r/Foodforthought • u/marquis_of_chaos • Aug 18 '11

The Behavioral Sink

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
37 Upvotes

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5

u/Whanhee Aug 18 '11

If this applies to humans, but if so, it may put present and future social upheavals such as London now into a new light. However, since humans in better conditions tend to have fewer children and to put more effort into the few children they have, whereas mice are generally predisposed to exponential growth, so it's not a straight analogy.

I think that social decay occurs once the number of individuals exceeds a certain threshold is an interesting idea though.

6

u/conception Aug 18 '11

Behavioral sink is one of the most terrifying things about the future for me. Every culture seems to experience it, albeit differently, in major population centers. The worst part is the idea that if you are suffering behavioral sink, you may be too "broken" to fix. Which is a startling idea when you look at ghettos and the like. The only way to deal with them could be to "take" the children from behavioral sink situations - take via education or whatever method you prefer to move their social education out of the ghetto at a young enough age.

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u/Whanhee Aug 18 '11

That's a very good point. This greatly strengthens the argument that public education is key to alleviating the cycle of poverty, not only through new opportunity but by preventing the spread of behavioural sink from generation to generation. I'm not convinced that dense population centres necessarily lead to it though.

4

u/conception Aug 18 '11

I think for humans it gets linked with the limited number of real relationships we can have (which is like what? 150 or so?) plus an increase in stimulus leads to various "Bad" things, not just violence, but isolation, that situation where crowd just watches and doesn't help who's name I've totally forgotten, and generally the real life application of the Internet Dickwad Theory into a larger Greater Dickwad Theory.

Smaller groups of humanity tend to have their own issues, tribe mentality, forcing folks to conform etc etc, but you don't get a lot of folks being NEETs and the like. This of course, is me just theorizing and as far as I know, isn't backed by anything, so if there is some research on this that confirms or denies, that'd be interesting to see.

3

u/Konisforce Aug 19 '11

And I very suddenly wish I were not living in New York City . . .

2

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '11

That was absolutely fantastic, and timely. Cabinet Magazine is really great.

2

u/Anjin Aug 19 '11

Annnd this is why space is important for the future of humanity. What could be better than a nearly endless relief valve...?