USA loves eugenics. We've been the kings of eugenics since day 1. Hitler tried to steal California's moves but he fucked it all up by going to far and pissing people off.

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/

Since day 1 of eugenics, I mean.

Before that we were too busy with slavery and genocide.

An interesting hypothesis. You should run this experiment with some sort of means for them to close a door behind them (possibly with an adorably complex system of levers and pulleys).

I don't think it would work.. there is probably the lack of "object permanence" with rats/mice which would equally apply to "mouse/rat permanence." I am not sure this is the case, I am assuming it is so.. not in the mood to look it up. But basically that means that if there is a closed door, which blocks out sight/sound/smell of whatever is behind it, then to that mouse/rat there IS no mice or rats behind the door. That kind of invalidates the whole experiment -- they are no longer members of a large colony, they are just once again living in their own cages.

They may be trained to open the door to get food, which would be cool, and then they'd see that they're in a large space.. but since mice also crave social attention, I am not sure they would want to close themselves back up.

In other words, they need distance to be healthy, but they don't have the foresight and planning (i.e., the frontal lobes) to make decisions to create distance. They have an instinct towards togetherness, which turns on them in massive numbers. In the natural world, distance is created by the environment for them, and they never needed to evolve a mechanism to "want to be alone."

Now, this is different in the case of hamsters and the like, rodents who don't live in massive colonies or family units, but they are assholes, and are not worthy of experimentation.

So what's our excuse, Sim? We got lobes aplenty, but not enough it seems.

I think that's pretty much an adequate explanation. We have more social intelligence than many creatures but lack it in many ways to innately function well in a large civilization. We end up functioning most psychologically healthy in small family or tribal units, but we are forced by our population to function in massive networked societies.

There are ways to blind ourselves to the reality of our civilization by training ourselves to function at a level we are innately familiar with, imagine the carrot at the end of a stick leading a donkey forward. The donkey functions based on its innate desire for food, not the expectations of "work" done for his masters. That's the idea.

There sort of was an experiment to try that with humans.

It was covered in a documentary that used to be on Netflix, forget the name. Some dot com millionaire decided to buy an entire apartment building and invite FREE SPIRITS to live there with the idea to see what happens when there is zero privacy. No walls. No doors. All beds were open bunks with no curtains. Shower was a clear booth in the middle of the floor. Toilets were out in the open.

If I remember correctly, their were noise complaints and the police got involved before anything crazy happened and the dot com guy got bored and shut it down.

Mice Going Their Own Way.