486 wdw revieW — IMAGE
The Behavioral
Sink: On Mice,
and Men
b y A n a T e i x e i ra P i n t o
April 2015
John Calhoun with mice experiment. Work republished by NIH. Original source: John
Calhoun, "Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, no. 66, 1 (January 1973): 80-88
In 1972, ethnologist John B. Calhoun de-
vised an experiment to test the effects of
overcrowding on mice. His design, called
Universe 25, consisted of a 101-square-
inch box, fitted with mesh tunnels, hori-
zontal corridors, and abundant nesting
boxes, 256 in total. All mortality-inducing
factors were mitigated: Universe 25 had
an optimal climate, resource supra-avail-
ability, disease control, and—since the
487
exponentially, doubling every fifty-five
mice could not climb over the steep metal
walls—emigration was impossible.
When the architecture was completed,
Calhoun brought in four breeding pairs of
mice, supplying them with food, fresh wa-
ter, and plentiful wood shavings for nest
building. In the absence of predators and
environmental adversities the mice began
to multiply. After a period of initial adjust-
ment, the population began to increase
days. Soon, however, the high fecundity
rate started to have an adverse impact
on the mouse world. As more and more
young were born, all social niches came
to be occupied. Prevented from finding
a territory of their own, excess mice had
to contest for roles inside an overcrowd-
ed system. Males who failed to assert
dominance over their territory began to
withdraw from social interaction. They
would congregate in large groups near the
middle of the pen, and exhibit atavistic
behavior. Long periods of inactivity were
typically interrupted by bouts of violence,
in which withdrawn males would vicious-
ly maul one another. Constantly called
upon to defend their territory, dominant
males were also under undue stress.
Gradually they too began to waver in
their dominance, leaving nursing females
exposed to nest invasion. The females, in
turn, started to prematurely wean, aban-
don, or even cannibalize their young.
As more and more mice were not prop-
erly socialized, mouse society started to
break down. Mortality rates began to
soar. Rejected by their progenitors, the
surviving young were not socialized
either. Some females began to withdraw
to upper nests while their male counter-
parts isolated themselves and refused to
engage in courtship or territorial fighting.
Calhoun called this group “the beautiful
ones”: their behavior restricted to eating,
1 John B. Calhoun, “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and
Demise of a Mouse Population,” Proceedings of the Royal Society
of Medicine, no. 66, 1 (January 1973): 80–88. Available at: http://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/
(accessed 9 April 2015).
2 Apocalypse (Rev.vi.7): “I saw a pale horse, and its rider’s name was
sleeping, and grooming, they exhibited
an impeccable pelage. By day 600, as
the population had ceased to regenerate
itself, its numbers began to dwindle back
to those in the initials stages. There would
be no recovery however. Though physi-
cally able to reproduce, the mice had lost
the social skills required to mate. Calhoun
concluded the colony had experienced
a “social death” long before its ultimate
physical extinction and published the
experiment’s results in an article titled
1
“Death Squared.”  As Calhoun candidly
admits in his introduction, however, he
was not solely concerned with mice. His
thoughts were on man, and on how the
death of the spirit, under certain con-
ditions, precedes the death of the body.
“Death Squared” opens by quoting the
2
Book of Revelation and ends with an
3
ominous warning. Calhoun’s description
of his mice colony also lent itself read-
ily to anthropomorphization: societal
dropouts, welfare moochers, delinquent
youth, feckless single mothers, and so-
cialites warped in narcissism.
Animals, as Henry David Thoreau said,
have to be put to their use, for they are all
beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry
some portion of our thoughts. Calhoun’s
mice were not really mice; they were a so-
cial metaphor. Not merely because mice
and rats are assimilated into urban squal-
or and moral degeneracy, but also be-
cause Calhoun was a Malthusian. A previ-
Death, and Hades followed him and they were given power over a
fourth of the earth to kill with the sword and with famine and with
pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.”
3 “For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why
a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species
extinction.” Calhoun, “Death Squared,” op cit: 86.
 488
ous paper, “Population Density and Social
Pathology,” evokes the British economist
in its introductory paragraph, but where-
as Thomas Robert Malthus stated that
unabated demographic growth would
lead to environmental collapse due to
overconsumption, Calhoun thought that
population density alone could preclude
4
endless progress. “Vice” (behavioral
pathologies), as he puts it using Malthus’s
own terms, even in the absence of “mis-
ery” (physical pathologies), was enough
to bring about societal collapse. He called
this process the “behavioral sink,” a be-
havioral pathology brought about simply
by an overabundance of resources, within
a spatially confined environment.
Calhoun was by no means the first
biologist to fall under the influence of
Malthus. Modern biology, in fact, could
be described as a branch of classical
economics. Malthus was instrumental
for Charles Darwin's take on evolution,
namely in the formulation of the two main
principles the theory implies: a principle
of fecundity, which leads to overabun-
dant natality, and a principle of selection,
which in effect culls the undesirable. The
political economist had famously argued
that “positive checks”—a euphemism
for premature deaths—were needed to
avert exponential growth, and that these
checks were provided by hunger, disease,
and war. Fittingly, he was among the first
to espouse a punitive approach to pover-
ty: he opposed the “poor laws”—a system
of poor relief which anticipated the mod-
4 John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,”  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1501789/?page=1
California Medicine, no. 113, 5 (November 1970): 54. Available at:
wdw revieW — IMAGE
ern welfare state—on the grounds that it
would allow the destitute to multiply be-
yond their means and place an undue bur-
den on the state; and he and his followers
defended that workers wages could never
exceed the cost of subsistence long-term.
Though Darwin did not assign moral
value to evolution, Herbert Spencer, who
popularized social Darwinism and coined
the phrase “survival of the fittest,” also
considered the division of labor in the
political economy to be the social analog
of physiological divergence and specia-
tion in biology. What became known as
Malthusian equilibrium—a stable sta-
tionary state maintained by the opposing
forces of reproduction and starvation—
also mirrors Darwin’s concepts of “fecun-
dity” and “selection,” Adam Smith’s twin
blades of “supply” and “demand,” and the
dual principles of “work” and “waste” in
William Thompson’s formulation of the
second law of thermodynamics, concern-
ing the dissipation of energy, i.e., entropy.
Unsurprisingly, Calhoun’s experi-
ments would lend scientific clout to the
rising anti-welfare rhetoric in the United
States and the United Kingdom, which
was to shape social policy from the late
1970s onward. His feckless and dysfunc-
tional mice were construed as arguing
the point that generous collective pro-
vision for unemployment and sickness
was sapping the working classes’ drive to
work, and his fear-mongering and apoca-
lyptic hyperbole about “social death” and
“behavioral sink” was taken to encourage
(accessed 9 April 2015).
489 T h e B e h av i o ra l S i n k : O n M i c e , a n d M e n
the Conservatives’ increasingly harsh
rhetoric about those reliant on social
security. Calhoun built a mouse dystopia,
now the mice could reciprocate by help-
ing dismantle the social contract and the
consensus surrounding the welfare state.
As Eugene McCarraher notes, cap-
italism is an eschatological tale as well
as a form of political economy, offering
its own story of human fulfillment. For
capitalist eschatology, salvation implies
5
inclusion in a worldwide marketplace.
Yet, below the threshold of conscious-
ness, darker visions are at play. Be it
through the implementation of ‘sacrifice
zones’ or allowing just enough unemploy-
ment in the economy to prevent inflation
from rising above a given target figure
(NAIRU), there is an uncanny continuity
between Malthus’ insistence on having
workers earn less than a living wage and
the Chicago school’s policies. Simply put,
just like in Calhoun’s colony where there
was a limit to the number of meaningful
social roles, under Chicago school eco-
nomics there is a certain percentage of the
population that cannot be redeemed back
to the social.
Fast-forward to 2015. Calhoun’s
6
experiment remains popular, having
been reexamined in a paper by Edmund
Ramsden and Jon Adams, “Escaping the
Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments
of John B Calhoun and Their Cultural
5 Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 189.
6 I am indebted to Antonia Majaca for bringing this to my attention.
7 The Journal of Social History, no. 42, 3 (2009). Available as a yin-1687584457 (accessed 9 April 2015).
working paper at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/ (accessed 9
April 2015).
8 Cabinet, no. 42 (Summer 2011), http://www.cabinetmagazine.
org/issues/42/wiles.php (accessed 9 April 2015).
7
Influence”  and the subsequent “The
8
Behavioral Sink,” an article by Will Wiles.
Yet, judging by a recent article in io9, its
9
meaning has changed. According to Es-
ther Inglis-Arkell, it was not so much that
Universe 25 was overcrowded but that the
mice seemed to converge on the center,
while pens at the end of each corridor
had one single entryway, making it easy
for the “beautiful ones” to seclude them-
selves from social turmoil. Instead of a
demographic problem, it would seem that
Calhoun’s experiment had a fair distribu-
tion problem. But one could also say that
what appears as scientific objectivity is
always made of finely congealed subjec-
tivity. It is tempting to see a mice society
as a stable entity whose modes of organ-
ization are guaranteed by the integrity of
the species, but most animals are able to
reconstitute their societies, to engage in
10
‘politics’ if you will. In a human envi-
ronment the number of available roles is
also not fixed; it grows with demographic
expansion, and the social is predicated on
the political rather than on the biological.
To wit, whether or not Calhoun’s experi-
ment provides a realistic representation of
social interaction is highly debatable. But
he certainly channels the zeitgeist.
9 Esther Inglis-Arkell, “How Mice Turned Their Private Paradise
Into A Terrifying Dystopia,” io9 (24 February 2015), http://io9.
com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-into-a-terri-
10 See Isabelle Stengers on primatology: The Invention of Modern Sci-
ence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 62–65.i