Rats and people are a lot a like actually speaking from principles common in all specie. Ever heard of calhouns experiments?
Working at NIMH in 1954, Calhoun launched several experiments with rats and mice. In his first series of tests, he placed 32 to 56 rodents in a 10- by 14-foot case in a barn on a Montgomery County farm. Using electrified partitions, he divided the space into four rooms. Each was designed to support 12 adult brown Norway rats. Rats could move between the rooms only via the ramps he built. Because Calhoun provided unlimited water and food as well as protection from predators, disease and weather, the critters were said to be in “rat utopia” or “mouse paradise”…
He described the onset of several pathologies: violence and aggression, with rats in the crowded pen “going berserk, attacking females, juveniles and less-active males.” There was also “sexual deviance.” Rats became hypersexual, pursuing females relentlessly even when not in heat.
The mortality rate among females was extremely high. A large proportion of the population became bisexual, then increasingly homosexual, and finally asexual. There was a breakdown in maternal behavior. Mothers stopped caring for their young, stopped building a nest for them and even began to attack them, resulting in a 96 percent mortality rate in the two crowded pens. Calhoun coined a term — “behavioral sink” — to describe the decay.
Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption…
The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations…
In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.
Males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some males became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount any rat they encountered. Mothers neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. In certain sections of the pens, infant mortality rose as high as 96%, the dead cannibalized by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a physical sense but at an immense psychological cost. They were the majority in the late phases of growth, existing as a vacant, huddled mass in the centre of the pens. Unable to breed, the population plummeted and did not recover. The crowded rodents had lost the ability to co-exist harmoniously, even after the population numbers once again fell to low levels. At a certain density, they had ceased to act like rats and mice, and the change was permanent.
Violence became prevalent. Excess males strived for acceptance, were rejected, and withdrew. Huddling together, they would exhibit brief flurries of violence among themselves. The effects of violence became increasingly visible. Certain individuals became targets of repeated attack. These individuals would have badly chewed and scarred tails. Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals, “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating, and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared as a beautiful exhibit of the species, with keen, alert eyes, and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact very stupid.
The way Calhoun describes it, behavior becomes more and more erratic until, eventually, the behavioral sink emerges like a vortex. Thereafter it acts as an accelerant, exacerbating the effects of the other pathological behaviors: “The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental,” Calhoun wrote, “a behavioral sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group.”
Similar behaviours in humans can be observed in humans with surplus "resource" choices such as various designer drugs, application glyphs for different demons, desire manifesting and being re-encoded into various traps towards alienation and cyclic processes of the same abstract conditions in any area just with different surface guises.
