Manly or Beastly?

Boozing at U.C.L.A.

The 36 subjects in the experiment, all male, fell into familiar patterns. Penned up in a fancy three-story condominium for months, the subjects drank heavily at a cocktail hour just before dinner and favored nightcaps just before bed. Every three or four days they went on a group bender, then tapered off the booze until it was time for another party. Punch line: all the subjects were rats.

Psychologist Gaylord Ellison conducted the experiment in the basement of the U.C.L.A. psychology building, where he compared the drinking habits of 36 individually caged rats with those of 36 rats living together in a 13-ft. by 20-ft. condominium, complete with rat-scale dining room and bar. The rats living alone drank more, but in no particular pattern. The commune rats drank regularly in groups from three spigots fed with an anise-flavored solution of 10% alcohol. The heaviest drinking came before the daily meal of rich scraps from the U.C.L.A. faculty dining room, and just before bed.

Like many people, Ellison's rats drank the most when their lives were in disarray. Using injections of neurotoxins, the experimenter made one-third of the rats lethargic and depressed, another third anxious and active. The rest of the rats were left undrugged. At first the jumpy rats drank more, the lethargic ones less. Then regular fighting broke out, including wrestling between anxious and depressed rats, and boxing matches in which the contestants stood nose to nose on their hind legs and threw punches at each other. Food hoarding set in, and all the colony rats, even the undrugged, were hitting the bottle hard. By about the 25th day after the injections, when a dominant "King Rat" (the largest of the anxious rats) emerged to bully the colony, the rats had increased their rate of alcohol consumption by 200%.

Ellison contends that the study shows the dramatic impact of group living and social disruption on drinking, and helps explain why depressants can be an effective way to attack human alcoholism. The most important finding may be a more obvious one: when it comes to boozing, rats are only human.

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