1. Mouse Utopia.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, animal behavior researcher John Calhoun created artificial environments for rodents to study their behavior. In 1972, he tried to create a paradise for eight mice, which quickly turned it into a self-destructive hell, called the new term "behavioral shell."
Calhoun designed the structure to be a "mouse paradise," with comfortable structures, common areas, spacious private apartments, and an unlimited supply of food. He called his creation "Universe 25," and since this was indeed the 25th environment he had created, he had a hunch that the paradise life would not last. His hunch proved correct, as the mice began to multiply as fast as they could. By the 560th day of the experiment, the population of Universe-25 had reached a whopping 2,200 rodents, proving that even for animals, hell is their habitat. Most mice spent every second of their lives surrounded by hundreds of their congeners. When the mice crowded into the main squares waiting for food, moods such as apathy and irritation prevailed among them, occasionally interrupted by mutual gnawing.
The reason why most of the mice crowded into the squares was even more frightening than their wistful apathy. A limited number of individual spaces were occupied by "beauties," an elite class that had developed in the mouse community of Universe-25. Guarded by the most aggressive males, who did not allow the rest of the inhabitants into these spaces, they were mostly females, preoccupied only with grooming, eating, and sleeping. It seemed that the "ordinary" mice were resigned to this state of affairs, and while the "ordinary" population was dying of inevitable gnawing, the "beautiful" ones were shielded from any violence. In doing so, however, they were so out of touch with reality that they could not breed, care for their cubs, or even understand the basics of social behavior.
2. Operation Midnight Menopause
Between 1953 and 1964, the CIA was engaged in a particularly unlikely behavioral project called Operation Midnight Climax. It was a top-secret operation, known only to the agency's top brass and its technical support department, and its purpose was simple: to find out how to use drugs to influence and control the minds of careless people. The experiment was conducted by an administration veteran named George Hunter White, who decided to achieve his goal by organizing, with CIA support, brothels in New York and San Francisco. There, government-funded prostitutes lured thousands of men to nights filled with sex, drugs and alcohol, while CIA agents watched them through two-way mirrors and recorded mind-altering sessions.
The absurd experiment was so insane that Time magazine later remarked, "The CIA seems to be suffering from its own form of insanity." But this insanity soon escalated to a higher stage when the department, as part of its "mind manipulation" program, moved to... to simply using the compromising videos it had collected to blackmail unsuspecting subjects into complying with its demands. At this time, George Hunter White was hovering over everything like a weird, government-sponsored supervillain. He watched the sex with drugs while sipping martinis and abusing alcohol and drugs himself to accomplish his mission.
Despite all the madness and insanity that accompanied the process, it seems that Operation Midnight Climax, against all odds, had some success, albeit in an unexpected area. In 2013, a psychiatrist examining old CIA documents discovered the hidden purpose of the experiment: it also involved prostitutes. By placing them in conditions simulating field operations, the department was testing whether they could be used as operatives or spies.
3. facial mimicry experiments
Even before psychologists had established some ground rules about things like traumatizing people for science or killing animals to study people's reactions to it, we had researchers like Carney Landis. In 1924, he wanted to find out if different people would have the same facial expression in response to the same stimuli. Since he didn't trust surveys like "What's your face like when you're happy?" he decided to elicit these emotions in person.
This would have been perfectly acceptable to his subjects if it were only about such things as physical pleasure, curiosity, joyful anticipation, and laughter. However, Landis was not interested in happiness. He wanted to explore emotions such as pain, disgust, fear, sadness and other negativity, so his subjects stuck their hands in buckets of frogs and got electrocuted. As an apotheosis, Landis took a mouse and said they must now decapitate the poor rodent. This may come as a shock, but quite a few people listened. About a third of the people Landis assigned the task took the rodent and decapitated it by every available means. The rest had to watch Landis personally decapitate the animal. In the end, it turned out that all these unfortunate creatures died in vain: Landis found out that different people express the same feelings with completely different facial expressions... and it wasn't necessary to destroy so many animals to find that out.
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