(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on October 18th, 2018. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
The Rat Park Experiment
What happens if you take away all difficulty in an environment?
What if you take away the intrigue, potential for adventure and interesting experiences that the world allows for?
And what if you replace those with opiates, stimulants and other low-risk, low-attention brain-candies?
As always, there’s a little-known experiment that will give us the answer.
Previously, we looked into the Mouse Utopia Experiments and discovered what happens if you give a population everything they need.
Now, we’ll go the other way by looking into the Rat Park Experiment and see what happens when the converse is true; what happens when you take everything away?
The Rat Park Experiment
In the late 1970’s, a Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis: that addiction wasn’t caused by anything physical or physiological, but was instead an environmental condition.
Specifically, he sought to prove that opiate addictions in laboratory rats weren’t chemical addictions at all, merely a side-effect of the laboratory conditions they were raised in.
To do this, he split our dear rodent friends into two groups:
- The group in normal, boring laboratory conditions
- A group in “Rat Park” – ostensibly a wonderful area where rats had an immersive environment and plenty to do
He gave both groups of rats two places to drink from. One was filled with plain water, the other filled with water tainted with heroin.
The rats in the first group chose overwhelmingly to drink the heroin-laden water.
The rats in the second group, however, chose overwhelmingly to drink the plain water even when heroin was available.
Alexander attributed this to the fact that the rats in the first group had nothing better to do than get high on opiates and wait to die, whereas the second group were fulfilled and weren’t looking for an additional high.
To further demonstrate this, he took some of the opiate addicted rats from group one and took them to Rat Park.
Those rats then seemed to wean themselves from the heroin water and revert to drinking plain water. Notably, they didn’t seem to suffer huge withdrawal symptoms as are reported in human addicts trying to kick the habit.
Reception Of The Rat Park Experiment
Curiously, it’d be years before this was published, and the findings were rejected several times by major publications.
Since, there’s been criticism with ideas levied against the findings such as: physiological addiction indicators, genetic predisposal towards addiction existing, and the other usual suspects that rear their heads in these things.
You can make your own mind up and I’d suggest the above factors don’t necessarily conflict with the findings from the original experiment, but I’m not a lab-coat scientist, so my opinion isn’t important.
What’s important is what this has to do with you.
How Is This Weird Experiment Relevant To Me?
You are a human, these are rats.
You possibly aren’t addicted to hard drugs; these rats were basically forced into an environment where they were necessary.
What does this have to do with you?
Well, two factors go into making the modern world:
- A constant stream of low-focus, dopamine-boosting activities available to your brain 24/7/365
- A large contingent of people in all corners of society who seek to eliminate challenging environments; presumably with the goal of turning the entire globe into one big HR department
People are checking into convents because they’re addicted to Facebook. Meanwhile, there are massive protests at higher education colleges worldwide because students might have to come into conflict with opinions that upset them.
There are professional cuddle therapists and pillow rooms in company buildings where people can escape life.
And there’s the big fact that you have multiple generational studies showing people are less healthy, less mentally stable and unhappier than ever before.
So here are some things I’ll pose to you:
- It’s never been easier to engage your brain. Take up new hobbies. Travel the world. Learn new things and expose yourselves to enrichment activities that were unthinkable a few years ago.
- On the other hand, there seems to be a general trend towards having people addicted to the cold blue of a screen, sleepwalking through a commute and a day’s work only to go home and repeat the same process again in their “free time.”
One of these things is akin to a lifeless laboratory cage. The other is a global Rat Park for humans.
Which do you currently live in?
But What Do I Do?
The environment doesn’t matter. The enrichment matters. You need to build enrichment into your life.
Assuming you live in boring laboratory condition lifestyle conditions, you will inevitably be drawn into the pitfalls of civilisation and become reliant upon them.
In other words, if you are bored, you’re going to get addicted to crack, smack or their digital equivalents. It’s an inevitable result of the lack of enrichment in your environment.
On the other hand, if you build enriching activities into your life, you will be more resilient to the temptations of modern life; be they chemical, digital or simply degenerate.
A final thought on this before I wrap it up: A lot of people, according to Bruce Alexander’s ideas, are trying to fix the wrong problem. They’re trying to combat a pornography addiction by not watching porn and they’re trying to quit binge-watching one Netflix show after another by… watching TED Talks or listening to Podcasts as though that’s better for them.
This is a classic case of treating the symptom and not the problem.
Instead of fixing the bad habit or even thinking of habits at all, think of those things as side-effects of your environment. Change your environment in a way that’ll fix your bad habits as a side-effect.