12 September 2010
Rat Park and Deciding to Ditch the Career
18 Sep 2010 07:03 PM Filed in: Writing | Cool Science
First, let me explain what I mean by Rat Park.
We have all heard, in some apocryphal form, about the addiction experiments where rats would keep hitting the switch for cocaine (or some other drug) until they died. They chose the drug over everything else including food, water and other rat companions. In 1981, psychologist Bruce Alexander ran a slightly different experiment. He noticed that in all the previous studies, the rats were kept in small, wire cages under very grim conditions. He wanted to test what the rats would do if they were housed in the equivalent of Rat Park. Would their behaviors change?
The rats living in Rat Park had lots of room, food and water, access to rats of the opposite sex and private places for their own dens. These rats eschewed the drugs. Those rats who entered addicted went out clean and those who were clean in Rat Park but moved to Rat Hell immediately started to drug up.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned here. Two examples come to mind: (1) bad experimental design and (2) correlation not equaling causation (i.e. rat suicide due to living in Hell as opposed to cocaine being all that). However, like all good addiction researchers, let’s extrapolate this behavior to humans. Read More...
We have all heard, in some apocryphal form, about the addiction experiments where rats would keep hitting the switch for cocaine (or some other drug) until they died. They chose the drug over everything else including food, water and other rat companions. In 1981, psychologist Bruce Alexander ran a slightly different experiment. He noticed that in all the previous studies, the rats were kept in small, wire cages under very grim conditions. He wanted to test what the rats would do if they were housed in the equivalent of Rat Park. Would their behaviors change?
The rats living in Rat Park had lots of room, food and water, access to rats of the opposite sex and private places for their own dens. These rats eschewed the drugs. Those rats who entered addicted went out clean and those who were clean in Rat Park but moved to Rat Hell immediately started to drug up.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned here. Two examples come to mind: (1) bad experimental design and (2) correlation not equaling causation (i.e. rat suicide due to living in Hell as opposed to cocaine being all that). However, like all good addiction researchers, let’s extrapolate this behavior to humans. Read More...