traditionally ecological perspective, Hawleys position was not dissimilar, as he
argued that it was a critical mass of density that led to an increased diversity of facilities and services in the
city; see Hawley, Population Density and the City (cit. n. 1).
80 See Howard Kaye, The Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1986).
81 Claude S. Fischer, Sociological Comments on Psychological Approaches to Urban Life, in Advances in
Environmental Psychology, Vol. 1, ed. Baum et al. (cit. n. 78), pp. 131144, on p. 132. See also Karen A. Franck,
Exorcising the Ghost of Physical Determinism, Environ. Behav., 1984, 16:411 435; she draws from Fischer
and others to prioritize social institutions and cultural norms in the human experience of the environment.
82 Fischer and Baldassare, How Far from the Madding Crowd? (cit. n. 79), p. 531. Fischer continued to
attack biological determinism more generally throughout his career. See Klaus R. Scherer, Ronald P. Abeles, and
Claude S. Fischer, Human Aggression and Conflict: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1975); and Fischer et al., Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
83 Fischer et al., Crowding Studies and Urban Life (cit. n. 75), p. 414; and David S. Kleinman, Human
Adaptation and Population Growth: A Non-Malthusian Perspective (New York: Universe, 1980), pp. xi, 271.
84 Mark Baldassare, Human Spatial Behavior, Ann. Rev. Sociol., 1978, 44:29 56, on pp. 44 45.

686
stress because they were given increased control over their space was disregarded or, if
recognized, was rarely an insight attributed to Calhoun himself.85 As the social and
intellectual focus shifted in the 1980s, away from the dangers of the crowded city toward
the monotony and isolation of the suburbs, and away from fear of the population explosion
to concern with the so-called birth dearth, critical treatments of Calhouns experiments
only intensifiedthey came to be used as shorthand for the myth of the evils of
population density.86 Having once embodied all that was wrong with urban life, Calhouns
rats now reflected a far greater danger: mankinds enduring obsession with the menace of
the crowd.
CONCLUSION
From the 1960s, a group of psychologists and sociologists concerned with real world
problems and disillusioned with the methods and theories of their parent disciplines turned
to a series of rat experiments for solutions. This was a generation for whom the city
seemed to be in trouble. Diagnoses of urban discontent led to intense deliberation over the
composition and definition of the city. Physical variables seemed crucial: the city comprises large numbers of persons, big buildings, busy streets, noise, pace, stress, and, above
all, perhaps, the whirl of the crowd.87 Given the concern over the impact of such intense
social and physical stimuli, coupled with broader fears pertaining to population growth
and ecological destruction, we can see how the intellectual climate was well suited to
receiving Calhouns work.
What Calhouns experiments provided was a near-perfect correlation of parts, the right
tools for the job of creating and representing the problem of the crowd.88 He had
generated, in experiments using a quintessentially urban animal, a wide range of pathologies deemed all too present in the cityviolence, apathy, narcissism, and sexual depravity; he was invigorating older sociological and sanitarian treatments of the city that
depicted its structures and institutions as disorganized, deviant, or sick; with the
behavioral sink, the social and the physical were united in a concept that vividly
presented the city as a cess-pit, or a drain, in which the dregs of humanity were collected,
their pathologies exacerbated. He also provided, through the measure of density, a
quantifiable, replicable, and controllable quality that had real and important effects one
that seemed easy to translate from the rodent laboratory to the human world. For those
concerned with realizing change through the application of social and behavioral science,
Calhouns work was understandably attractive. This was what previous generations had
missed: in always privileging social relationships, organizations, and norms they had
forgotten that all that was social was physically grounded and physically expressed. The
significance of Calhouns work for social thought was unquestionable; where there was
85 Freedman was typical in this regard; see Freedman, Crowding and Behavior (cit. n. 38), p. 35. Yet so
concerned was Calhoun with the political economy of rodent societies that he even described the mice who
controlled the best nesting sites (the lower apartments) as having higher income: John B. Calhoun, Annual
Report of the Unit for Research on Behavioral Systems, 30 Sept. 1982, Calhoun Papers, NLM.
86 Ben J. Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth (New York: Pharos, 1987); and Michael P. Smith, The City and Social
Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 191. When tracing the distribution of population through time, it seemed
apparent to many sociologist demographers that the density of urban areas was in decline by the 1960s, as people
moved to the suburbs.
87 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 175.
88 Clarke and Fujimura, Right Tools for the Job (cit. n. 13).

EDMUND RAMSDEN
687
disagreement was over whether this was to the benefit or the detriment of science and
policy.
As not only ideas but also experimental systems were translated from the animal
laboratory to the social world, we can see how Calhouns objects and material practices
continued to influence the degree to which crowding among human beings was constituted
as a problem. When adapting Calhouns systems to human populations, researchers faced
obvious ethical restrictions: they could not place human beings in a confined space and
breed them to extinction. They therefore devised strategies to uncover processes of
crowding in situations faced by human beings that were deemed analogous to those seen
in Calhouns rats and mice. The practicalities of these adaptations determined results,
theories, and concerns; in turn, the choice of practice reflected broader social interests.
The first studies to follow from Calhoun were certainly simplistic. When authors spoke
of a model provided through animal studies, they were merely seeking to map rodent
pathologies onto human laboratory subjects and statistical data, justifying social and
scientific interest in the problems of space and numbers. Inconsistent results did not lead
to the abandonment of Calhouns systems, but to further reflection over their structure and
meaning. Social scientists began to examine the objects of Calhouns systems more
closelythe distinctions made between, and the significance granted to, his model
organisms or his model environments proving crucial to the perception of crowding as
either a stable technical object of minor concern or an epistemic object of considerable
import.
By differentiating between density as a physical measure and crowding as an experiential phenomenon, social scientists distinguished between rodents and man while maintaining a focus on the pathology of the crowd. By further differentiating between physical
and social density, they established how unwanted social interaction and crowding stress
could be created and ameliorated through alterations in the physical environment. For an
emerging community of environmental psychologists, Calhouns experimental architecture was not simply a technical condition but the very target of inquiry; its power was
observable and measurable in model environments analogous to those present in the
behavioral sink.89 Policy applications were also realized, as few would declare that
increased numbers in institutions aided healing, education, or rehabilitation. In the hospital, school, or prison, it seemed clear that crowding caused problems.
The city was a different matter. Urban sociologists, in particular, sought to defend and
understand it through the study and application of fundamentally sociological theories and
variables. In spite of the increased sophistication of crowding studies, Calhouns systems
were interpreted in terms that were utterly simplistic, even naive: density was held to lead
directly and inevitably to pathology, irrespective of the ordering of experimental architecture, social structure, new social roles, adaptations, and advances in response to high
density. Certainly, sociologists were justified in looking beyond animal experiments for
inspiration: stimulus overload, selective withdrawal, and power relations in relation to
space and numbers have been of long-standing interest to social scientists.90 What is
striking, however, is the degree to which critics sought to charge Calhoun with a failure
89
Valins and Baum, Residential Group Size, Social Interaction, and Crowding (cit. n. 63), p. 438.
Seeking both to reclaim the field from ethologists and to deactivate their concerns, Baldassare argued:
Sociologists began to speculate about the effects of urban densities long before experiments with crowded rats
gained attention. See Mark Baldassare, Residential Crowding and Social Behaviour, in Remaking the City:
Social Science Perspectives on Urban Design, ed. John Pipkin, Mark La Gory, and Judith R. Blau (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1983), pp. 148 161, on p. 149.
90

688
to examine these elements and then to use that failure to draw points of distinction
between crowded rodents and man. In disavowing the distinction between density and
crowdingand thus continuing to generate data that questioned the premise that increasing the concentration of individuals caused them to go berserkthey were able to
promote a more positive vision of mans future in an urban world. Thus, by defining
crowding as density, stabilizing it as a crude physical and predictable technical object of
limited importance, Calhoun was more effectively denied. The cause of differing responses to density could then be explained only by fundamental differences between
humans and other animals. Continued references to Calhoun reveal the degree to which he
now served as a point of attack. The work of those fearful of the crowd was not only
flawed because of its dependence on Calhouns rodent studies; it was dangerous, for
perceiving the urban masses as aggressive, pathetic, and deviant animalsas uncultured
ratswould only reinforce their treatment as such.


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From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH

Author(s): By Edmund Ramsden

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