What Rat Park Can Teach Us About Ourselves

One of my favorite studies of all time, Rat Park was a series of experiments performed in the 70s, which you can read about extensively here.

While I won't discuss every detail of the experiment, the study was structured with multiple test groups living in multiple environments.

One group lived in traditional small cages in isolation, while another lived in a "Rat Park"; a cage free space 200x the size of a normal study-rat environment, with balls, wheels, ample food and fun, including a lot of other rats to engage with.

Bruce provided both rats with two options for drinking water, one being plain water, and the other being an opiate sugar water mix.

What became immediately evident is the rats in the isolated small cages would start abusing the opiate water, while the rats in Rat Park would instead drink the normal plain water.

Further, when rats were moved from the opiate-den isolated rooms into Rat Park, they would stop the opiate/sugar water mix, and instead reverted back to normal water. Bruce observed these rats did this even in the face of some withdrawal, like twitching, etc.

After a variety of other relevant experiments, he concluded that the isolated rats abused morphine because of their living situation, with contemporary proponents of the study taking it a step further: Arguing that addiction stems not just from a biological cause, but from ones circumstance, including healthy relationships with others.

Regardless of the addiction component, the study provides some incredible insights, thought experiments and extrapolations for us on the humankind side of things.

For one, I would observe that this study strongly supports the view that our external environment is at least partially responsible for our mental state and mental health. Potentially a considerable portion, nearing 50%.

If ones environment alone can determine whether or not an individual abuses hard drugs or abstains, there's incredibly strong evidence pointing to the need for healthy, safe, and resilient homes and communities, in order to produce healthy, stable individuals.

This study also points to the resilience of living things, and to our capacity to decide/change our own behaviors (willpower and determinism, two upcoming articles). When even rats can choose to withdraw off heroin when allowed to socialize with their friends and feel like they belong, the argument for our own agency and capacity to change/heal is encouraged and reinforced.

And this view that our environment is largely responsible for our happiness and success isn't just my opinion. Frameworks and viewpoints like Maslow's Hierarchy, which posits that an individual needs a variety of environmental essentials to achieve self-actualization; much less just feeling content surviving, have existed for decades, and are yet to be proven wrong or philosophically unsound.

This framework, Maslow's Hiearchy, is actually our next article coming up!

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