Crowding and Behavior in Chicago, 1940–1970

Abstract

That high levels of population density or overcrowding may have severe and negative consequences for human populations appears to be a recurrently intriguing and controversial idea. Although this argument may be found in serious journals of more than 100 years ago (Verhulst, 1845), recently revived interest in the density-behavior equation has been spurred at least, in part, by research on other animal populations such as lemmings, elephants, monkeys, and rats (Calhoun, 1962a) (for a review of the literature on the effect of density on animals see Galle & Gove, 1978). Research on human populations, however, remains fairly sparse and subject to widely varying interpretations (for recent reviews of this literature, see Galle and Gove, 1978; Fischer, Baldassare, & Ofshe, 1975; Carnahan, Gove, & Galle, 1974; Freedman, 1975; Altman, 1975). An earlier article by the present authors (Galle, Gove, & McPherson, 1972) has partly contributed to this continuing controversy. This chapter will attempt to extend the discussion of the question of the relationship between crowding and behavior in human population in two ways. First, after a brief restatement and clarification of the findings reported in our earlier Science article, we try to answer some questions that have been raised about that earlier analysis. Second, we examine the consis- tency of the findings reported there for Chicago by extending the 1960 analysis to three other time periods, 1940, 1950, and 1970.